Academia: Conduct Unbecoming

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

I keep thinking about the case of Daniel Schmidt, now a junior at the University of Chicago.

On social media, Schmidt targeted a course to be offered at his institution called “The Problem of Whiteness”. It wasn’t a detailed critique of the content of the course. He had no interest in taking it, he didn’t discuss the syllabus, he didn’t engage the readings. He included the name of the professor, her email and a photo of her in his initial social media message and complained that “anti-white hatred is now mainstream academic inquiry”.

Chicago ultimately found that Schmidt had engaged in nothing more than free speech, despite the fact that the professor unsurprisingly received a great deal of hate mail and felt compelled to cancel the course’s initial planned offering—an outcome that Schmidt deemed “a huge victory”.

Chicago is proud of its supposed commitment to protecting free speech.

Chicago didn’t do anything to protect the professor’s speech or to protect the offering of a course that a faculty member had decided to offer, not really. They affirmed that she had the right to teach the class if she wanted to, and provided security for it. But in this case, it needed something more: this is one of those “I am Spartacus” moments. The university should have actively commissioned multiple versions of “The Problem of Whiteness” from multiple faculty. They should have insisted as a matter of policy that it be taught every semester until the end of time as long as the hate mail kept flowing in. They should have made a week-long version of the course be a requirement for first-year students until the hate mail stopped. Something that demonstrated that if a faculty in good standing at the university wanted to teach the class and the department in question wanted it taught, then so did the University of Chicago, whatever Daniel Schmidt thought.

You need to do something to show you won’t be intimidated if your institution is trying to defend its free speech as well as the professional prerogatives of its highly-trained and highly-qualified faculty. Letting the class be pushed aside and leaving an individual faculty member to face a storm of hate mail is allowing the world outside the university to destroy the commitments that the university claims to have made.

I’ve long been sympathetic to the critique of “civility” as it is sometimes interpreted in academia, as a commandment to speak politely, avoid confrontation, and comply passively with what you’re told to do. But I think folks have been too quick to discard the concept altogether. There’s a valid version of civility in academia that says, “We are gathered here for a particular purpose. We’re not the town square, we’re not a bar, we’re not a parade. If you’re here, you’re here for our mission. If you’re not here for the mission, don’t be here.”

Universities are entitled to say when a student, a professor or a staff member is plainly not there for the mission. Attacking a course that you have no interest in engaging with the intent of getting it cancelled and its professor harassed is not being there for the mission. Being there for the mission in Schmidt’s case would mean taking the course. If he had, he might well have been able to raise some valid and interesting questions about its content, including its title. DuBois asked over a century ago, “how does it feel to be a problem”? As a student in that course, Schmidt would have been in a position to offer a reflective and knowledgeable answer—and would have been able to ask pointedly in turn, “How does it feel to be a problem-namer?” That’s the kind of conversation that’s in the mission.

It’s the kind of engagement that gives you standing to make a critique. All those people bombarding the Chicago professor with attacks have no standing: they could care less about the course itself, but more importantly, could care less about the University of Chicago as an institution, about academia as a whole. They’re not trying to make something better, or expressing a genuine interest in what universities do. And in making his attack the way he did, Schmidt stood with them—and arguably forfeited the standing he already has as a student.

Why is Schmidt even at Chicago? He professes to follow Jesus Christ in everything he does, stressing his identity as a devout Catholic. There are universities that stand ready to partner with him in that respect. What attracts him to Chicago if not its rich diversity of thought and method? I think that’s a question we should ask whenever someone within an academic community is so dissatisfied that they reject absolutely any responsibility to or care for the mission of academia. Why are you here, then? No one is making you be in this particular institution, even if you feel that college generally is semi-mandatory for a career or aspiration you have in mind. Even a student who says, “I want to change this institution from what it is to something very different” is showing some sign of attachment or care to the institution as it stands, a belief that it’s worth preserving and upholding. It would make no sense at all for me to hope to be a fellow at the Claremont Institute on the grounds that I’d like to reform it, given how utterly distant I am from that organization’s mission. It’s not ok to want to be a part of something that you could only imaginably join with an intent to destroy its present mission and character.

In the end, this is why I can’t personally embrace critiques that call for the end of academic institutions as we know them—though there are many versions of such critiques that actually stay inside productive civility, that accept the constraints of the mission even as they argue for the radical reconstruction of the mission. There are conservative voices that do the same, arguing strenuously against the academy as it stands while engaging that argument by respecting the civility that the academy asks us to demonstrate. There are other versions of both critiques that come from outside the academy and aren’t bound to respect the discipline and ethics that are tied to its mission. Those are what they are: we may argue against them, but we have no power over them in terms of how they’re made.

Where we do have power, I think we’re obliged to weigh conduct against speech. What Chicago can say, should say, to a student like Schmidt is “this isn’t a matter of free speech, it’s a matter of conduct. You have violated the spirit of being a student here.” There are many ways of speaking that we’d respond to that way at most universities. A student who got up at the beginning of every discussion and began to filibuster at the top of their voice by reading the Terms of Service of major social media platforms. A student who persistently referred to other students in a class with racial, gender and sexual slurs and never any other way during discussion. A student who responded to every question in class discussion by screaming at everybody to just shut up because they’re all idiots. A student in a studio art course who just made doodled caricatures of penises rather than follow the exercises assigned by the instructor.

Why would we act on that kind of behavior as a matter of conduct and not speech? After all, in all cases, isn’t the student in these cases going to find out what happens when you fuck around when the grades come in? And isn’t the student going to get suspended when all the grades come in as no credits and Fs, and isn’t that discipline enough? We would act before then because other people are trying to learn, because the rest of the community that’s there for the mission has a right to get what they are there for. All of the behaviors I’ve described would deprive all the rest of the students of one of a very finite number of courses they’ve set out to take.

Well, Schmidt took away an opportunity for some people to study what they wanted, and affected the experience of other students while they were engaged in that study. That’s conduct, not speech. It’s consistent with the mission for a student to enroll in that class and ask during a discussion of The Souls of Black Folk, “hey, isn’t the title for this course framing this whole class as making someone a problem? Isn’t that what DuBois means to critique?” It’s not consistent with the mission to tweet out a misrepresentation of the course to thousands of people who could care less about universities or anthropology or knowledge and provide a picture of the instructor and an email address along with the misrepresentation. That’s misconduct, or it should be.

I’m aware that by that standard, many students commit modest kinds of misconduct on social media every day. But mostly anonymously, without mentioning the specifics, and mostly about courses they are actually taking.

Even FIRE (perhaps especially FIRE, given their free speech maximalism in other contexts) acknowledges the right of universities and colleges to have conduct standards that truncate or limit the speech of students and faculty, most particularly in the case of religious institutions that require students and faculty to adhere to a particular faith or doctrine and that have (sometimes lengthy) codes of conduct that address speech, dress, and decorum. Secular institutions (or institutions whose religious affiliation no longer informs their mission to any great extent) still have a right to ask for an alignment of conduct and mission. You want to critique a course and be a student in good standing? Take the course, or at least bother to learn about it. Critique it to the community, not to a mob of people who could care less about the course, the institution or academia. Join a conversation that is legible within that institution for the time that you’re a part of it.