It has been quite the few days for Connecticut College, resulting in, as a recent Day front-page headline well put it, some deep “soul-searching.”

Last Wednesday the focus was the troubling depiction of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict filed on the Facebook post of a tenured professor. Professor Andrew Pessin posted a commentary that compared Palestinians in Gaza to “a rabid pit bull in a cage, regularly making mass efforts to escape.”

“Gaza is in the cage because of its repeated efforts to destroy Israel and Jews,” wrote the professor of philosophy.

The eight-month-old posting generated a reaction on campus in February when a student emailed Professor Pessin to say she was offended by the imagery used to describe the Palestinian people. As word spread, so did student outrage, including a petition signed by hundreds of students urging the administration to take a stand against such “racism and dehumanization.”

Then Sunday came the discovery of a racial epithet written several times on the walls of restrooms in the student center.

In search of positive aspects, the strong reaction to these incidents shows students, faculty and the administration care. A lack of outrage would be far more troubling.

Conn College President Katherine Bergeron has confronted a difficult situation forthrightly, if not always consistently.

A week ago, she called a campus-wide forum to address the professor’s troubling remarks. Dr. Bergeron sought balance. She criticized the comments, pointing to Professor Pessin’s “poor judgment” and his failure to utilize “the level of discourse I have come to expect from the Connecticut College Community and, in particular, from its faculty.”

Dr. Bergeron also recognized the rights of students to “speak against (and) confront speech that they consider destructive or inappropriate,” while reminding students that danger lurks in seeking to silence views with which you disagree or even find abhorrent.

“Freedom of speech is absolutely essential to the integrity of a college like ours that operates according to fiercely held values of academic freedom,” said Dr. Bergeron. “No institution should abridge the right of students, faculty and staff to express their views freely and openly.”

In assessing how the college president handled the matter, it is also worth noting the professor's screed was posted on his own Facebook page without any overt connection to Connecticut College.

The campus community made it clear that degrading an entire group of people by comparing them to a rabid, vicious dog is unacceptable, no matter the point trying to be made. While trying to remove a tenured professor for using such language would go too far, and tread on the ideal of academic freedom, Dr. Bergeron's condemnation of the professor's words did not go far enough.

Professor Pessin, to his credit, apologized. “I see now … just how damaging and hurtful the language of that post was,” he wrote in a letter to the college newspaper, “College Voice.”

In reaction to the racial slurs drawn on restroom walls, Dr. Bergeron canceled classes Monday and held multiple campus meetings. It would be tempting to criticize this as an overreaction, but the discussions will likely leave a greater impression and provide more important life lessons than an average day of Monday classes.

“I cannot and will not tolerate racist acts. I cannot tolerate hate speech that is meant to degrade or dehumanize,” said Dr. Bergeron.

Except for history books and literature that place the word in its hateful and discriminatory historical context, the "n-word" is unacceptable. That it is accepted in some parts of American popular culture and speech is disturbing and damaging. It should stop.

But what of the professor's comments that were arguably racist and degrading, and were certainly dehumanizing? When it comes to speech that should be tolerated and that which is intolerable, the lines are not always clear.

As Dr. Bergeron noted, students in these few days have confronted "some of the most important things the you'll ever talk about in your life." We might add that Dr. Bergeron is facing the most important challenge of her still young presidency in striving, in her words, to "take a broken community (and) put it back together." 

As of this writing, it is unknown who wrote the hateful graffiti. It could be someone with no connection to the college. However, the collective repugnance and condemnation by the campus community was welcomed. If that can lead to greater sensitivity in respecting differences, avoiding stereotypes and shunning hurtful speech, then some good will come from these troubling events.