With pay (of course).
Via LJ World:
A Kansas University professor who used the n-word during a class discussion about race is on leave while the university investigates a discrimination complaint against her.
Andrea Quenette, assistant professor of communication studies, said she was notified Friday morning that five individuals, whose names she does not know, filed a discrimination complaint against her with KU’s Office of Institutional Opportunity and Access. She said her supervisors agreed to her request for a leave of absence with pay until the investigation concludes.
The formal complaint follows more than a week of public criticism perpetuated by graduate students in the communications department. Students have posted messages to Twitter with the hashtag #FireAndreaQuenette, shared a lengthy letter online and complained about her in a Student Senate meeting Wednesday night.
Sparking their outrage was Quenette’s use of the n-word and statements about retention rates at KU and the concept of systematic racism during her Communications Studies 930 class — focused on best practices for graduate students who teach undergraduate classes — on Nov. 12, the morning after KU’s heated university-wide town hall forum on race.
Quenette, who is 33 and has been teaching at KU for two years, said she believes academic freedom protects her comments and that they were not discriminatory.
“I didn’t intend to offend anyone, I didn’t intend to hurt anyone. I didn’t direct my words at any individual or group of people,” she told the Journal-World tearfully in a phone interview Friday.
“It was an open conversation about a serious issue that is affecting our campus, and it will affect our teachers. In that regard, I consider it within my purview … to talk about those issues.”
The graduate students saw it differently.
“It was outright racism,” said Amy Schumacher, a first-year Ph.D. student who was in the class, which she said is composed of nine white students and one black student. “I don’t think that it was an open dialogue — she wasn’t receptive to hearing any other ideas.”
Schumacher said she believes Quenette “actively violated policies” during the discussion, hurt students’ feelings — including the one black student, who left “devastated” — and has a previous history of being unsympathetic to students.[…]
Quenette said she could have apologized “in the moment” if anyone had responded but that no one did, and the discussion continued.
On the subject of low graduation rates for black students and whether institutionalized racism is to blame — students in class said it was — Quenette said students who don’t graduate do so for a number of reasons, and from what she’s seen at KU it’s often academic performance. Quenette said she’s on a College of Liberal Arts and Sciences committee studying retaining and supporting students, and that “all students” who come to KU with low academic preparedness are at risk.
She acknowledged there was “confusion” during that conversation and that it ended “abruptly” when class was over.
Schumacher, who is also white, described Quenette’s interactions during the conversation as “disparaging” and “deeply disturbing.”
“They articulated not only her lack of awareness of racial discrimination and violence on this campus and elsewhere but an active denial of institutional, structural and individual racism,” Schumacher wrote in the letter signed by the students in the class, plus one other graduate student. “This denial perpetuates racism in and of itself.”