Per CNN:
The longtime chairman of the Roger Williams University board admitted Monday to using the N-word during a board meeting, saying it “kind of slipped out.”…Papitto, who has given the school at least $7 million and whose name is on the only law school in Rhode Island, said he had never used the term before.
“The first time I heard it was on television or rap music or something,” he told WPRO.
That’s understandable. As we all know, the N-word is bandied about like nobody’s business on network television these days. And since Papitto, like most 80-year old white men, probably listens to rap music two or three hours per day, one can understand how it could slip out in a casual conversation about the difficulty of finding minorities to sit on the university board. It must be tough, having grown up in ‘30 and ’40s–when, of course, racial slurs were unknown–only to endure a coarsened 21st century culture to which he inevitably, and forgiveably, succumbed.
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03/11/10 | Kevin Carey is quoted on the rising costs of education in The Economist.
03/10/10 | Chad Aldeman's False Fronts paper is quoted on Accuracy in Academia.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on Federal Family Education Loan defaults on The Huffington Post.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on loan origination on the Firedog Lake blog.
03/07/10 | Kevin Carey calls for a Race to the Top in higher education in a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.