There’s a recurrent argument about civility in academic culture where the opposing poles of opinion are fixed in place.
Pole #1 is that academic freedom and tenure require defending anything that a faculty member says as legitimate, that we should not censure, discipline or cancel a professor for their scholarly writing or their speech in the classroom, and that invocations of “civility” are almost invariably a form of insidious prior restraint intended to suppress marginalized or excluded perspectives or to preserve the tacit dominance of some form of particular groups or orthodoxies within academia.
Pole #2 is that civility is absolutely crucial to the healthy functioning of academic life, and that both scholarly knowledge and pedagogy demand respect and restraint, that faculty must behave professionally and that academic freedom has a specific purpose and is in fact more limited than free speech in broader contexts.
The thing is, most people in academia (and many observers of academia from outside of it) shuttle back and forth between these poles depending on whose ox is getting gored in any particular controversy. I’m no exception. I can articulate both points-of-view sympathetically and often find myself feeling ambivalently drawn to both within various pitched battles. I admit that I’m pushed one way or the other depending on prior political commitments but also often my feelings about the individuals at the heart of any given argument. E.g., I will often clam up or opt out of a particular argument about civility and academic freedom if the person or people at the heart of the controversy annoy me because of the bad faith character of their claims, because they’re blatantly instrumental in claiming protections that they otherwise deny to others, or just because they seem like performative assholes who are weakening interests or causes that I care about.
I do try to keep in mind some principles or rules of thumb that I will try to stick to even if I’m frustrated by the particulars of a dispute about civility versus academic freedom. In that sense, I do think there are forms of professional restraint that are almost invariably important that we might call “civility”. There are things you shouldn’t say about other individual faculty in a public fashion, or in an indiscriminate way that you consciously mean to circulate through informal networks. You might think some of these things, and in a very discreet and private way talk about your thoughts with a few trusted colleagues, but go no further unless you’re ready to do so responsibly. A lot of this boils down to don’t start nothing, won’t be nothing, so maybe this is not so much about civility as it is common sense. It’s also about the difference between public acts and private ones within a scholarly world, and that principle has some issues, I know.
You should never state that a colleague has repeatedly engaged in unprofessional activity with students, to students or in front of students in a classroom unless you have substantial evidence that this has happened. There are exceptions: anyone with the status of a “responsible employee” generally has to (and should) pass on any evidence of sexual misconduct or harassment, even if it’s based on a single complaint or comment. You may hear from students about behavior that concerns you, especially if you’re a chair, and if it’s serious enough you may need to speak with the colleague or with the chief academic officer. But saying out loud in a public context—or spreading rumors—that you think a faculty member is manipulating or mistreating students is serious business. It is absolutely something you should not claim through inference, through observing students and concluding that they could not be saying what they’re saying unless someone put them up to it. I remember when I was an undergraduate that I wrote a long critical appraisal of the university’s new strategic plan for the alternative newspaper on campus. A faculty member came up to me and said he was delighted by my analysis but he wanted to know which colleague of his had told me what to write. That offended me a lot as a student, but looking back on it, I’m also really disturbed that the professor in question believed that someone had spoon-fed me the critique without any evidence to that effect.
Similarly, “weaponizing” students in a fine-grained way against a specific colleague is a line that faculty generally should be careful not to cross. Good pedagogy involves inspiring students, helping students think about how to navigate the institution and achieve their own goals. It’s right and proper if students take what they’re learning and deploy it according to their own judgment and commitments—that’s what we’re there for. But some things have to be taught as general principles rather than as commandments to go after a particular colleague or set of colleagues, especially if that’s about an issue you have with that colleague that is not something the students cared about until you told them. I was really provoked once when a colleague told students they should complain about a required class not being taught by someone who had a particular specialization because that wasn’t an issue that mattered to the students and that colleague had been in the meeting where we decided it wasn’t an important issue. That’s bad form. It’s something much worse than incivility when the person weaponizing is tenured or senior and the person targeted is pre-tenure or contingent.
In general, you should not casually shit on the diligence, validity or craft of specific individual scholarly work of colleagues at your own institution, most especially if you yourself have absolutely no expertise in that area. If you are going to critique the specific individual scholarship of other professors generally, you should do that as a public act, e.g., put your name and your own reputation behind it, explain your critique, do some homework. If someone got tenure at your institution, they passed through some kind of rigorous evaluation that you need to have some basic respect for unless you have a demonstrated, validated reason to the contrary. Again, sure, you can privately grouse to a close friend if you think a local colleague is kind of an idiot, but don’t confuse someone’s demeanor in the everyday life of the institution with the peer-reviewed knowledge work that they produce. It’s easier to think that someone that you have no professional contact whatsoever who works at another institution is producing no-talent assclown research, but even then, if you’re going to say that in some kind of public context, you’d better be serious and think there’s something at stake.
Show some notional respect for the intellectual ecosystem in disciplines that are not your own. If there’s an argument that is coherently made within another discipline or subfield that your own discipline would find risible or invalid, take the time to understand why the other discipline thinks differently than yours. Understand what your colleagues in another discipline or field have to do in order to be intellectually legitimate within their own networks of peer review and evaluation. If you’re going to go after a discipline or field, once again, do your homework. Show some humility. Exhibit curiosity. Ask questions before making proclamations. Also, it’s one thing to say that you have issues with an entire discipline—and even then you should be sure not to let that turn into an administrative or interdepartmental vendetta against a department merely for being that discipline—but it’s another thing to take a shot at a specific individual’s scholarship in a way that questions its integrity or professionalism simply for being of a discipline that you dislike.
I’ve learned the hard way that when a tenure or promotion case at another institution becomes a controversy, it’s best to either say nothing public about it, unless the person at the heart of it is a close friend and you’ve got some inside information from them. Otherwise, it’s nearly guaranteed that there’s something you don’t know underlying what’s going on.
It’s fine to be funny or light-hearted in trash-talking about scholarly issues on social media, but normally try to stay well on the light-hearted side of the line. The moment you get serious, you’d better be serious. If you think there are real stakes involved, you have to up your game and know what you’re talking about—and snap back into proportionality and diligence in what you say.
Generally some modesty and humility, some self-reflective awareness of where and how your arguments or criticisms implicate you also, is an important professional obligation. You can take that too much to heart—too many academics fall into various kinds of cycles of self-blame, diminution, timidity, etc. or talk their way into imposter syndrome. But some skepticism about anything you’re going to say about other academics or institutions in terms of your own interests and behavior is healthy.
Try to leave people some room to retreat in any argument within the institution, including administrators. Whether you go for the jugular in scholarly arguments in a wider public context is up to you, though I honestly think relentlessly adversarial approaches to scholarship are wearisome and privilege a particular kind of masculine temperament. But inside the institutional house, having a bit of grace and generosity seems important in terms of all of us making life liveable for one another. I grant that sometimes people demand that grace when they have exhausted the forbearance of others, or expect it as a fixed attribute of hierarchical deference, so this is not an infinitely flexible principle. This point requires reciprocity to really work, but if everybody follows this as a norm, it improves everybody’s life.
This is probably particularly salient for academics who also serve in other roles, and can (and do) leverage their academic reputations and credentials to create a halo effect or legitimize views that are entirely outside of their realm of expertise (or are within it, but where their interest is more than detached). Two examples come to mind.
One is the alliance between Bay Area universities and the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem. In its purest form, academics lend their technical expertise to fledgling upstarts. But in plenty of cases, academics lend the shine of their credentials to pure frauds (like Theranos) or use their academic post to privatize gains from discoveries made at their university posts.
Another is public intellectuals who use their academic posts to push politics. The foremost example is Milton Friedman, whose contributions to economics were very real but very technical, but who made his name as a public intellectual publishing highly ideological political bromides, which ranged from unsupported and intentionally misleading ("the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression") to delusional ("doctors shouldn't be licensed, and we can use tort law to weed out quacks"). This one is somewhat asymmetrical, but not entirely so. I find Paul Krugman's economic analysis to be mostly rooted in sound economics, but in his public intellectual role, he'll occasionally couch political opinions as economic analyses (for instance, as he later acknowledged, his prediction that the economy would plunge into recession if Trump were elected was not based on any rigorous economic rationale).
Which is to say, I think perhaps these rules are more applicable to academics solely in their roles as good faith academics.