A tenured Princeton professor is under fire for using the n-word in a class discussion, with some of his students asking the university to fire him, cancel his class, and allow them to complete his course without interacting with him.
Princeton has defended the professor, Joe Scanlan, saying the incident fell under the university’s policies protecting academic freedom.
On Nov. 3, in a visual arts seminar, Scanlan, who is white, used the n-word when discussing a poem by poet Jonah Mixon-Webster, who is Black. The 20-page poem, which appears in Mixon-Webster’s debut collection Stereo(TYPE), uses the plural of that version of the word, alone, for 20 pages.
