It’s not racist to quote the n-word

Hopes that cancel culture might be on the wane at British universities always seemed optimistic. The recent suspension of a classics professor reveals how little has changed at these holdouts of intolerance and fanaticism.

According to The Times, Peter Pormann has been suspended from the University of Manchester for using the n-word in a staff meeting in October. Three weeks after the meeting, the classicist and philologist was told he could pose a ‘potential risk to colleagues’ and was duly banned from campus. The university is ‘examining’ whether his language constituted racist or inappropriate conduct.

If you suspect there might be more to this story, then your instincts are correct. Pormann did not call a black student or staff member the n-word, which would have been an unpardonable slur, and deserving of the university’s censure. In fact, he didn’t address the word to anyone directly.

Pormann instead uttered it in an administrative meeting, which he was attending in support of another colleague. She had been hauled before the university authorities for using the word ‘bitch’ in front of students, who were reportedly ‘offended’ by its use. Pormann told the meeting that ‘words have context’. He argued that this applied to ‘bitch’ just as it would for ‘nigger’. ‘I am not saying that we should use these words’, he said, ‘but I am a philologist. So words have contexts. Situations have context.’

To most adults, the idea that the force of words depends on their context is so elementary that it feels ridiculous that it needs to be said. That it apparently needs to be spelled out to university authorities suggests an almost wilful ignorance on their part.

As with so many other examples of cancel culture, Pormann’s treatment seems needlessly cruel. He appears to be in every respect a quiet, bookish and decent person. He has worked with Holocaust survivors in Israel and he established an organisation called Youth Against Racism when he was growing up. Do we really believe he was engaging in some sort of unhinged racist outburst in that now fateful meeting?

The decision to suspend Pormann isn’t just ethically wrong and intellectually shallow. It may also fall foul of the law. Indeed, as The Times points out, Pormann’s ordeal could offer an important test case on the robustness of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which is supposed to ensure ‘campuses are places where robust discussion can take place without fear of censorship of students, staff or external speakers’. The £585,000 penalty issued in March against Sussex University, which had failed to protect the free-speech rights of gender-critical philosopher Kathleen Stock, suggests the law does have some teeth.

Before the university went about defenestrating Pormann, its lawyers should also have familiarised themselves with the eerily similar case of Carl Borg-Neal. In 2021, Lloyds Bank fired Borg-Neal for using the n-word during a workplace anti-racism training session. He had asked the trainer what he should do if two black staff members were using it among themselves. He then immediately apologised for articulating the full word. In 2024, Lloyds were forced to pay out £500,000 for wrongful dismissal.

Those precedents don’t look good for Manchester University. If the higher-ups had any common sense, they would restore Peter Pormann to his role immediately. Sadly, as we all know, common sense is in short supply on university campuses.

Hugo Timms is an editorial assistant at spiked.