The case of an academic at the University of Manchester who was suspended for using the n-word during a disciplinary meeting while defending a colleague’s context-specific use of language lays bare how little protection the government’s newly commenced and significantly watered-down campus free-speech duties actually provide.
Professor Peter Pormann, a specialist in the history of language, was supporting a colleague at an internal hearing when he used the term while referring to the range of meanings it carries in standard dictionaries.
The disciplinary meeting, held in October and attended by academic and administrative staff, had been convened after a fellow academic was accused of upsetting students by using the word “bitch”. Defending his colleague, Pormann told the meeting: “Words have context, and the word ‘bitch’ can have a positive meaning if you look at the Oxford English Dictionary.” He then used the n-word as a further example of how meaning can shift over time, adding: “I am not saying that we should use these words, but I am a philologist: so words have contexts, situations have context.”
In response to this exposition from an academic well-versed in the contextual specificities of language, and with apparently zero understanding of what they had just heard, administrators launched an investigation into whether his remarks were “inappropriate, offensive and racist”. As part of that process, the head of the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures suspended Pormann, barred him from campus and warned staff that he represents a “potential risk to colleagues”.
There is a grimly Kafkaesque irony in a philologist patiently arguing before a disciplinary panel that a colleague’s use of language shouldn’t be wrenched from its setting but understood within the messy, unpredictable reality of human interaction, only for the university to strip his own words of context and investigate him for daring to mount that defence. But Pormann’s suspension, alongside that of his colleague for what we might loosely term “Crimes Against the Sanctified Lexicon”, is all the more troubling because it fits a wider pattern of institutional capitulation to the idea that certain utterances are, always and everywhere, taboo.
In 2023, students walked out of French lectures after complaining that staff were using the n-word while teaching on colonial history. A formal investigation was launched after an open letter from a group calling themselves “UoM Black Students Matter”, which said the language had caused “distress” to black students, with one student apparently leaving a seminar in tears. The university later reported that students “exposed to racist language” had received personal apologies from senior members of staff.
To understand where this dismal way of thinking comes from — one in which the liberal-democratic gap between speech and action is steadily closed — you only have to consider the critical–race-theory-inflected ideology that now permeates so many British institutions. It is a curious and telling fact that many EDI initiatives, while eager to emphasise the complexity of “lived experience” when it comes to the identities and personal narratives of supposedly oppressed groups, are strangely reluctant to extend that logic to language itself. The result is that at Manchester, as in a growing number of workplaces, HR departments investigating disciplinary complaints now lift contested words out of their real-world setting and treat them as if they carried a single, immutable meaning, regardless of who is speaking, to whom, and why.
Yet what Pormann, as a philologist, knows — and was trying to convey to his department’s administrators — is what the ordinary language philosophers Wittgenstein, Austin and Ryle made clear long ago: meaning emerges from use. When we strip words of their “lived experience”, separating them from the activity, culture, and relational context that imbues them with meaning, we don’t just risk misreading them; we contort them into something they never were.
The same pattern, in which intent and context are discarded in favour of a rigid textualism, was on display in the recent case of Carl Borg-Neal, the Lloyds Bank employee who asked a trainer, during a race education session, how, as a line manager, he should handle a situation where he heard someone from an ethnic minority use a word that might be considered offensive if spoken by a white person. When his question was met with a puzzled look, he clarified: “The most common example being use of the word n***** in the black community.”
After the course, the trainer claimed she was so offended by the use of the n-word that she was too sick to work and took five days off. When the training provider complained, the bank accused Borg-Neal of racism and launched a disciplinary process, which ended with his dismissal for gross misconduct.
With legal support from the Free Speech Union, he fought back at the Employment Tribunal. One of the most striking aspects of the hearing was the extent to which Lloyds fixated on Borg-Neal’s use of the n-word in isolation, disregarding the wider context entirely. It was on the basis of this semantic fixation that the bank could concede that he had not intended to cause any hurt, that he asked the question with no malice, and that the question itself was valid – and still sack him anyway. The bank’s argument was that Borg-Neal should have known better than “to use the full word in a professional environment”.
However, thanks to top-drawer representation from Doyle Clayton, the panel was ultimately steered back towards the circumstances in which the word had been uttered: the exchange took place during a race-education session, in a discussion of “intent versus impact”; it was a good-faith, relevant question about how to handle racially offensive language in the workplace; and there was no suggestion he was taking an opportunity to say an abusive term under cover of a question. The result was a finding that he had been unfairly dismissed and a payout in excess of £800,000.
Whether any of this will help the under-investigation Professor Pormann remains to be seen. His case comes just months after the main provisions of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act were commenced. Under the Act and the Office for Students’ new freedom of speech guidance, universities must take “reasonably practicable steps” to secure freedom of speech within the law, and to protect academic staff from being “adversely affected” in their jobs or promotion prospects for putting forward controversial or unpopular ideas. As the OfS itself puts it, there should be a “very strong presumption in favour of permitting lawful speech”.
On the face of it, Pormann’s treatment looks hard to reconcile with that framework. There is, however, a catch. After the Labour government paused commencement of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act in July 2024 and moved to repeal its statutory tort and scale back the planned OfS complaints scheme, the core free-speech duties have come into force, but the new enforcement machinery remains largely on paper. In practice, that means for academics in his position the only routes to redress are still the old ones: internal procedures in which the process all too often becomes the punishment, followed, in the worst case, by a lengthy and costly employment tribunal.
All of which brings us back to Carl Borg-Neal. It is true, of course, that any given word or phrase in the EDI lexicon may well have an accepted dictionary definition — and yes, some of those meanings will be deeply unsettling to some employees. But as the ruling in his case made clear, when HR departments set out to ascribe fixed meanings to ostensibly “hurtful” words uttered by employees in the workplace, they are expected to consider a host of other, contextually relevant factors — the “constellation of surrounding circumstances”, as the US Supreme Court put it in Oncale v Sundowner Offshore Services — including the speaker’s intentions, tone, style of delivery, the dynamics and purpose of the exchange, and the specifics of the setting.
To proceed otherwise is to curtail employees’ freedom to speak honestly at work and, as Lloyds now knows all too well, to expose your organisation to significant financial and reputational damage. The University of Manchester’s HR department would be wise to take note.
