[Leigh M. Johnson and Edward Kazarian]
We trust it won’t come as a surprise to NewAPPS readers that the reputation of professional Philosophy has been taking a well-deserved beating in the public sphere. The really bad press started two years ago with the Vincent Hendricks scandal, gained momentum a year later with the Colin McGinn scandal, and has unleashed its full fury this year with the triplet of scandals at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Northwestern University and Oxford University. Given the severity—and, in some cases, alleged criminality—of the behaviors reported in these scandals, what IS surprising to us is the turn that recent intra-disciplinary conversations about them has taken. As two non-tenured professional philosophers, we’re particularly concerned with the new enthusiasm for policing “collegiality” that seems to be emerging in and from these conversations, which in almost every case promotes a norm that we fear only serves to make the vulnerable among us even more vulnerable.
An exemplary instance of how “collegiality” standards can backfire is found in Brian Leiter’s quasi-authoritative “please revise your tone” comment (and more general attitudinal disposition) in this discussion on the Feminist Philosophers blog, followed by his longer a fortiori post (which he removed from his blog within hours, but which has been preserved here) on the “increasingly ugly cyber-dynamics” of conversations about sexual harassment in the profession. (For the record, we want to note that the sexual harassment problems in our profession are far uglier than the conversational cyber-dynamics in our profession, though it’s really a lose-lose in that determination.) It is important to take note of the dynamics on display in these threads, which demonstrate more than a little bit of our "climate" problem. Leiter invoked “tone” in reprimanding critics of his position on the issues under discussion and he directed his opprobrium at, among others, a graduate student speaking to the vulnerability she and many of her colleagues feel in a profession with an increasingly well-documented hostile climate for women. Many of the other commenters in the thread, including the post’s author, argued explicitly against attempts to police matters of tone (see comments 10 and 16).
To be precise, we're troubled that insistences on a certain set of normative standards for “collegiality” are regularly being forwarded on behalf of people like us—i.e., colleagues from underrepresented groups in the profession, those with provisional employment, and/or those whose status as stakeholders in the profession is undervalued—presumably in the interest of making the space of professional (philosophical) disagreement friendlier and “safer” for us. What seems to go largely unacknowledged, if not intentionally ignored, is the manner in which the right to police norms of professional collegiality is a privilege that attends only those for whom running afoul of those standards has no real consequences. And so, to those attempting to police these standards of collgiality, we want to say: Thanks, but no thanks.
We understand that our objections herein may seem counter-intuitive to many of our colleagues. Collegiality is, after all, widely perceived to be one of the core academic virtues, something to be valued and cultivated as a basic structuring element in our community, perhaps even one of the necessary conditions for the possibility of an academic community. In order to make room for the intellectual space required for ‘dissent,’ the traditional understanding of collegiality goes, we’re obliged to be (or at the very least, behave like) ‘friends.’
Our contention, however, is that this requirement is excessively regulative in a way that almost inevitably leads to exclusionary results. The rule of ‘collegiality" qua smooth conforming social behavior, "fitting in" in a way that doesn't ruffle feathers, is the sort of requirement that only works, practically speaking, in very homogenous communities. If we may be permitted an analogy, collegiality is like ‘togetherness’ as analyzed by Jane Jacobs in Death and Life of Great American Cities. There, Jacobs is concerned with how cities can work as communities of “strangers” (she emphasizes that frequently encountering strangers is an inevitable fact of city life, just as it is in our profession), and with how the largely anonymous interactions of sidewalk life might potentially perform a number of positive essential functions, e.g., providing for general safety and contact between people in a neighborhood. Her discussion of togetherness arises with regard to how otherwise-rare ‘contact’ is handled in the absence of a constant circulation of people on the street, emphasizing that lack of contact is the most frequent outcome in cities. (To wit, Jacobs’ concerns about the lack of “contact” in city-life reflect the very same concerns that plague professional Philosophy now, namely, that we “philosophers” are joined together in a community only by virtue of a minimal, almost-entirely “professional,” and increasingly exclusively digital, that is to say, tangential and, at best, entirely impersonal connection.) But it is Jacobs’ description of the consequences of opting for “togetherness,” in the absence of something that might genuinely constitute togetherness, that are of interest to us here.
Specifically, we’re concerned that Jacobs' claim that “where people do share much, they become exceedingly choosy as to who their neighbors are, or with whom they associate at all,” has come to unfortunately dominate the determination of collegiality within and among professional philosophers. Jacobs’ analysis elucidates, saliently in our view, that this implicit and unavoidable “choosiness” among and between self-appointed protectors of a community’s “togetherness” makes real diversity not only unwelcome, but nearly impossible to support. In a passage that is highly resonant with much of the agonizing about ‘fit’ that goes into hiring decisions, as well as the difficulty that many departments—not to mention our discipline as a whole—have with retaining a broadly diverse group of students and faculty, she writes:
People who do not fit happily into such colonies eventually get out, and in time managements become sophisticated in knowing who among applicants will fit in. Along with basic similarities of standards, values and backgrounds, the arrangement seems to demand a formidable amount of forbearance and tact…
City residential planning that depends, for contact among neighbors, on personal sharing of this sort, and that cultivates it, often does work well socially, if rather narrowly, for self-selected upper-middle-class people. It solves easy problems for an easy kind of population. So far as I have been able to discover, it fails to work, however, even on its own terms, with any other kind of population (65).
As an ideal, what a certain formulation of “collegiality”—dominant in recent discussions and exemplified by Brian Leiter’s “please revise your tone” comment at FP—relies upon is an abstract notion of ‘collegiality" that, when implemented among real professional philosophers, requires a common manner, disposition or set of behaviors, even across many important social differences. As a regulative ideal, we do not object to that notion of collegiality. What we do object to is the mandating of it—because we recognize that, in practice, what is being mandated can only be behaviors that mimic “togetherness” where such togetherness is manifestly not the case. Members of traditionally privileged groups in academia (tenured, white, straight, cis men chief among them) might experience collegiality as the glue that allows them to “get into it” with one another at a paper presentation, in a department meeting, in print or in the various digital versions of print, and then subsequently wash away any potentially lingering disagreement over a few beers. But members of out-groups do not share in the easy sociality of ‘the guys,’ nor do they share in the personal or professional safety that makes that easy sociality possible.
What is or is not permitted as acceptable speech or behavior, what is or is not viewed as “anti-social,” “un-professional” or “un-collegial”—that is to say, what strikes the ears of community members as resonating with an inappropriate “tone”—will always be defined and policed according to the norms of that group’s social interchange, norms that are determined by those to whom such norms are the most advantageous. Those for whom such norms of collegiality do not render benefits will find, as a matter of course, the professional insistence on “collegiality” exponentially more demanding. Indeed, as long as this particular formulation of collegiality remains a professional standard, underrepresented groups will find themselves locked into the false choice between ineffectively participating in hostile spaces (and being called out for their non-allegiance to the rules of collegiality) or, what is often worse, not participating (and consequently being seen as ‘aloof,’ ‘disengaged,’ ‘unprofessional’ or whatever other code for “antisocial” one wishes to cite). The predictable result of this dynamic is just what the comparison with Jacobs’ ‘togetherness’ would lead us to expect, namely, professional Philosophy will continue, as it has for millennia under the guise of good-faith efforts to prevent the same, to drive-out or force-out marginalized and underrepresented groups from the community/conversation in disproportionate numbers.
Some might object that collegiality, these days, is a far less robust standard than we are claiming, that it is really no more than an insistence on some variation of “civility,” a virtue with which it is grouped in the APA Committee for the Status of Women’s Report on the situation at UC-Boulder, for example. That Site Visit Committee, regrettably charged with offering up an analysis of and practical fixes for what was an all-too-common and fundamentally structural problem, also opted to reinforce (in our view, unfortunately) the “collegiality” norms with which we want to take issue here. Insisting on “family-friendly” conditions for the possibility of professional interaction, as the UC-Boulder Site Committee’s Report does, may be (at least in UC-Boulder’s case) a marginal improvement on the current conditions the Site Visit Committee was charged with diagnosing, but their diagnosis was not leveled without its own costs, not the least of which is that “family-friendly” is not the measure by which every professional philosopher does (or ought to) judge standards of collegiality.
What is more, even if “collegiality” is interpreted more narrowly and held to bear simply on norms of professional (real, print or digital) conversation, our professional norms of collegiality still tend to stack the deck against anyone expressing a dissenting view. And, let’s all be honest, what professional Philosophy needs most now, ante omnia, is a norm that welcomes without prejudice the stranger. Our professional norms for collegiality are typically much harder to satisfy in terms that everyone (especially the target of the “un-collegial” criticism) will agree are collegial. This is especially true, as evidenced in recent conversations by Leiter et al, given how likely it is that our colleagues will take claims that they are being insufficiently sensitive to diversity issues as personal attacks or claim that their critics aren’t being ‘collegial’ (or, as long as collegiality is around as a professional standard, ‘unprofessional’), thus neatly diverting responsibility away from themselves and back onto the person who objected in the first place.
Leiter threw his institutional weight and influence around to attack junior colleagues ("Current Student" and Rachel McKinnon, particularly) by suggesting that they were professionally unsuitable to engage in conversation; he employed the age-old rhetorical strategy of discounting women’s voices by appealing to female hysteria; he insisted that his critics “please revise [their] tone” when he was being called to account for his mendacity; he offered up a left-handed “apology” for his misbehavior by endorsing a bona fide race-baiting analogy to “lynch mobs,” and he did all of this under the guise of calling for justice, fairness and collegiality. Taken together, this strikes us as a remarkable example of how the “problems” with collegiality, as it is currntly understood and enforcedd by the dominant colleagues in our field, are all too frequently manufactured by them.
To wit, we argue that the structural problems with collegiality standards (and other similar standards, like civility, friendliness, appropriateness, etc.) may be reason enough not to support the unreflective policing of such regulative criteria as those suggested in the Petition to the APA for a “Professional Code of Conduct for Philosophers.”
To summarize our objections, we worry that these standards will: 1) impose a disproportionate burden of changing their behavior to "fit in" on those who are members of out- (that is, underrepresented or minority) groups within the profession; 2) likely be applied disproportionately against those expressing dissenting views or criticizing colleagues for lapses in judgment or perception; and 3) tend to reinforce or provide opportunities to reiterate the structures of privilege and exclusion already operating within the profession.
No one wants to work in a climate of hostility or incivility, of course, least of all those of us for whom such a climate is the most disadvantageous. We acknowledge that some behaviors can be, ought to be, and in fact are already legislated by extant (college, university and federal) codes of conduct. Hearts and minds, on the other hand, ought not and cannot be legislated. It is at the level of hearts and minds that our (professional philosophers’) real problem lies. Before we sign on to any program that mandates certain attitudinal dispositions, we ought to think seriously about the extent to which those initiatives in fact work to further discredit and marginalize the very voices they are intended to protect.
Professional philosophy has now found itself, and is being forced to reflect on itself, in the midst of crisis. Let’s not opt for handing our problems over to (what Kimberle Crenshaw aptly called) the crisis-oriented, neoliberal mode of thinking. Our objections are not about “personal responsibility”; we’re concerned, primarily, with leveling the playing field and what we hope has become apparent in the above is that the “collegiality” playing-field is not, and has never been, level.
New APPS 
129 responses to “Please do NOT revise your tone”
“nothing short of sickening” wouldn’t be my choice of words if I expected a friendly response. Luckily that commenter stands nothing to lose in professional status since, like us, they posted anonymously. Perhaps on this blog their comment would have been deleted for making a personal attack behind a veil of anonymity, I’ll leave that for the NewAPPS moderators to ponder.
The others put their names, or at least part of their names, out there and for their forthrightness accrued the benefits that might have been expected from calling somebody “champ” or heralding the exit of their kind from the profession.
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Newapps folks: first, thank you for posting Leigh and Edward’s (I hope it is OK for me to use informal first names) thought-provoking post. I wonder whether it might be possible to have a new thread that allows for comments that are more directly about the contents of their post. I’m not suggesting shutting down this thread at all. Clearly lots of folks regard this thread as an important and valuable discussion. As someone who might have something to say about Leigh and Edward’s post, it might be useful to have a kind of reboot thread more narrowly focused on their ideas and suggestions. I signed the petition for a code of ethics so I’m thinking as carefully as I can (between classes, etc.) about what our colleagues took such time and care to craft. If I think I can contribute usefully to that, I guess I’d prefer it to be a different thread than this discussion, as lively and productive as it may be.
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I don’t know. At this point maybe everyone has aired all the personal grievances that are relevant?
Leiter apologized on his blog for the stuff a lot of us complained about above. Can we just accept that and try to move forward in a charitable spirit? It’s important for us to be clear about stuff that bugs us, so we can all do better. But personalizing it too much becomes harmful in all sorts of ways. Can we focus on practical ways that we ourselves won’t be assholes? If we focus on the ways we we take others to have been worse we’ll just end up being even worse. I don’t think we’re there yet, but I fear that the comments are veering that way.
The issues are much larger than any one person, and every one of us has treated other people in ways that would be far more humiliating than anything we’re discussing above, were they made public.
Martin Luther King said “I’d rather die than hate you” (http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_loving_your_enemies/). Words to live (and die) by. Can we just move forward in a spirit of charity and forgiveness (realizing we ourselves need forgiveness too) and all try to do better?
Personally, I would have had a more productive day if I’d thought about Leigh and Ed’s post in terms of the stuff I do instead of stuff other people do.
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Oh please. Leiter has not apologized to me, which is what lots of people (including ‘Current Student’) thinks was the worst part of this fiasco.
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Oh Jeez, I stand corrected. I actually thought he had apologized to you. He certainly owes you one!
This being said, I do still think the King sermon is apposite. I realize that that’s naive in all sorts of ways, but there I stand.
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No, he only apologized to Current Student. He hasn’t apologized to me.
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…or Matt.
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I understand that you’re just asking questions for clarification without asserting a stance.
It’s a talent to do things that way, and someone just might write several dialogues on the same model of asking without saying.
I guess I have this notion that a clearing assumes the forest is thick there in the first place, and a well swung question designed to cut out some space seems wasted if there weren’t trees there to begin with. Or maybe it’s like clarifying water, pushing the dirty solution up against a filter to let the clearer water through? It’s probably not like clarifying butter or letting the air clear, letting things sit undisturbed to settle down and out naturally. There are a lot of metaphors behind what we mean by clarifying things, not all of which involve pressure, agitation, movement.
Are there peaceful questions? Challenging questions that also instill peace and settling?
Maybe.
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I once booked a show which was an experiment in bringing into contact two sub-subcultures with which I strongly identified, and it was a disaster. One of the bands had a t-shirt depicting a zombie attacking a scantily-clad woman. Some of my friends confronted them, and within minutes there were over a dozen people screaming at each other, many of them using sexist slurs.
Afterward I was talking with a friend that had been in attendance and lamenting that I thought everyone had behaved badly and though I agreed substantively with the women challenging the sexist shirt I was frustrated that they had been so aggressive because it prevented the conversation from being more productive. She pointed out that I didn’t spend the day up until then walking around as a woman, getting cat-called, called a whore, or seeing distorted ideas of what I should look like used to sell products, so it was easy for me to wish they’d stayed calm. That was the last time that I felt comfortable policing someone’s tone.
It’s been mentioned once or twice here but I think it’s worth emphasizing: a lot of people are really fucking angry. And rightly. And maybe in a perfect world we’d all keep our cool all the time, but not only is that unrealistic but when we hold everyone to that standard we essentially expect marginalized folks to just “calm down” and be rational no matter how much shit they’ve had to put up with. So I’m not prepared to endorse any
kind of Non-Violent Communication rule, any MLK-esque principle of charity, or a “no-punching” rule, because it’s easy for me to stay calm as someone that enjoys a lot of intersectional power and privilege.
One part of privilege is getting to expect everyone else to stay calm so that their efforts to challenge bullshit will be more effective. And it probably will be. But it’s not my place to insist, and especially not in the it’s-for-your-own-good register. So while I hope that everyone can avoid punching, threatening, and insulting, I’m not comfortable legislating it. A distinction that seems to be getting passed over here is that between legislating collegiality on moral and tactical grounds. Whether it’s effective depends on the situation. Whether it’s reasonable to expect depends on the experience of others. But as far as I’m concerned whether it’s moral depends mostly on the answers to the first two. I’ve never found blanket admonitions to non-violence persuasive. I think most of the time it’s a tactical mistake, but people experience violence in any number of subtle and not-so-subtle ways, from micro-aggressions to sexual assault. It’s not a question of whether we’re going to allow violence–it’s too late for that–but whether it’s best met with more of its kind. Usually probably not. But in the rare case that punching up, figuratively or literally for that matter, is the best way to challenge pernicious uses of power, the only general principle I’ll endorse is to wrap your wrists.
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Jon, #95, and others,
I laughed aloud when I read Leiter’s comments about libel and defamation. Isn’t he a lawyer or law professor? How can I put this politely? I wouldn’t hire him to represent me in a lawsuit, if that’s his understanding of the law in this area.
Why do philosophers allow this person such power in influencing and representing their discipline, I wonder? Why don’t you simply stop participating in his blog and stop relying on his rankings and reports of faculty moves? He occupies his current perch by default, because years ago when he came to prominence, neither the APA nor any other entity was successfully offering the service he did. Perhaps it’s time to visit a new restaurant.
I agree with the conclusion of the original post about tone-moderation. I’ve worked in a few different male-dominated fields where unprofessional behavior often went ignored or was even encouraged (engineering, academia, marketing). I found it extremely useful to know straightaway with whom I was dealing and not have to deal with false fronts. If you’re the sort of person to comment on the length of my skirts or rudely dismiss my ideas, I want to know so I can respond to you appropriately, and not be surprised later when you undermine me.
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He never apologized for saying I have the worst possible philosophical judgment in cyberspace. And I’m fine if he doesn’t (it might be his considered view, which is fine with me). Given that you don’t have tenure, and given the number of us who deal with mental health issues, or who have dear friends and family who do, it was clearly a lot more irritating when he called you “unhinged.” Though if I’m not mistaken, he did at least take that down, didn’t he?
The guy sometimes gets defensive and uncharitable when he’s stressed, and he strikes a lot of us as having unsound judgment about French philosophy. These aren’t horrendous character flaws and to act as if they define him just dehumanizes him and us. If he wasn’t in the public eye ranking the rest of us (or rather selecting the committees that do and determining which programs get voted on) it wouldn’t be an issue. We all have colleagues down the hall who do worse. We all do worse ourselves when not in the public eye (and some of us do so in public).
To the extent that it is a big deal when someone gets uncharitable in the heat of public debate, then it’s twice as important to be charitable towards those who have been uncharitable towards you. If you think someone is being unfair about some people’s scholarship, then it’s twice is important to be fair about their scholarship (and there are so many bizarre ad hominems about Leiter’s scholarship in every nook and cranny of the web that it’s perfectly understandable why he’s grumpy about some of this).
I know there’s this: http://www.theonion.com/articles/aclu-defends-nazis-right-to-burn-down-aclu-headqua,1648/ and also that what Jack Samual above in 109 is true. I’m not trying to legislate a rule that applies in all cases with respect to all forms of abuse of power. But someone who blogs as much as Leiter does losing his steam now and again when stressed out is exactly the kind of thing that there’s no downside in being charitable about (the fact that so many people by name took exception to Leiter calling you “unhinged” shows that Wallace is at least 2/3ds correct above).
Part of why I wanted to be in on newapps when John set it up is because I wanted to be part of a place where people with different approaches to philosophy treated one another with respect, as fellow members of a guild, even (and especially) when these differences involved disagreements. I’ve sometimes done a terrible job of this when in the heat of debate, both in my old blog and here at newapps. But I’ve been very lucky to have, for the most part, extremely charitable interlocutors. It would be the height of hypocrisy not to, in the calm light of day, extend the same charity to others.
Those of us so quick to see other people in terms of what we take to be their worst public behavior should realize that we too need charity.
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anonymous, do you ever find the kind of antagonism and the reactions you know you generate worth it, in the end, for what you’re going for? Of course, being anonymous, you know very well that people who speak truth to power very often, despite the amount of time spent talking about intersectionality or dynamics of power relations or microaggressions or Foucault, have a hard time seeing in what ways they do have power and use it to such an extent that truth spoken to them carries the sting of responsibility. So, it’s easy, I think, to find in what ways we sin and fall short, since we’re prone fundamentally to vanity. Pointing out the inconsistencies, and especially the moral ones, does have a way of fostering humility, but like with the old line attributed to Richelieu, and really what’s at stake with the Too Many Secrets mentality of the NSA, finding moral inconsistencies is often going to be the tool of the powerful to silence dissent, since the powerful are always by definition the ones who openly enforce the rules and hold them up as pressing.
Coming up with new rules, better rules, more responsible rules for how people talk to one another reminds me of the Taoist point about building a better, more secure lock against thieves: the best thieves just take the whole thing and use the lock for them. Expanding the analogy goes: building a better (more inclusive, more moral, more more) set of rules just enables better usurpers of those rules. Perhaps if we got rid of the entire cult of genius (I do like how philosophyadjunct thinks with that language), or like Zhuangzhi deadpan argues as getting rid of all the sages and refusing to think these moral problems are solved through figuring out the right side of ruling, we’d be in a very different kind of conversation.
To some extent, that’s what I think you acknowledge implicitly by pointing out earlier that commenting anonymously is permissible here for the safety of those who want to participate but fear retribution, even though we want to believe in and use the ideal of authenticity as a way of opening the door to dialogue. Rather than use this inconsistency as a way of permitting access, we use the inconsistency in the rules to govern those who do not fit, while calling out this same logic in the powerful. So, it’s no wonder the conversation turns into when it is right for those on the right side to do things the wrong side does. People think the anonymous safe space means we’re empowering folks to say things against, to use other thoughts, the powerful ones. It becomes jarring this ambiguous place: by using this safety to challenge those who already feel disempowered elsewhere, you remind them in what ways they do have power or desire power over others, but you also are not fitting into the acceptable mode of discourse and agreement and, as you admit, will be construed as supporting the wrong side even though, more likely given the way you’re asking things, what you are doing is supporting no side but the dissolution of sides.
I can be wrong about all this. I’m likely reading into it things more from my own time spent doing the schizopolitics, fluid identities thing using multiple alternate accounts. You are likely more thoughtful about this than I was, since at that time the Internet was still as young as I was. Better people practice this sort of thing to learn better things about people. But when it comes to your own reflection on the art of rooting around, do you worry that you are, in the end, supporting the wronger side by challenging those who have been wronged to not wrong in turn the wrong side?
I mean, I’m very sympathetic to what Cogburn is pointing to by appealing to King and some aspect of the Christian tradition’s non-violence, but becoming less and less Christian myself, I find it worth wondering alongside those who refuse reconciliation how much such non-violence, non-aggression, non-intervention is just support for those who use violence to gain control, just as I find it worth wondering alongside those who refuse the response-in-kind how much such violence, aggression, intervention is just support for those who use violence to gain control. Like the book says, once the way is lost, we get benevolence and righteousness. A lot of us rush to the position where being the wronged one authorizes our words to be more right, and being more right though wronged gives greater weight to just how right we are. Leiter serves notice to remind people of their responsibility to be right; as he said somewhat recently, standing for truth requires a combative stance at times. Here the conversation about facts includes detailing precisely how we are wronged and seeking justice, public acknowledgment, of having been right all along, publicity that also demands tracking who we are and when we are them.
Maybe if we embraced the separation of moral reality from material reality more thoroughly, and didn’t assume someone on the wrong side cannot have better facts or better arguments (we very often admit they are better persuaders and rhetoricians, but think of those as somehow beneath the higher calling of truths demanding and conflict-settling), we’d be sooner on our way. But it does mean for all of us to give up what’s owed to us, believing we’ve been wronged by the wrong side when we’re the ones rightly on the right side.
That’s a hard thing. And it becomes even harder when everyone keeps saying to one another, “You first.”
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You say it’s not your place to advocate calmness to oppressed people who are angry and trying to bring about change. You seem to think that to do so is problematically paternalistic. In my experience with people belonging to the oppressed groups you’re talking about, oppressed people, like us privileged folk, are quite rational and able to regard us as ordinary interlocutors. If such a conversation about tactics is just such an exchange of views, then I don’t see anything problematically paternalistic. This means that if I hold a view about the best tactics for an oppressed group, many members of this group will be willing to debate my views with me. I don’t need to shield them from my views about what will be effective. Of course, I feel things out in the situation at hand. Some people, understandably, aren’t able to have this kind of debate, and I’ll never insist that they do. So if you mean you don’t feel comfortable having these debates with people who have made clear that they don’t want to have them, then we agree. But your post makes it sound like you’re making a somewhat sweeping prohibition against endorsing certain views in conversation with certain marginalized people. And I think that to whithhold some of your views from marginalized people like this is to, well, marginalize them in a certain way.
Another reason you give for not wanting to “legislate” norms of collegiality is that people are rightly angry, and so breaking such rules would be understandable. To me, that just seems to call for sensitivity and attention to the particulars of individual cases in applying or enforcing the norms. A general rule against bad behavior would be, as Mark Lance has noted above, defeasible.
You say that collegiality and non-violence are usually the best tactic, but that in those cases that they aren’t, you’ll “wrap your wrists”. Is the latter kind of case a complete hypothetical, with no practical application to the issue we’re discussing, viz. underrepresentation in academia? Or do you think there are, or are likely to be, cases in which “punching” will be effective in combatting barriers to groups entering academia? If the latter, could you describe such an actual or likely case? It seems that many people commenting think there are such actual or likely cases (they agree with the OP that collegiality norms can work to preserve the status quo) but I haven’t seen anything in the OP or in the comments that lends plausibility to this view.
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There’s a difference between exchanging views regarding tactics, stepping outside of a conversation in a heated moment to insist that someone play by your rules, and establishing rules banning uncivility. If my post made it sound like I was making a sweeping prohibition against endorsing non-violence etc. it was unintentional. To be honest, reading through it again with that in mind I have a really hard time seeing how you got that from what I said. To be clear now: I have no problem with anyone endorsing tactical norms in the context of rational exchanges of views. I have a problem with moralized calls for a strict policy of non-violence, with telling people to calm down or watch their tone, and with institutionally-backed policies of enforced collegiality.
It’s a matter of degree I suppose, but I don’t see the purpose of having a rule that’s as defeasible as I think would be needed in this case. Maybe a recommendation. I’m happy to use the word “rule” so long as it’s defeasible, understood as inappropriate to enforce on others in the middle of a heated argument, and not institutionally-backed. And I don’t mean to be coming down decisively against the APA policy effort. I think there are considerations that speak for both sides, and here I’m just trying to lay out some of the ones that I think speak against.
I’m reluctant to engage in hypotheticals because when we describe made-up cases from a safe analytic distance we assume artificially detached perspectives on artificially simplified situations. If you think there are no cases where there is a tactical advantage to being uncivil then I don’t see why you wouldn’t think that my view is trivially true (if there were any it would be okay, but there aren’t). And maybe it turns out that there aren’t any. In thinking about resistance more generally I can imagine cases much more easily (Black Panthers breaking their comrades out of jail, ELF destruction of property), but in blog arguments about academia maybe not.
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Just for the record that “wrap your wrists” comment was a bit of commenting-after-my-bedtime hyperbole. (Also I saw 12 Years a Slave yesterday, which left me reflecting on the merits of violent tactics in contemporary struggles.) I agree that polite, civil conversations are more fun most of the time, and there are lots of good reasons to prefer them. But when bucking those standards is the best way to challenge power, “just do it the best way you can and be careful” is a good policy, I think.
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In light of the points raised both in the OP and the comments thread, I can’t help but see this story as evidence of the problems with “tone”:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/03/13/lost-faculty-job-offer-raises-questions-about-negotiation-strategy
and
http://philosophysmoker.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-new-kind-of-pfo-mid-negotiating-post.html
Look at how questions of “fit” and “collegiality” work into people’s speculations, particularly of those who think that Nazareth is in the right.
Of course, we don’t know why Nazareth withdrew its offer. Nor do we know which demands were particularly unreasonable (though if it was maternity leave, Nazareth ought to be in serious, serious trouble). But we can note that worry about “fit” and “collegiality,” (which as Leigh, Ed and others have brought up are related to “tone”) insures that we have cover to dispose of a candidate whose gender may or may not be relevant in a tidy way.
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Thanks for the clarification. I don’t think my original reading of your post was unmotivated, as you suggest it was, but I also don’t think either of us want to go down the road of arguing about that. Whether I agree or disagree with the view at the end of your (1) would depend on the nature of the problem you have with these things, the kind of collegiality that’s enforced, and the nature of the enforcement.
I’m wondering why you think the rule is so defeasible if you don’t know of any cases where being uncivil is productive. (Your response in (3) suggests you don’t know of any such cases.) It might be true that others shouldn’t admonish those who break the rule in a wide variety of cases. But the rule isn’t defeated in those cases, it’s just that admonition isn’t the appropriate response to its being broken. I realize you don’t suggest the impropriety of admonition as your reason for thinking the rule is highly defeasible. I’m just anticipating one reason one might give that’s consistent with things you say.
We agree on the irrelevance of unrealistic hypotheticals (hence my request for actual or probable cases). Whether your conditional linking the (non-actual) effectiveness of punching up to the prima facie permissibility of doing so is true in virtue of the falsity of its antecedent or the truth of its consequent is, of course, important here, since we’re interested in whether norms of civility and collegiality work to suppress certain voices, or to hide certain problems (and not just in blog postings, but in professional interaction generally). This is the claim of the OP and of many commenters. If your conditional is true in virtue of the falsity of its antecedent–if there are no cases in which punching up is effective–then the claim at issue is false, since norms of civility don’t preclude any effective strategies for fighting problems. This doesn’t contradict anything you’ve said, but I just wanted to clarify that my interest isn’t in the truth of your conditional per se. Rather, since I’m interested in the real-world implications of this discussion, I’m interested in the primary contention of the OP and the thread, viz. that norms of civility reinforce some kind of power structure.
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Thank, Ammon, that’s interesting. I don’t see any reason to speculate that gender was the reason for withdrawing the offer or that collegiality norms are likely to be used in this way. However, while the job candidate’s behavior seems incredibly imprudent to me, I don’t see how it can be characterized as ‘uncollegial’. So collegiality norms can be misused. But I think they’re just like any norm in this way. For example, one could use the norm against sexism to target a black man.
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Right, we really can’t speculate and we won’t know for sure. But my point is that many people are actually characterizing it as a problem with collegiality (I think we both agree they ought not, but c’est la vie). And the university itself actually used the justification of “fit” when they withdrew the offer.
You want actual examples of where people are harmed by the invocation of these norms. There you go.
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You just completely dismissed how stressful and insulting this has been for me. Thank you.
You basically just gaslit me and told me to get over it: what can we expect, he just lost his temper, he does that sometimes…that’s just Brian being Brian.
Unacceptable.
There’s no sense in which to be “charitable” to what Brian did. None. One might be compassionate, but that is different from charity.
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I didn’t mean to minimize the fact that what he did was unacceptable. I apologize to the extent I did that. I am also sorry if anything I said added to the stress.
I respect your view about this, and continue to learn from what you’ve written here and elsewhere about these issues.
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Please reflect on how that comment reads to someone in my position, and that it comes (roughly) immediately after your saying that he owes me an apology. The follow-up message is infuriating and extremely insulting.
“He never apologized for saying I have the worst possible philosophical judgment in cyberspace. And I’m fine if he doesn’t (it might be his considered view, which is fine with me).”
How am I supposed to interpret that? Calling me CRAZY and UNHINGED is very different from saying that you have very bad philosophical judgment. I think he owes you an apology, too, but the cases are different. They’re also different for reasons of power imbalance. His comments about me were also manifestly (I hope) MEAN. What did I say that warranted calling me crazy? I politely disagreed with him, engaging with his arguments in the FP thread. Then I called out his very shitty comment to the student. And yes I called him an “asshat” on someone’s FB thread (in which he wasn’t participating: I didn’t say it “to” him, I said it “about” him).
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Jon, I think you might be confusing charity for compassion. Compassion would dictate that I should take into account how hard it is to be Brian, and to understand that he lost control. That’s one thing (and I’d tell you where to shove it if that’s the view: drop a dish on the floor. It’s broken. Now tell it you’re sorry: does the dish go back to being unbroken? That’s what’s happened to me. It’s hard to be compassionate for one’s oppressor. I’m not saying that, ideally, it wouldn’t be better if I were, but you can’t seriously expect me to.)
But “charitable”? I haven’t misrepresented anything Brian has done. I’ve been quoting him. I haven’t misinterpreted anything he’s done. How was I uncharitable?!
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I wasn’t looking for an example where someone is harmed by the invocation of norms of collegiality. People can be harmed by any norms, no matter how reasonable (e.g., a racist gets harmed by an invocation of a norm against racism). What I was looking for was an example that confirmed the claim in the OP. That claim is that “[t]he predictable result of this dynamic [of dominant groups choosing the mandated norms of collegiality] is …[that] professional Philosophy will continue, as it has for millennia under the guise of good-faith efforts to prevent the same, to drive-out or force-out marginalized and underrepresented groups from the community/conversation in disproportionate numbers”. I don’t see that the example you provide is an example fo this.
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Re 122:
Thanks for taking the time to explain this. I stated clearly the ways I took the two cases to be non-comparable, but I do see now that I treated them comparably in what I wrote and that this amounted to gas-lighting.
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I’d told myself I was going to sit this one out, but two points. First, Leiter is sui generis here. He is perceived as representative of the profession (IHE, etc. contact him) and clearly cultivates that image (always linking to those IHE stories that quote him). He also runs – apologies to those who work very hard on producing this document – a ranking of graduate programs in philosophy that is, at the end of the day, a very elaborate opinion poll. From this position, he does an awful lot of boundary work, using words like “crappy,” “dim,” “mediocre,” “SPEP” and “Stonybrook” to clearly signal that some ways of practicing philosophy are illegitimate or not actually philosophy (inquiring minds might ask what, other than Derrida and Butler, is included in this domain, since it seems to be ambiguous. But of course that serves the boundary work well, because the ambiguity encourages people not to go too close to the fuzzy borderlands lest they find themselves on the wrong side).
Then he calls a junior female colleague “unhinged” but demands that someone else who calls him “champ” “revise” their tone. In the meantime, the blog post that he removed basically says that his way of dealing with harassment claims is the right one and that harassment (and not, say, too much machismo) is the main thing keeping women out of philosophy.
How can that not be damaging?
the second thought is to second the comment above that the libel threats sound mostly like efforts at intimidation. There’s federal law that protects U.S. citizens from jurisdiction shopping in libel cases (suing somebody in a location where the law favors the plaintiff), he’s a public figure so any libel would have to be pretty egregious, and a lot of the actions he threatens could be challenged under anti-SLAPP laws.
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Yeah, I meant “compassion,” not anything having to do with “charity” as it is normally used in philosophical contexts. I often use different idioms in religious and philosophical contexts, and here is a good example of where I should have kept them separate.
Marx certainly had some very good points about the Christian world-view. Telling the oppressed to have compassion for their oppressors can be a slap in the face or worse.
Sister Helen Prejean’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Prejean) talks are often attended by grief stricken victims of the very murderers she is trying to save. She’s very good at squaring the circle of not letting her expression of compassion for the criminals shade into a lack of compassion for the victims.
Me, clearly not so good. Thanks again for taking the time to explain this stuff to me.
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The claims regarding Leiter’s power in philosophy are dramatically overstated.
The Philosophical Gourmet Report is certainly influential. One might legitimately wonder whether an “elaborate opinion poll” should have as much influence as it does. But, the Gourmet Report is not Leiter. Rankings in the Gourmet Report are determine by a survey of philosophers, not Leiter dictating from on high. The prominence of the Gourmet Report in the profession – good or bad – has little or nothing to do with whether Leiter’s comments on his blog are “damaging” or powerful.
Granted, his blog is widely read. I suspect, however, that most – like me – read the blog not because of anything Leiter has to say – and certainly not because I look to Leiter for guidance about anything – but because it’s a convenient source of news and discussions (often involving very little Leiter) about the profession.
In this case, there is particular reason to think that the insulting comments are not powerful or damaging (to anyone but Leiter). The insulting comments that are supposedly so damaging here are the very sort that Leiter routinely makes, apparently for no other reason than that he disagrees with the person he is insulting. Given his unfortunate pattern of throwing around insults at those with whom he disagrees, it is hard to believe that anyone who is familiar in the least with Leiter’s blog would take the comments as reason to think less of those who were insulted. That is particular so given that (1) Leiter posted a reasonably accurate summary of the exchange which led to his insulting comments, (2) the post was very quickly taken down (and, preserved only by those who are supposedly worried about the damage it might do to their careers), and (3) anyone in philosophy who knows how to google is familiar with this whole affair.
To the extent that any of those who were insulted by Leiter’s post were damaged, I suspect it’s because Leiter more widely publicized insulting comments (“asshat”) that had been made previously. If that’s really the source of the harm, it’s hard – for me, at least – to be very sympathetic. If you’re worried about it being publicized that you called someone an asshat in a public forum, you probably shouldn’t call them an asshat in a public forum. Similarly, if you’re very sensitive about being insulted by someone in a public forum, you probably shouldn’t insult them first in a public forum. Given the apparent importance of apologies, I assume that Leiter has been issued one.
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“To the extent that any of those who were insulted by Leiter’s post were damaged, I suspect it’s because Leiter more widely publicized insulting comments (“asshat”) that had been made previously. If that’s really the source of the harm, it’s hard – for me, at least – to be very sympathetic. If you’re worried about it being publicized that you called someone an asshat in a public forum, you probably shouldn’t call them an asshat in a public forum. Similarly, if you’re very sensitive about being insulted by someone in a public forum, you probably shouldn’t insult them first in a public forum. Given the apparent importance of apologies, I assume that Leiter has been issued one. ”
I have absolutely no problem with him making public that I called him an asshat. That has nothing to do with this.
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