If you want an example of how bad-faith arguments about civility and academic freedom tend to chase me to one pole or another, this essay by Lawrence C. Bobo, Dean of Social Science at Harvard University, is Exhibit A for the prosecution.
These kinds of arguments are what make me reluctant to invoke civility in any form. In this case, they’re being used to shield administrative leaders from criticism. They’re being deployed to suggest that students do not have agency in their own political or intellectual choices, and as an attempt to invoke the university as a private, familial space in a way that is deeply reminiscent of a patriarch seeking to cloak his domestic world from any scrutiny as if it were his property.
Harvard—and any university or college—is public in the sense that almost all academic institutions make claims, sometimes extravagant ones, about how they contribute to the general good. They invite both their own specific publics (families, alumni, faculty, students, community members) into the life of the institution, into events on campus, and they argue that they disseminate knowledge and training into the world in a wholly beneficent way. That makes what happens on campus important, and gives outsiders some legitimate right to be concerned with campus events and developments. (Not to mention that most private colleges and universities draw on public funds in some fashion, as they should.)
If Harvard and other institutions have a familial, “inside” nature, that should be central to an essay like Bobo’s. He shouldn’t be remonstrating with colleagues from above them, but arguing intimately with them from among them. I don’t lightly accept anybody telling me what my ethics have to be—the ethics I value are the ones I set for myself, in myself, of myself, in conversation with peers and friends.
Academic freedom shouldn’t just be about the ideas that scholars work with, the claims they make in their classrooms and research. It has to be about the nature of the academy itself as well, about the institutional arrangements that undergird it. I honestly think all institutions should protect the freedom of people that work for them and with them to speak in a public fashion about problems and issues with the institution, but faculty have to have that right for the integrity of their work and the health of their institutions. When Bobo moves to close that off as unseemly, even if he doesn’t mean that simply as a cover-your-ass maneuver, he’s making a big mistake.
The knock on civility is that it often amounts to the micromanagement of other people’s tonality, and Bobo’s essay is an excellent example of why people say that. I don’t want to read another piece like this from a person in administrative leadership that says that we must have “vigorous debate” where it’s left unsaid exactly what that is. I want to hear precisely about what is “vigorous” in the present, right now, chapter and verse, with a full exegetical laying out of its vigor.
Because, almost invariably, what is “vigorous” is what the writer agrees with; what is “vicious” is what they disagree with. Look at this bit of pro-forma rhetoric from Bobo:
Targeting protest at those charged with a pastoral duty of care for their students and an indirect-at-best relation to the protesters’ core grievance considerably removes these efforts
Wait for it, you know what’s coming next…
from the inarguably heroic actions of college students who burned draft cards in protest of the Vietnam War, registered black voters in Mississippi or Alabama, sat in at segregated lunch counters, or joined marches for women’s liberation and gay rights
If public debates had referees, someone would have to call a foul there for the “complete lack of historical perspective” and “ridiculous cliche”. (I know that Bobo knows better, given his scholarly work.) Those college students back then were excoriated for their incivility and often by faculty and administrators as well as general publics. They were not in any sense regarded as “inarguably heroic” on their own campuses or in the overall society until decades later, if in fact they ever were in the latter case.
Which is why you can’t trust a writer arguing from Bobo’s position of authority to decide what is vigorous and what is vicious, what is civil and what is not. I’m willing to think about civility as an internal gauge that is set with a particular mindfulness about people with whom I share a professional as well as personal connection. But writers who are in Bobo’s position never set this as a conversation within and between us, between equals; always instead, they want to hand down a rule from above and to close the door so that no one sees what they do with it.