Law Schools

Law Professor Drops Racial Slur In Class Because Otherwise How Will Black Students Ever Learn About Racism?

There's no excuse for employing racial epithets in the classroom, but this law professor's going to try and come up with some.

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As a white guy, I’ve got to be honest, I’ve never felt that my life is in any way diminished because I can’t deploy racial epithets with reckless abandon. There’s never been an event where I’ve thought, “oh, wow, if only I could drop a slur or two right now!”

But at the DePaul University College of Law, Professor Donald Hermann feels he really needs to toss out a few to give his lessons the proper punch. In a lesson on provocation, Hermann laid out a hypothetical about a white supremacist harassing a civil rights leader’s funeral with racial slurs. That hypothetical is easy enough to grasp, but Professor Hermann felt it necessary to go right ahead and spell out what this hypothetical Nazi would say.

SPOILER ALERT: The hypothetical Nazi said exactly what you already assumed he would because it’s obvious and requires absolutely zero imagination.

A number of students reported the incident to the administration. When reached for comment, DePaul University spokeswoman responded:

On Feb. 22, the dean of DePaul’s College of Law heard from students who alleged that a Law professor used a racial slur during a class discussion about criminal law and speech. DePaul’s Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity, which oversees discrimination and harassment complaints, was notified immediately and set up meetings to interview the students and professor.

The OIDE staff will complete their inquiries in accordance with established university procedures.

Fair enough… except Crain’s Chicago Business notes that three students had already informed an assistant dean earlier in the semester about other offensive terms Professor Hermann used so the school can’t claim to be blindsided here.

For his part, Professor Hermann is doubling down on this in a troubling way. Reportedly, Hermann used his next class to address the issue by reading aloud to the class from a student letter sent to him about the incident. Except instead of using the euphemism written in the letter, Hermann went ahead and replaced it with the whole word 13 times. If that’s an accurate report, that’s just taunting and bullying and unbecoming a lawyer or an academic. UPDATE: We’ve heard from the author of the letter, and she is not a student, but an attorney in Chicago and co-founder of a pipeline program for 1L women of color law students.

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And then came the nauseating but predictable claptrap about how this is all the fault of coddled Millennials, appearing in a sterling bit of public relations copy masquerading as a Chicago Sun-Times article. Quoting Professor Hermann:

“Some of these students will be public defenders, prosecutors, defense attorneys. Words like this will be a common part of their practice. I can understand their sensitivity about it. But in preparing people to go out into the real world, if during their education we have to be so sensitive to provide a safe space to harbor them from words that could be emotionally upsetting, I don’t think we’re doing our job of educating these students to be lawyers.”

So here’s the deal. Those students… they’ve already heard that word. They’ve probably had it hurled at them in hate many times over their relatively young lives. So where do you get off acting like you’re the one “exposing” them to the real world? It takes a special kind of narcissism for a random white law professor to think he’s the one “educating” a group of black students about racial slurs.

That’s the whole misconception about the “safe space” thing. It isn’t about sheltering students from learning that the real world is an unpleasant place. It’s about not gratuitously dragging them through the unpleasantness they already understand all too well so some academic can sound “edgy” in class.

To inject a little hyperbole to underscore this point, why not just savagely murder some student to really give the class a good sense of the crime in the casebook? Sure there’s the option of describing a crime and trusting a bunch of adults with college degrees to grasp a basic narrative, but that really underplays the impact of that crime. After all, some of these students will be prosecutors and violence like this will be a common part of their practice. If we don’t expose them to brutal decapitations here in class, we’re not doing our job of educating these students to be lawyers.

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That’s Annalise Keating’s philosophy anyway.

The point is, there’s such a thing as context. When a lawyer, working on a matter, confronts unpleasantness and has some degree of agency to confront that, they’ll deal with it. But for now, they really don’t need to be subjected to explicit racial slurs to understand “fighting words” any more than they need to see a real killing to grasp that murder is bad.

The Sun-Times also spoke with African-American law professor Terry Smith, who supports Hermann and blames the students for having “[a] sense of entitlement that they should not be offended or provoked in the classroom.” This comes up a lot in these discussions, and I’m wondering just when did offending people become so core to the 1L curriculum? You’re teaching the Rule Against Perpetuities for heaven’s sake. In fact, the only sense of entitlement I see here are some professors obsessed with the “freedom” to use straightforward lessons to live out their inner shock jock. [UPDATE: There’s some additional news about Professor Smith — he’s also suing the school for discrimination.]

Professor Smith also notes:

“Frankly, relative to my other white colleagues, he would rank as perhaps the most progressive white colleague I have,” he said.

OBVIOUSLY. Of course he’s a white liberal because only a white liberal would ever do anything this. Pulling something like this requires that special sense of entitlement that only comes with being able to say, “no, it’s okay, because I voted for Jesse in ’84.” There was literally no moment in this story that I didn’t expect this professor to be a self-professed liberal.

Hermann, who’s been teaching since 1972, said he was sorry that the students had been offended or hurt and said he planned to skip the “fighting words” discussion in future classes.

No, no, no, no, no! That’s exactly the horrid outcome people unfairly accuse students of creating when they talk about safe spaces. Students still have to learn the law. But they can learn it without being subjected to racial epithets. Why is this so goddamned hard to understand?

Hermann told Crain’s he used to term to show his students how they need to be prepared to be provoked when they are working in a courtroom. “If this word interferes with their functioning, being a lawyer is probably not a thing they should be doing”, Hermann said.

If this word is gratuitously coming up in class, being a law professor is probably not a thing you should be doing.

UPDATE: DePaul students protested the all-around troubling response to this incident today. As is de rigueur, another student complained to Above the Law about being mildly inconvenienced by the protest. Because proportionality is hard for some people. I get it — law school is expensive and it’s frustrating to have class time disrupted. On the other hand, there’s a limited number of tools to hit an administration where it matters and that might be the easiest one. In the grand scheme of things, just take the temporary inconvenience and enjoy some independent study.

DePaul investigating law professor’s racial slur [Crain’s Chicago Business]
DePaul law professor subject of complaints over use of ‘N-word’ in class lecture [Chicago Sun-Times]
DePaul law professor accused of using n-word in class [WLS]

HeadshotJoe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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