It seemed like a normal enough day in Ken Hardy's introduction to interpersonal communication class at Jefferson Community College in Louisville, Ky. The adjunct professor had wanted to talk about taboo words and their historical evolution. How did they work to support dominant paradigms? he asked his class. How did ordinary words take on the taint of the taboo? The students seemed engaged, rattling off a list of slurs that have traditionally oppressed marginalized groups: "girl," "lady," "faggot," "bitch."

Then a student said the word "nigger" and Hardy, in taking up the conversational thread, repeated it. In what ways, he wondered, did the word offend? On which linguistic and social levels did its disparagement work? For Hardy, the class was going very well. Not only had he launched a lively discussion -- with almost 100 percent participation -- but they were attacking a "philosophically challenging" topic as well.

But first-year transfer student Julia Pierre found the earnest discussion of language quite beside the point. Pierre, one of nine blacks in the 22-student class, didn't want to hear the word "nigger," regardless of the context. She said so, and the effects were devastating.

In an era marked by distended political sensitivities and their assorted backlashes, this eruption over a single word, uttered dispassionately in the name of education, seems to perfectly embody the absurdist apogee of the academic culture wars. What has become of higher education when the anti-racist college teachers who are in the very midst of teaching anti-racist lessons get fired for racism? Hardy, after all, boasts a long history of civil rights activism. Is infighting among the enlightened dividing the left to death?

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"