When the news began circulating on social media, many couldn’t believe it was true––that the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California would remove a longtime professor from a class because a Mandarin word he used correctly in a lesson sounded sort of like a racial slur. One skeptic warned that the “ridiculous sounding story” seemed like a “fabricated Reddit meme.
Hundreds of academics in the linguistics community signed an open letter earlier this month attacking Steven Pinker, one of their field’s most prominent scholars, for six tweets and a passage from one of his best-selling books. Whatever their intentions, they were never going to succeed in intimidating the famous, tenured Harvard professor. But they did send a message to less powerful scholars that certain opinions, publicly stated, could result in professional sanction.
When I was 21, the United States experienced a national trauma: the planes crashing into the World Trade Center, the nearly 3,000 people killed in that day’s terrorist attacks, the ruins left smoldering for months at Ground Zero, and the unnerving knowledge that sooner or later, al-Qaeda would almost certainly strike again. Thoughtful deliberation is never so difficult as in such moments.