"Can't you see what we're talking about here?" asked another.

Hardy hastened to Pierre's defense -- perhaps, he offered, certain words can't ever be uttered, even in the context of their very analysis. Could some words possess such power that even cool academic discourse can't accommodate them?

But the damage had been done and during a break in the class that day, Pierre approached Hardy and requested that he stop using the offensive word. Hardy defended the merits of the discussion but gave Pierre the option of sitting the rest of the class out. Pierre objected.

A few days later she reiterated her disapproval in a letter to Hardy and took her beef to the Rev. Louis Coleman, a famously outspoken Louisville justice crusader. Founder of the Justice Resource Center, Coleman is the self-appointed investigator of many of the city's civil rights complaints. In matters involving alleged racism, he has a reputation for going for the jugular. And true to his calling, Coleman communicated Pierre's complaints to JCC's president.

"We asked him to look into the matter," says Coleman mildly, claiming that he can't remember details of the conversation.

On July 21, five days after the lecture, Hardy found himself in the dean's office being grilled about Pierre's complaints. According to Hardy, Pam Besser, acting dean of academic affairs and his interrogator, acted "argumentative and combative." William Lites, the humanities division chairman, who also attended the meeting, agreed that she was "antagonistic, confrontational and abrupt."

Less than a month after that, Besser left a message on Hardy's machine informing him that, after more than three years at Jefferson, he had no job that fall. Hardy sued on the basis that the school had deprived him of his First Amendment rights.

Lites' characterization of the meeting with Besser appears in the Sept. 3 affidavit he filed for Hardy's suit. Hardy, having been denied a position in the spring 1999 term as well, gathered evidence for his suspicion that the "N-word" incident had fueled his dismissal. In his affidavit, Lites claims that Besser had mentioned in the meeting that a "prominent citizen" was involved in the matter. Lites also contends that Besser said enrollment was down at the school and JCC couldn't afford to alienate the black community. "If you were not a white male," he recalls Besser telling Hardy, "this would not be an issue."

Claiming the school deprived him of his constitutional rights, he brought the case to federal court. The school responded with a motion to dismiss on the basis of sovereign immunity -- as an entity of the state, it argued, the school enjoys an exemption from lawsuits. Hardy, now with the support of the American Federation of Teachers, has since countered this motion. He expects to find out over the next month or two whether the case will be heard.

The tale plays like a teaching parable for both sides. For Coleman and Pierre, the lesson is that no teacher, black or white, should be allowed to say "nigger" in a classroom.

What about when a teacher is trying to get to the bottom of the hatred the word contains? "Doesn't matter," Coleman says. "I think a teacher ought to be fired for that."

"I have never encountered a professor who felt comfortable using that word," says Pierre, who has since transferred to another school. (Her transfer, she claims, has nothing to do with the Hardy incident.)

But for Hardy, such in-class censorship does more than defile our constitutional rights; it plays havoc with academic freedom as well.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"