He asked the question “What is worse, a white man punching a black man, or a white man calling a black man a nigger?”
It was not used as an epithet. It wasn’t directed at anyone. It even compared the use of the work with physical violence. He wasn’t encouraging its use or diminishing the impact that the word has.
I guess he got the answer to his question though...
In that context, he would have to say the word. Nobody ever says, “You’re an n-word.”
The professor was having what was supposed to be a clinical discussion about the impact of hate words. He was not hurling epithets at students. It was equivalent to an anatomy professor using words like "breast", "penis", etc. Would HE be accused of sexual harassment? I doubt it. The vocabulary used by the anatomy professor would be perfectly in line as the correct names for those parts, and the vocabulary used by the Princeton professor was perfectly in line as an example of a hate word. The students who reacted were exceedingly immature, oversheltered, not-ready-for-college snowflakes, undoubtedly the scions of libtard parents who don't have better uses for their money.