Eh. If the only corroborating source you can find of this is National Review, Reason, and Campus Reform, who really don't hire any journalists but only hire opinion makers and obviously have a very clear ideological bent around this, I'd be skeptical of the original story. Yahoo News does not really have an editorial department that fact checks stories published by their freelancers.
Was this professor really placed on leave for using a Chinese word? That just seems very unlikely. Could there have been some other parts of this story that contributed to their leave? Is "A pause in teaching while we review this" being "put on leave?" THe semester just started, how long has this "pause" been going on for, what's the conditions of the "leave," when did he teach the class? Colleges, especially colleges like USC with enormous administrative staff and faculty review boards, don't just put their professors on leave without reviews. There's conversations with department chairs, students, administrative review boards; there's an enormous bureaucracy in colleges, especially state colleges.