The student body president at Eastern Michigan University is asking a professor to resign after posting a racist acronym on social media last year. 89.1 WEMU's Jorge Avellan has the story.
"There is no circumstance in which a professor should be saying a racial slur."
Before making that comment during an EMU Board of Regents meeting, Candice Crutcher said she was speaking as a concerned black student and not as student body president. She thanked the administration for suspending Mark Higbeewithout pay for the winter semester of 2018. The history professor used a racist acronym when replying to a Facebook post about a racist incident that occured on campus.
"I think he should make the decision to resign because clearly he's not fit to teach at our institution where 20% of our population are black students," said Crutcher.
Higbee is now suing the University after an arbitrator concluded that the professor's suspension was not reasonable under the First Amendment. James Webb is the chair of the EMU Board of Regents and responded to Crutcher's request.
"We support completely what she said. We did everything we could within the constraints of the law and the labor contract to discipline this man. We would've gone further if our lawyers thought we could've," said Webb.
Crutcher is asking for Eastern's Faculty Senate and the labor union that represents the professor to take action. We reached out to Higbee for comment but did not hear back from him before this story aired.Non-commercial, fact based reporting is made possible by your financial support. Make your donation to WEMU todayto keep your community NPR station thriving.
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— Jorge Avellan is a reporter for 89.1 WEMU News. Contact him at 734.487.3363 or email him javellan@emich.edu
