Filed under: When the left eats their own.
Via Daily Beast:
The movement to purge all offensive speech from American college campuses has claimed another scalp. Andrea Quenette, an assistant communications professor, was chased out of her own classroom—not because she was a bad teacher, but because her students said she wasn’t agreeing with them quickly enough.
For months, Quenette has been under investigation by the University of Kansas. She is on academic leave. Her students’ refusal to return to class left her no other choice but to take the semester off.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which stood up for Quenette’s free-speech rights back in November when she was first accused of racial discrimination, is sick of waiting for KU to clear her of wrongdoing. […]
You would think that Quenette must have perpetrated an egregious act of harassment or obvious discrimination to provoke her students to publish an open letter demanding her immediate termination. The letter, written by five of Quenette’s students—some, but not all of them, black—alleges that Quenette violated the university’s policies prohibiting racial discrimination. Images of the professor disparaging minority students, or giving them lower grades, come to mind.
But Quenette did nothing of the sort. What she did was make the mistake of using the n-word—during a discussion in which she was admitting her own shortcomings about race. She didn’t use the word maliciously: She was, quite literally, checking her privilege. Isn’t that exactly what far-left students want from their classmates, administrators, and professors?
Not unless one checks one’s privilege using carefully planned-out, politically correct language, it seems. Here was Quenette’s micro-aggressive remark—which she made during a discussion about how to talk about racial issues on campus—according to the students: