Welcome to the Slippery Slope, My Friend. Here are your Roller-skates.
Hey, what exactly does your user name mean, huh?
And also there are a lot of ignorant bigoted assholes, topped-out in a third-grade mentality, who delight in the stupid and frankly cowardly “I’m not touching you” justification of saying and doing things that merely sound or seem racist, taking pleasure in the discomfiture of minorities and others and gloating in their misperceived immunity from exposure thanks to a thinly-veiled definitional escape hatch. On this board, their used to be a couple of such, whose posts suddenly proliferated with words like “niggardly” and “nitpickers” when the context of said posts did not quite support their usage. Of course the denotation of these words did not support a complaint: nonetheless, they had made their lack of character clear.
Across languages, it’s more complicated. Still, when contemplating an Chinese professor fluent enough in English to teach business at USC but relying at one point on a Chinese word that his students certainly would not understand but which sounded like a racial epithet he was very likely familiar with, I am not sympathetic. Had the class been taught in Mandarin, it might have been an unfortunate coincidence. This seems very different.
On a bigger, more macro scale, we’ve gotten the N-word worked up to such a point that the word itself has become taboo, regardless of context.
Student screaming the N-word to harass someone? Sure, that’s racist.
Instructor teaching Chinese filler words, a teacher reading aloud a word that was literally written into Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain himself, or reading To Kill a Mockingbird Aloud? Totally different.
Here’s a transcript of what he said:
…and this is culturally specific so based on your native language… like in China, the common word is “that”, “that, that, that, that” so in China it might be “neige, neige, neige, neige”… so there’s different words that you’ll hear in different countries…
How much clearer do you think he needs to be that he’s talking about a word in the Chinese language? Are you really saying that when lecturing college students he should be catering to some lowest common denominator of stupidity, to people who are so parochial and ignorant that they don’t grasp that similar-sounding words in other languages have completely different meanings?
This is preposterous, and the very fact that there’s not unanimity on here that this professor should never have been censured makes me think that rather than just being scaremongering propaganda about “political correctness gone mad”, the alt-right sites that are pushing this story have a fucking point.
I agree with you here. He also goes on to explain how in English, speakers might say “uhh” instead of “nega” or “neiga” as they do in “other countries” such as China. It was a short, ~30 second clip of him teaching and he got all this through and more within 30 seconds. He made his point clearly and concisely. I’m sure that if the entire class was posted, we’d have seen even more context. Not as if he needed any more context. He did the exact opposite of coming out and randomly saying “nega nega nega” just to provoke the class or something.
Oh man, sucks that you have to vote for Trump now that he’s the only one that can save us from PC.
Hot tip: I heard there are some towns banning Christmas too!!!
Im guessing this Brazilian American singer wont be asked to play at USC.
fwiw the standard spelling (pinyin) is “neige”
Which is also the French word for “snow”, though pronounced differently, but still I suppose another potential linguistic landmine that will cause the suspension or firing of more professors, particularly those trying to teach French. 
I’m usually among the first to defend academia, but this USC Dean is an idiot, plain and simple. People like that are embarrassing and are gifts to right-wing imbeciles who criticize the politics and alleged political correctness of academia.
I think it would have been very strange for the dean to write a letter based on a made up scenario that is not remotely what happened.
That said, I agree with the earlier posts saying the professor bore some degree of responsibility. I also agree that the professor (assuming the transcriptions here are accurate) adequately fulfilled that responsibility with the context here.
Finally, it is possible for a person to be traumatized without anyone being at fault. I mean, a person with PTSD can be retraumatized by exposure to a smell, or a song. It doesn’t mean that the person playing the song is to blame, unless they did it in a blameworthy way (like with the intention of traumatizing someone).
Microaggressions can often be unintentional. In this case, if the word for “this” is also frequently used in the same way, (which I believe is the case) the professor might want to make a mental note to use that one for making the same point in the future.
We’ll never see Tulip O’Hare again!
This is my view as well. I’m all in favor of reducing “micro aggressions,” but this wasn’t one.
Assuming the story is as presented, this is a clear example of how the philosophy of “impact vs intent” can lead people and institutions astray at times.
The message that the USC administration is sending is, “Ignorance wins, if it is angry and offended enough.” That’s a very dangerous precedent to set.
This whole thing confuses and offends me.
The Dean is a putz and so are the students.
I’m sorry, but It’s just not plausible that anyone is really traumatized or in any way harmed by a word that is clearly stated to be in a different language, and only vaguely resembles the phonemes of the English slur. If context is irrelevant and anything vaguely approximating the mere sound of the word is traumatizing, how could any African American continue to exist in modern society where the reclaimed “nigga” is in constant use among African American youth? Everyone seems fine with taking that usage in context.
According to the NY Daily News Patton had been using the same example in that class for a few years.
“This particular international illustration is a class example I have received positive feedback when presenting in the past.”
Patton explained that he has taught the course for a decade and the example he used was given to him by several international students years ago.
I wonder if the difference this time was that he was teaching online instead of in person.
It’s not the same thing listening to someone in person in a classroom, along with other students, and watching remotely.
It’s not really a matter of “plausib[ility].” It’s also not really reasonable for someone to be traumatized by being offered tomato soup, or hearing a certain song while in an elevator. Emotions are not subject to reason. Just like a person with a phobia of spiders can be terrified by a picture of a spider that they know is just a picture. If something caused trauma, then it did, whether anyone is to blame for it or not.
I don’t know if anyone was truly traumatized by this or not, but I know that the truth of that is not determined by how reasonable it is. I guess it would come down to the credibility of the person saying they were. Do we know if anyone reported that they were?