Classroom Clash: Professor’s Words in Hate-Speech Course Stir Student Walkout, Campus Controversy
A campus debate erupted over the limits of acceptable classroom speech when a veteran professor’s use of a racial slur in a class on hate speech prompted some students to walk out and the course to subsequently be canceled by the professor.
Students challenged the use of the term by Rosen, who used the word three times during the class, according to The Daily Princetonian. At one point a student who had walked out returned to the classroom and confronted the professor, using an expletive, before walking out again. Some students demanded that Rosen apologize; he did not, and said he used the word because it “was supposed to deliver a gut punch,” the Prince said.
In the wake of the incident, the University issued a statement saying that “the conversations and disagreements that took place in the seminar led by Professor Rosen ... are part of the vigorous engagement and robust debate that are central to what we do” and that it would look for ways to encourage discussions about free speech and inclusivity with the class and the campus community. Before the class could meet for a second time, however, Rosen sent an email to students canceling the course.
Anthropology department chair Carolyn Rouse, who defended Rosen in a letter to the Prince, said he had “started the class by breaking a number of taboos in order to get the students to recognize their emotional response to cultural symbols,” and said he had used the same example in past courses without prompting the type of response that resulted this year. She said Rosen’s decision to cancel the course was his alone, and that he made it because he felt he “couldn’t get the course back on track.”
Rosen, who did not respond to PAW’s request for comment, is completing a 40-year career at Princeton, having won awards for his teaching and having received one of the first MacArthur Fellow grants. He has often been identified with progressive movements, Rouse said.
News of the course cancellation came just hours before the February CPUC meeting, where President Eisgruber ’83 expressed support for Rosen on grounds of academic freedom. “I respect the pedagogical decision he made, although I also appreciate it’s a controversial one,” Eisgruber said. “You’ve got to have the freedom to speak up or to say things that may be upsetting to people ... but we also provide the support so that if people are going into those arguments, that they actually feel able to speak up.” Diversity and inclusion do not compete with free speech, he said — rather, they are complementary values.
The anthropology department will make course syllabi clearer on what students should expect, according to Rouse. “In the past, there was much more homogeneity in the academy and the sense that everyone was coming from the same point of view and perspective,” she said. But as universities have become more diverse, she said, “we can’t make presumptions that our students know where we’re coming from.”
Politics professor Keith Whittington, author of a new book on why universities must defend free speech (see the March 7 issue of PAW), said that among the faculty, “Everyone understands these are risky and difficult classes.” He said professors should try to explain “why it is you do these things, what you’re trying to accomplish in a class like that, and what the difficulties are.” Trying to craft rules saying “you can’t do that” could hamper the ability of faculty to teach and of students to learn, he said, but “you also should be listening to students to hear what their concerns are.”
Salter said she had joined the class “knowing we would be discussing controversial issues, expecting some conversation about the use of the N-word to come up. My problem was I don’t think you need to use hate speech in order to discuss it in a productive way.”
During a Feb. 21 Whig-Clio event, students debated whether Rosen ought to have used the word in the classroom. After the debate, students voted 34–11 that the professor should not have used the term. College Pulse, an unscientific online survey platform, asked Ivy League students about their views on the incident. Of the 400 Princeton students who took the survey, 39 percent were sympathetic to Rosen, 35 percent were sympathetic to the students who walked out, and the remainder were not sure or not familiar with the incident.
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6 Responses
Rufus King III ’66
6 Years AgoKerfuffle in Class
I don’t think I understand. Was the language of Professor Lawrence Rosen quoted in “Classroom Clash” (On the Campus, March 21) — without endorsement of any unacceptable labels as far as I could tell — the only language that caused students to walk out and launched the kerfuffle? I thought teachers were supposed to ask questions and use examples. Have the political-correctness police become so dominant that faculty can’t do that at Princeton anymore? That’s not the Princeton I attended or to which I would want to send my grandchildren. And how did the students who were so shocked ever make it through high school, much less attend a major university?
Jamie Spencer ’66
6 Years AgoDebate Over Speech
We owe PAW great thanks for the article on the “Classroom Clash” (On the Campus, March 21). It offers fascinating insight into the campus culture — moral, intellectual, ethical. I heartily second the University’s statement of support, which affirmed the values of “vigorous engagement and robust debate.” It is always good, as Finley Peter Dunne urged a century ago, “to afflict the comfortable.” In this case, that meant causing today’s students, who I fear may be too fond of safe spaces, to squirm in some discomfort. Professor Lawrence Rosen was doing a good thing to challenge his students. Nor should they have been surprised that the incident occurred in a course examining “cultural freedoms” and subtitled “hate speech.”
But I also want to offer some “comfort” to the “afflicted” students (a practice Dunne also recommended). Why did Professor Rosen feel it productive to voice the N-word twice more? The first use could serve precious pedagogical purposes; for instance, he might have used the word in a sentence, and then, 10 or 20 seconds later, stopped his lecture and solicited reactions from the class. It could have been a truly revealing moment wherein those listeners could scrutinize their immediate reactions and have a chance to exchange and articulate their “gut” responses.
But to employ it twice more strikes me as self-indulgent. All it accomplished was to drive several students from the room. And the one student who returned simply delivered an obscenity. It is rare when an obscenity, whether shouted or whispered, contributes to a healthful exchange of views. And to stalk out after delivering one renders even that opportunity moot.
Peter K. Seldin ’76
6 Years AgoDebate Over Speech
“Classroom Clash” stated that a student “returned to the classroom and confronted the professor [Lawrence Rosen], using an expletive, before walking out again.” Were there any consequences for the student for such uncivil behavior, or is that just acceptable conduct at Princeton these days? We know that Yale students can spew expletives at faculty members on an open microphone. I hope that Princeton is better than that.
Editor’s note: In a letter to faculty members who asked about this incident and another campus protest, President Eisgruber ’83 said Rosen has maintained that “the proper response to the provocative speech in his classroom is ‘more speech,’ in the form of campus discussion, not University disciplinary action.” Eisgruber said he believes that judgment “is a wise one.”
Serban Protopopescu ’68
6 Years AgoHate-Speech Course Without Discussing Hate Speech?
What is the point of a hate-speech course if one cannot use words that exemplify hate speech? I found the students’ reaction a perfect example of the political correctness that has become a plague in colleges across the United States. No word should be banished from an academic discussion; what matters is context, how the word is used. It is obvious that Professor Rosen was not using it to promote racism, but rather to start a discussion. I find it distressing that Princeton students cannot make the distinction between the use of hate speech to denigrate people and examining what makes a word explosive.
Elaine Showalter
6 Years AgoAn ‘Initiating Incident’
I read the story about Professor Rosen with astonishment. In fall 1985, Professor Melvin Tumin of the Sociology Department, a distinguished specialist in race relations, was taking the roll for his seminar in the middle of the semester and two students on the list had never come to class. “Does anyone know these students?” he asked the class. “Do they exist or are they spooks?” He meant “ghosts,” but it turned out that the students, whom he had never met, were African American, and he was summoned by University authorities and spent several months establishing that he was not guilty of hate speech.
If this story sounds familiar to some PAW readers, it is because Philip Roth, a friend of Professor Tumin, used it as the “initiating incident” of the plot in his prize-winning novel "The Human Stain" (2000). Roth wrote about his source in a lengthy letter published in The New Yorker on Sept. 6, 2012. The tragic downfall of his protagonist, Professor Coleman Silk, is the result of his “unwarranted,” “heinous, needless persecution” for these words.
I taught Roth’s fiction along with other powerful contemporary novels at Princeton for many years, and had no problem reading passages for discussion aloud. I wonder whether either of those options would be possible now. And I am surprised, on a lesser scale, that no one recognized the parallel.
Robert D. Schrock Jr. ’60
6 Years AgoHate Has Many Forms
I feel bad and embarrassed when my black friends are denigrated, but I found just as chilling the video images from the Charlottesville riots and the chant: "JEWS WILL NOT REPLACE US!" I am sure that Professor Rosen covers this, too. We have much work to do.