Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMHO - you would be wrong. It is a perfectly good word. This horse-shit has to stop.
I don't know, you can tell that some people definitely like to play a verbal version of the "I'm not touching you" game, or get off on telling people "actually, it's not a slur". Obviously I'm not referring to what happened to this professor, though
Why not? He mispronounced a word, and seems to have deliberately chosen it in order to be provocative. There are a million different pause words he could have used instead.