A professor was reportedly fired after quoting author Mark Twain’s use of the N-word in an anti-slavery novel that was being read aloud during class.

“Mark Twain was one of the first American writers to use actual dialect,” the St. John’s University professor, Hannah Berliner Fischthal, explained to the class before the use of the slur. “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.”