St. John’s professor allegedly fired for reading racial slur from Mark Twain book

In a twist worthy of Mark Twain himself, a St. John’s University professor has been fired for reading a passage containing the N-word from Twain’s anti-slavery novel “Pudd’nhead Wilson” in her “Literature of Satire” class.

"Mark Twain was one of the first American writers to use actual dialect," Fischthal said. "His use of the ‘N-word’ is used only in dialogues as it could have actually been spoken in the south before the civil war, when the story takes place." The day after the class, however, she got an email from a student who said she had to "abruptly" leave the call because of Fischthal’s use of an "inappropriate slur."