[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”
I think this is all important and thought-provoking, and I agree about the abuse of tone-policing and that we need to be challenged on these things.
But in the context of hiring, I don’t know about how, “And, let’s all be honest, what professional Philosophy needs most now, ante omnia, is a norm that welcomes without prejudice the stranger.”
It’s overwhelmingly important in hiring to try to get someone who is going to help the students, get tenure, and do their fair share of service work. It’s a very hard thing for someone to balance all of these demands, so hard in fact that there’s really no easy way to predict very much from the normal job interview processes. . . But if someone is too much the stranger there’s no way to predict at all, and you are upping your chances of inflicting some form of disaster on the department. Even just someone not getting tenure, or leaving for another job, can mean losing the line forever, not to mention the damage that bad citizens can cause to students.
I mean to be offering up this concern in a spirit of charity with the point of the OP. The Doors second album is my favorite one, and “People are strange” was my favorite song long before Echo and the Bunnymen covered it.
LikeLike
I think it depends on what you mean by ‘stranger’ here. We’re not calling for hiring people who are complete unknowns—I’m frankly not sure how what we wrote lends itself to that interpretation. But with that clarification in place, let me also say that there are tons of people who can do the things you mention (or learn to do them with proper support over the course of a career), and many who can do them very well; but not all of those people are going to folks that are easy to ‘get to know’ at a deep level for everyone or even most members of a lot of current philosophy departments.
And in fact, it’s far too often the case that people who are ‘other’ in some important sense and also good quickly come to be resented, viewed with suspicion, or forced out of their jobs. If they’re not ‘one of the guys,’ then the fact that they may be telling their students different things than you would, or prompting students to ask questions that may also be popping up in other people’s classes, etc. can quickly lead to non-renwed contract, denial of tenure, etc. I’ve seen this happen. I’ve seen it happen to people with off the charts teaching evals and whole departments full of students who love them, but who freak out some or all of their colleagues–or worse, have the temerity to disagree with them.
The fact of the matter is that figuring out who’s a competent teacher and a qualified researcher doesn’t require being ‘close’ at any level. Not being threatened by people who are good may require that, but that’s a very different thing.
LikeLike
For what it’s worth, I think you’re at least somewhat misrepresenting the “tone” comment. In that thread, Leiter had replied perfectly politely to some comment, though disagreeing on the merits of the claims made. I assume that’s still okay to do. Drabek, who apparently has some personal beef with Leiter that I neither know about nor car about, replied by saying, something like “keep up the good work, champ.” It was in response to that content-free rhetorical move that Leiter made the “tone” comment. Things obviously went down hill rapidly from there, in a way no one can be happy about, but I think it’s clear that the “tone” comment wasn’t meant to be any sort of authoritative remark on proper collegiality or in some way an attempt to keep outsiders out or the like.
I’m also not quite sure if you’re attributing to Leiter the idea that the recent “increasingly ugly cyber dynamics” are “uglier” than cases of sexual harassment, but if so, that seems to me to be completely unsupported, and something I’m fairly sure he disagrees with. Perhaps it’s just less than ideally worded passage, but there’s an implication there that I think is unsupported and unfortunate.
Anyway, I hope, too, that we can avoid getting sidetracked into discussions of codes of behavior or standards of collegiality. I’d much rather we debate the merits of various claims. That’s been very hard to do, but I hope we’ll move more towards it.
LikeLike
Yes, I agree with Matt. Leiter did respond calmly to every post on that thread until Drabek called him “champ.” It was at that point that Leiter asked him to “revise his tone.” I am a little concerned about some of these posts. I am aware of this morning’s post on FP, stating that there is no witch hunt going on in philosophy right now. But I think we should attempt to be professional about these issues and not call out people unnecessarily. As I tell my grad students, a devastating objection presented super-calmly is much more forceful than one presented in an aggressive tone. This applies to all of these issues as well. I think we need to present our arguments like professional philosophers.
LikeLike
Just to add to the previous two posts, I suspect that Leiter would agree with the abstract argument in the original post, but take issues with the specific examples used. FP, for instance does do a lot of “tone regulation,” for better or worse (this is not to say that I either agree or disagree with their decision to do so). So the argument could as well be turned against who I suspect are not the original targets of this post.
LikeLike
Shades of Leiter, Brian, The Circumstances of Civility (April 6, 2011). CIVILITY AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, Washington State University Press, 2011; U of Chicago, Public Law Working Paper No. 351. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1804544. Putnam has said that the discipline of philosophy has changed for the worse, at least since the death of Morgenbesser. Do you agree?
LikeLike
Just to second Matt and Berit’s points about context. (The actual Matt Drabek quote to which Leiter was responding was “Looks pretty clear to me, champ.” Drabek goes on to note “My tone was certainly negative, and normally I don’t use a tone like that. The tone results from some wrongs I believe Brian Leiter has done against me on his own blog. But those issues aren’t relevant here. I won’t be using a tone that negative in the future, but I don’t apologize for using it above. That’s all I’ve got to say about that.”)
LikeLike
I, like Berit and Matt above, did not share the same read on the situation; if anyone sees fit to call me ‘champ,’ I reserve the right to tell them to stick it where the sun don’t shine (and asking them to change their tone would be the most polite possible version of that exchange).
Perhaps on the same note, I find the discussion of civility here (and elsewhere when ‘tone police’ arguments come up) very alien. It may just be that I’m having trouble wrapping my head around the meaning of the terms as intended. To me, when I think of civility I think of something in the vicinity of a package of certain norms of respect and reciprocity–speak to people in ways that express a conception of them as equals. But then it’s hard for me to understand how that’s a bad thing, or, more strongly, why it’s not okay to reprimand someone for failing to speak in that way. I mean, surely we’re allowed to call out bullies. After all, that seems to be what’s going on in this very post. So I’m really just not sure I understand the target notions.
LikeLike
This is more about the comment section fracas than the post above–I don’t understand the whole thing about “The Tone Argument,” as if “tone” is a magic word that automatically constitutes a fallacy. If someone had called a woman “girly” or “firecracker” or something (or whatever the equivalent of “champ” would be), it would be immediately recognized as sexist and condescending. I don’t see why Leiter gets his head chewed off for having the temerity to use the word “tone” when someone condescendingly calls him “champ.” It seems an unfortunate example to pin the above post on, which seems to make some legitimate points otherwise.
LikeLike
For me, Leiter’s The Circumstances of Civility characterizes the political situation in which one is not obligated to be civil. The so-called Tone Argument has little, if anything, to add to Leiter’s analysis. Seizing on Leiter’s appropriate comment was an exercise in illegitimate power.
LikeLike
I agree with nearly everything you write here, but I still fear that we are talking past one another.
I didn’t mean to impute to you the view that we have to randomly hire people. The point I was trying to state is that there is a lot of epistemic uncertainty in hiring and as a result it is inevitable that people use imperfect heuristics. One of these is going to be how civil one might project the person being in normal circumstances. A really uncivil colleague can increase your service work load exponentially (since no one else wants to work with the uncivil person, they end up getting out of a lot of service) and cause constant problems with students.
I write this in full agreement that “collegiality” and such notions are constantly abused by those in power. I don’t know what the answer is.
I’m also uncomfortable with saying that this is analogous to neighborhoods. I’ve lived in a lot of poor neighborhoods and most of the poor people in those neighborhoods are victimized by the incivility of other people in the neighborhoods. It’s extraordinarily exhausting when you have kids to have really loud, often intoxicated or high, sometimes violent people hanging out in front yards or in the street at 3:00 AM on work nights. Poor people trying to raise kids well face toxic and life shortening amounts of stress in part as a result of this.
Of course we live in a political environment where these kinds of facts are used to get poor white voters to vote for their own exploitation. The incivility of some poor people becomes an excuse to blame poverty on the poor (even if yourself are poor). But this doesn’t mean that incivility is O.K. If it weren’t such a bad thing, it wouldn’t work so well in that kind of political discourse.
LikeLike
“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.”
Maybe I am missing something here. How did Leiter “throw around his institutional weight and influence”? What did he say that “employed the age-old rhetorical strategy of discounting women’s voices by appealing to female hysteria”? Finally, when I google Brian Leiter and “lynch mobs” I do not find any place where he used that phrase. In fact, the top hits are to a post on FP and your own post.
LikeLike
This was a fascinating post and I’m trying to decide what I think. I definitely get the ways that the norm of civility can be abused, leading to exclusion, discrimination, and reinforcement of privilege. Some of that is going on in the comments. Leiter trivializes the position of the student protestors by attributing a silly universal rule to them. Drabek says that is unreasonable. Leiter denies doing so, saying Drabek falsely quoted him. Drabek produces the quote saying exactly what he attributed to Leiter and uses the “champ” word. Leiter acknowledges the quote, says it doesn’t matter, and objects to tone.
Now multiple defenders think this was a legitimate case of tone policing, with one of them finding the term ‘champ’ to be plausibly equivalent to calling a woman ‘girly’. But none of these defenders – and certainly not Leiter – have seen fit to find a tone issue with ‘vigilante justice’ being used to describe a silent nonviolent protest – hiding instead behind literalism. Yep, I get the function of that. (I feel bad that I’ve now contributed to the hijacking of this thread – intentional or not – into a discussion of the particular case of Leiter’s behavior. I thought that this needed to be said, but in an effort to stay on topic, I’ll ignore any refutations of what I say in this part and respond only to responses to what I say below.)
But for all this, I can’t help but think that there is a legitimate defeasible – that is non-universal, but for that non-trivial – norm of “not being an asshole”. I think back to activist groups I’ve worked with. One, one of the most effective given its resources of any group I know of, was multi-racial, many gendered, many sexualities, disabled and not, and class diverse. It had lifelong poor refugee queer women, and straight white middle class men. ANd we disagreed at times over really important stuff. But our discussions always were carried out with a sense of caring, love even, certainly concern for each other’s feelings. I recall other groups who did not at all embody this, and most fell apart because of it. I’ve seen the same with philosophy dept’s – some disagree productively, others are toxic. Similarly, as someone above pointed out, femphil does police discourse style quite actively. And others have argued that the combattive and obnoxious tone of so much philosophical discourse is itself a cause of exclusion. (there has been a lot of discussion in activist circles lately about the toxic nature of habitual “calling out” culture, with many working on developing a notion of “calling in” – the point is that whatever other problems there are, there is widespread understanding that the way we talk to one another can all by itself destroy our ability to do things.)
So it is hard for me not to think there is some norm – again, defeasible, maybe merely aspirational – in the ballpark of a tone norm that we ought to respect. I think some of y’all’s comments at the end suggest that you agree. So first, do you? And second, if so, could you say something about how to articulate it, or how to flesh out the difference beyond the narrow “don’t abuse the norm for exclusion” point?
LikeLike
I think there are several ideas worth thinking about in this post, in particular the idea that norms of “collegiality” serve an exclusionary function. I also think Brian Leiter behaved wrongly on the FP thread, and that he owes Rachel McKinnon a public apology for the post he put up and then took down on his blog calling her “unhinged” and “crazy”.
But I’m having a hard time seeing the plausibility of attributing to Brian Leiter an excessive or inappropriate concern for norms of “collegiality”. His contributions to the recent discussion have not been explicitly rationalized by an appeal to such norms. Is the idea that you think they are somehow explained by tacit acceptance of those norms? I don’t know, I just am not seeing the link. As a couple of others have noted, the “please revise your tone” remark is, in context, rather difficult to interpret as anything other than a reaction to being addressed as “champ”; I hope we can agree that if there is such a thing as a rude “tone” that one has a right to take umbrage at, that’s an example of it. (This is consistent both with thinking that one can sometimes be warranted in being rude and that there’s a different and somewhat more menacing “tone” problem with some of Leiter’s own recent remarks.)
LikeLike
The term ‘vigilante justice’ is wrong and misleading for the reason that the protesting students by themselves did not and could not cancel Ludlow’s class: the administration chose to cancel it.
LikeLike
Just to clarify the spirit of my comment above: I don’t have any interest in getting into a debate about Brian Leiter. The internet just doesn’t need any more of that. But since his recent doings are the primary example in the post it’s hard to understand the points about collegiality except in light of those doings. I am inclined to think that norms of collegiality do more good than harm, and am supportive of both the petition for an APA code of conduct and the “family-friendly” language in the Boulder report. I’m very open to the idea that I should change my mind about some of that — but I’m not seeing how Brian Leiter’s recent behavior (which, as I said, I think has been bad) illustrates a reason to do so.
LikeLike
I’d like to address the claim that ‘revise your tone’ is not a problematic thing to tell an interlocutor. Telling someone to revise their tone is a way of demanding that your interlocutor participate in a politics of respectability,it is a way of controlling a conversation (as opposed to having a conversation), and a way of telling someone else to either become or try harder to maintain objectivity. There is not a straightforward sense in which any of these criteria ought to be met, especially when the conversation at hand is one ABOUT power and its exercise (by faculty or conversely by students). When you tell someone to revise their tone, what you’re actually saying is that there are not speaking in the manner you find acceptable and you refuse to participate in the conversation until they meet YOUR standards of how a conversation should be held. That isn’t having a conversation–that is an exercise of power.
LikeLike
Broadly speaking, it seems clear to me that in situations where academic issues are being discussed, civility does remove at least some distracting factors. On the other hand, blogging isn’t purely academic, so it is permissible to use emotionally charged language. Thus far, I agree with the direction of the original post.
Taking that position, shouldn’t one allow that there are moments when one tends to lose one’s cool? When one blogs with open comments, one gets a lot of abuse. It is sometimes difficult to keep one’s temper under control. And this is just as true for senior people with institutional clout as it is for junior people. Matt Drabek taunted Brian Leiter on the FP thread. Either he (Drabek) knew what he was doing and was triumphant when he got the reaction he did, or he was himself reacting hotly and got even hotter. Either way, yay for him. But it strikes me as self-refuting to come all moralistic about it. If you favour a little bit of pugilism, why should you bridle when somebody responds in kind? Surely a shouted “Moderate your tone” is fully in line with your send-up/put-down of collegiality.
Finally, this is not directly to your point, but I am sure it hasn’t escaped your attention that many of the sharper barbs in comment threads both here and on FP are anonymous. (Matt Drabek and Rachel McKinnon are courageous exceptions.) If a graduate student or an untenured academic decides to attack a senior philosopher, it is quite understandable why s/he would do so from behind a pseudonymous tag. But just because s/he is anonymous, she cannot be harmed by a furious riposte in the way a fully-in-view and vulnerable grad student can be. The pseudonym has made her or him personally invulnerable, and s/he is fair game.
LikeLike
I think we agree about the particular case, but re your general point that talk about tone is just exercising power, don’t we all insist that there are some conditions on how a conversation will be carried out – conditions such that if htey are not met we will withdraw? If I started spouting sexist insults at you here wouldn’t you not only quit talking to me at some point but be justified in doing so? That is, aren’t there such things as genuinely defensible norms of how we ought to talk to one another whatever the truth of our position? I think everyone tacitly believes that, and that the question is how to formulate this, or how to apply this, in a way that serves legitimate ends without reinforcing power and exclusion.
LikeLike
I think I am in general concurrence with Lance @19, but I would also like to go a bit farther and note that deliberate shows of disrespect and incivility can themselves be aggressive exercises of social power. Anyone who has ever been humiliated in front of an audience should get that. They can also serve a silencing role. If someone is sufficiently aggressively disrespectful with you it becomes almost impossible to actually talk about the thing you wanted: if you ignore their behavior, then you tacitly accept that it’s okay for them to talk to you that way (and potentially lose the respect of your audience) but if you confront it then you are hijacked into this other discussion about being respected that is itself often impossible to win. I mean, all these angles seem like precisely the sorts of things feminists and etc. have worried about in terms of confronting the particularly sexist forms of aggressive disrespect they run into.
So I think that the problem is not with standards of civility per se, but with understanding the right ones and applying them well.
LikeLike
I probably shouldn’t contribute to the hijacking of the OP, so this is the last thing I’ll say about Leiter’s tone policing.
FWIW- I think Leiter’s penchant for mentioning libel laws and defamation (which he did in the thread under consideration, once again ominously invoking the illiberal libel laws of other countries) actually is extraordinarily problematic. And I conjecture that Mark, Leigh, and Ed couldn’t help but to see the tone policing against Matt, Rachel, and others in that light. Maybe it’s mistaken, but I couldn’t help but do so.
For what it’s worth, the Communications Decency Act protects blog hosts from defamatory statements made by anonymous people, which might explain the relevance (for blog hosts who redact and close off comments, I have no idea what Leiter’s motivations are for saying things like this) of Leiter saying that within some period of time he’d have the identity of the anonymous person who’d insulted him.**
From my perspective as a blogger, overuse of mention of defamation/libel (especially with respect to foreign countries, where it’s not at all idle) does have a silencing effect on internet speech. You spend far more time moderating stuff, because if you have any moderating at all then all of the sudden people take you to be responsible for everything everyone says on one of your posts, and the angry e-mails can start to flow in. It’s far, far easier to close comments on anything sufficiently controversial (for that matter, it’s far easier to just post cute pictures of your cats). Note how many popular philosophy blogs are are militantly closing off comments now. We didn’t use to do that.
Let me note for the record that if anyone sends me an e-mail *in any way in reference to this I will not open it. If you disagree with what I’m saying, say so here (anonymity is fine) and know that I’m not going to write anything more about it.
[*On one example of the abuse invited by foreign countries’ illiberal libel laws, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_v_Penguin_Books_and_Lipstadt . Linguist Geoffrey Pullum wrote a much discussed piece decades ago showing how British libel law had led to censorship of linguistics books.
**To be clear, I find much of the anti-Brian Leiter stuff on the internet to be thoroughly obnoxious, and I can only imagine his frustration. There’s this weird thing with the internet now where public figures like Leiter for the first time in history have spontaneous public conversations with the hoi polloi. And there’s a weird thing where someone like Leiter can get so much internet fame, but not have enough cash for a decent publicist to help him navigate the crowd’s fickle affection. But our culture of celebrity in part works because the hoi polloi can make celebrities placeholders for their spleen (consider the sick shadenfreude while someone like Britney Spears or Courtney Love has a public breakdown). Humanity worked this stuff out before the internet in various suboptimal ways, but even those seem to me to have fallen apart. I see the OP’s meditation on tone policing in light of this too.]
LikeLike
That’s an excellent point, and I think you’ve got the pragmatics right.
The very first public question I received from the very first paper I ever presented at a public conference was from a pretty famous European logician (this was at the Czech Logica conference). The question was, “Well since only a fool would accept your premises, I don’t know what to say.”
I can deal with that sort of thing today with aplomb (“Good for you. Next question.”) but I was just out of graduate school, didn’t have a tenure track job, and at that time pathologically afraid of public speaking. I responded by trying to restate my main argument (since published in Synthese as well as Philosophy and Technology), but was so anxious that I made a hash of it. It was pretty humiliating.
My experience is that this kind of thing is far worse in continental Europe, where it’s much more acceptable for senior people to abuse junior people in exactly the way you describe (the norms are that junior people should be much more deferential, so senior people “putting them in their place” is accepted). I’ve seen people do it to their own students in public, and I’ve never seen that in the United States. But public rudeness by the powerful does work exactly the way you describe here as well.
LikeLike
anonladygrad @ 17:
I think it depends on the context. For sure it would be If I were visibly in charge of you: e.g., if I were Head of your Department and speaking to you. And in an intimate relationship, it could well be a way of trying to control a conversation, which might or might not work.
But in a thread like that, I take it as an angry response to a provocation. Not a “conversation” at all, if by that term you mean an exchange of views (however confrontational).
LikeLike
anonladygrad,
I suspect your argument is what many have had in mind when they object to “tone policing,” and I admit that like others on this thread I’ve been a bit unsure of exactly why policing tone is thought to be problematic, so your post helps give me a better sense.
However, while I share your worry about conversation taking the form of control, I’m not convinced that tone-policing applies. As you’ve presented it, it sounds like the ideal of conversation is one that exists outside any kind of power relation–as though I could seek to change someone’s mind or, even more modestly, seek for my interlocutor to understand my thoughts in the way I intend them, without in a broad sense exercising power, even attempting to control them (in the sense of their thoughts, their interpretation).
Leaving aside the impossibility of a power-free conversation , I don’t even see it as desirable. Why would I want to enter a conversation (or social relation, or encounter with an artwork or any experience) that cannot overpower me, transform me or my thoughts despite myself? Why would I want to be entirely independent of others’ power in such a way?
So, the solution to power inequality in a conversation is not to make an ideal of not exercising power but of balancing powers, of exercising our power in ways that don’t debilitate or demoralize others, that preserve the possibility of continued conversation.
And I don’t know how we do that except through at least some kind of “tone policing”–broadly, I don’t know how you have conversations (or games or societies) without rules, and rules without some kind of “enforcement.”
If we’re playing a game of chess, and I think you’ve broken the rule, even if I’m mistaken about the rules, what can I do but say I think you’re playing unfairly, while being willing to listen to you if you think I’m mistaken? Doesn’t this apply to objectivity or tone in the game of philosophical conversation as well?
LikeLike
I would like to second anonladygrad’s post and add that much of the discussion here seems to treat speakers as if they are all on a level playing field with respect to power (i.e., white supremacy, patriarchy, and, yeah, tenure). Making sure everyone follows some minimum standard just won’t cut it–it will, like all good liberal practices of colorblindness and genderblindness do–just reaffirm and reinforce existing relations of privilege and oppression. Or, more bluntly, in asking “How can I make sure not to be an asshole here?” you absolutely must account for your position in relation to privilege and power.
And, I also want to add that feminism has also recently had a big blow-up over tone policing and the issue of online “safe spaces.” Suey Park has a great critique of “safe spaces” in her essay in Model View Culture, here: http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/in-defense-of-twitter-feminism
Park argues, for example: “Only those with presumed safety in dominant society fear losing their privilege of comfort, along with possession and control over discourse in online spaces. People of color face real violence on the basis of their skin color. Black, brown, and gender non-conforming bodies even face police brutality, which shows that a lack of protection is normalized. In a world where whiteness means presumed innocence, safety, and entrance there is born a fear of anything contrary to unquestionable authority. The reaction white feminists are having to women of color feminists entering Twitter tends to problematize those who point out racism rather than question the integrity of the framework being critiqued.”
So, perhaps a JUST philosophical culture will feel very, very “uncollegial” to its most mainstream practitioners, insofar as their taken-for-granted privileges are disrupted?
Finally, thanks Leigh & Ed SO MUCH for this post–it was so necessary and much appreciated.
LikeLike
I appreciate all the thoughtful replies (Yan, Mark, and Mohan). I’m certainly with you that I am unsure in this circumstance whether BL was actually tone policing (despite in fact objecting to someone’s tone). I just wanted to clarify why tone policing is a problematic thing (which many on this thread didn’t seem to see). As far as I can tell, at least with regard to Mark’s suggestion that I would be right to leave a conversation in which an interlocutor started spouting sexist slurs at me, is that this is in line with what the spirit (if not the letter) of my point: which is that conversations in which one individual sees fit to exercise power over the other in a manner intended to end the conversation rather than participate in it is incompatible with an actual conversation (for that reason, maybe what was going on over at FP was, as I’m inclined to believe, a series of exercises of power and not a conversation). To that end, in the original thread, perhaps the actual point of criticism is to say that one need not participate in a conversation in which another makes diminutive remarks toward the other, so a more apt remark would have been “Don’t call me “Champ”” rather than ‘revise your tone’. This isn’t actually about tone at all–rather it’s about what kind of exercises of power are or are not compatible with a conversation (even one about a disagreement).
Certainly we cannot have conversations in which power is completely absent (I think you’re right about this, Yan, we’re embodied and embedded in social relations and social hierarchies). That said, we should use our power to fight against problematic social norms, to ensure safe spaces for conversations concerning the vulnerable, including the expressions of anger and resentment that oppressed people often make (especially if it is the vulnerable or oppressed who want to have that conversation), rather than using it to merely reinforce one’s own high social status.
LikeLike
I feel like the lesson is: don’t punch down. That’s both a strategic and moral claim (it’s strategic because it’s moral.) But it means our norms should incorporate the basic fact of status and material inequalities. That is: it’s probably acceptable to attack the pre-eminent ranker of all of our work and educations, because he is in a position of power and prestige that renders him basically invulnerable. So attacks on him are irrelevant to his status unless they become widespread enough to have institutional effects, which they are unlikely to do. Yet when he responds in kind, it’s pretty obvious that he has misunderstood his own power which will have institutional effects (I think he does this quite often) and that he is acting inappropriately.
So I propose an asymmetric set of norms. It’s (generally speaking and defeasibly) acceptable for those with less power to demand civility from those with more power, while it’s weird and exclusive for those with more power to demand civility from those with less: in other words, those with less power should have access to civility norms to demand respect that the power relation excludes them from. Those with more power can and should use civility demands to protect other vulnerable people, but they should not use civility norms to preserve their own power. When they do the latter they err: both strategically, by acting vulnerable and resentful at what appear to be minor harms, and morally, by hurting those who are in fact more vulnerable.
The weapons of the weak do and should include vitriol, impersonal reasoned argument, snark, and civility-demands as needed. The powerful should restrict themselves to impersonal reasoned argument. When the powerful don’t so-restrict themselves, I think it is reasonable and effective to point out that their insecurity is showing and that they are abusing their power to protect their personal pride and not professional reputation. (For instance, a statement is only libel if it harms one’s reputation. An attack on one’s reputation that no one takes seriously has no damages.)
All this assumes that norms can bind us asymmetrically (I think it’s obvious they can) and that the powerful who pay lip service to equality and protection of the vulnerable might be motivated uniliterally disarm (I’m hopeful that they’d do it for strategic reasons even if the moral ones don’t persuade them.)
LikeLike
anonladygrad:
Thanks – i find this clarification very helpful. I do think the problematic thing is the use of power in ways that are contrary to the reasonable conversation. Of course in practice it is hard to sort this out, but then so is everything. And then you point, if I get it right, is that both shitty tone – the sort of dismissive nastiness that r (20) so rightly mentions – and demands to monitor tone can be cases of this. One can assert unreasonable power both by policing tone and by engaging in nasty tone.
Joshua: I don’t think it can be so simple for two reasons: first, power doesn’t – as you know – resolve out into a simple linear directionality as if we can all be ranked in terms of more or less total power. So one is typically punching both up and down in different ways at a given time. Someone might have some obvious dimensions of privilege and at the same time lots of non-obvious dimensions of non-privilege. (Here’s an example: I have a friend who has very serious PTSD from very serious abuse. Certain kinds of aggressiveness are really harmful to this person. No one could see this just by looking but it is dreadfully important to having a rational conversation with this person.) Second, even if we are in all respects and unambiguously “punching up” isn’t there still a defeasible norm of not punching? Insofar as someone is trying to engage openly and constructively, isn’t it bad to turn things nasty? (I take it this is part of Jon C’s point.) So while I certainly agree with Robin that we have to always try to be attentive to as many aspects of institutional power as we can, never pretending that we are all equal in this, I don’t think it gets sorted simply by accepting that punching up is ok and down not.
LikeLike
Thanks, Leigh and Ed for a very provocative post about the problems of collegiality and civility. I can’t reply in detail here, but I would like to note that one of the important patterns of hierarchical organizations is that, to put it bluntly, people kiss up and kick down.
LikeLike
To Mark @19: I think my comment (and the comments it was seconding) was narrowly factual: the OP seemed (I don’t doubt unintentionally) to misrepresent the sequencing of events by conflating the targets of various remarks; in particular, the legitimacy or otherwise of Leiter’s language in describing a protest in a given way doesn’t seem narrowly factual in that sense. I’m not sure what “hiding behind literalism” means here. I do have a (defeasible) policy of keeping out of these discussions except where I think there’s some narrow clarificatory point that could be helpfully made; perhaps the thought is that that’s inappropriate, but the alternative is probably my abjuring the philosophy blogosphere entirely… but I’ll avoid stressing the point further given your self-denying ordinance not to reply!
LikeLike
I guess I don’t see the default assumption of “don’t punch.” I mean, I certainly see it when we’re talking about real punching, but rhetorical punching? Why not? Since the power relations in general lend themselves to a whole hierarchy of getting punched (rhetorically) in the face all the time if you’re junior, I guess pointing to the explicit comments that punch up as some kind of failure seems to assume a default not punching but cover over the way the structure is always already punching down.
I think the point about power not really being linear is an interesting and complicating one, and I’d want to point to intersectionality as well as the way that communities of esteem sometimes intermesh and sometimes incommensurably exclude. (So being SPEP-famous might make you APA-nobody, for instance, but SAAP and APA esteem seem pretty compatible, and joining the American Political Science Association tends to make people think you don’t belong in philosophy anymore.) But can we can agree that the author of the Leiter Report has more power than most of us?
LikeLike
“Don’t punch down.” I think that is at the heart of why I chose to focus on Leiter’s comment and not Drabek’s when I chose to weigh in. I think I did a not great job of articulating my reasoning on the original FP post. I did consider whether I was being unfair in not calling out Drabek specifically too, but I made the judgement in that moment that there seems to be more (for lack of a better word) power behind Leiter using the imperative with someone–even if book-ended with polite terms–than with Drabek’s straight-forward taunt. I think it’s valid for people to think I made the wrong call, but I still stand by it, especially since I then received an infamous Leiter email where he was not “impolite” per say, but he used no address and he told me, “You, however, have no business even implying that I am not acting like an adult.” That struck me as a problematic thing for a senior professor to say to a graduate student, in a way similar as to I found his tone comment on the FP post problematic.
Thus, I think “less punching down” might be a more important principle to focus on than “no punching” overall in our conversations.
LikeLike
I really don’t see how, given how many times both in this thread and elsewhere I have explicitly talked about the implicit and explicit punching down, that you can say my endorsing a default “don’t punch” norm is covering that up. It just isn’t. As for your “Why not?” re the rhetorical punching, I already gave my reasons.
Can we all agree that Leiter has more power than most of us? I don’t think that is a useful summary of a complex situation.
LikeLike
A propos of the “collegiality” idea: much of this reminds me of the attempt on the part of many universities in the ’90’s to add collegiality as a fourth criterion of faculty tenure/promotion/evaluation, alongside the traditional three of research, teaching, and service. The AAUP came out against it, for what I still think are good reasons. You can see its views on the issue here:
http://www.aaup.org/search/node/collegiality
LikeLike
Yes, don’t punch down is certainly a much clearer explication of what I was trying (albeit maybe not very well) to get at with my clarification.
LikeLike
I’d like to register agreement with what anonladygrad says here in post 26. As for whether or not Leiter’s statement to me was a case of tone policing, that’s a more complicated story than maybe we can even cover here. The fact of the matter, as I said in post 11 on the femphil thread, is that the spat between myself and Leiter did not start on the femphil thread. It started with a post Leiter made about me on his own blog, a post that I believe was irresponsible and made outlandish legal claims. Leiter also mentions (but misrepresents) this dispute in post 12. This complicates the issue of whether Leiter was tone policing. Insofar as Leiter’s original post, and his response to me, function to shut down criticism of either himself or philosophers who have been found by their universities to have sexually harassed, then it’s clearly tone policing. But I take it that this might be in dispute here.
As for not “punching down,” I think it’s probably a good thing to avoid, ceteris paribus. But even I probably wouldn’t support any kind of blanket prohibition here. If my “champ” comment had come from nowhere, out of the void, rather than from anger at Leiter’s posts about sexual harassment and posts about myself, then a certain amount of “punching down” might have been fine.
LikeLike
I don’t think you’re covering it up. I think the norm does the covering, as do the people who demand civility when they are attacked while attacking in more subtle ways (and I would include Leiter in that group. I’m much warmer to him as an ally that Ed and Leigh, but I think he does this down-punching thing with some regularity.)
The reasons you’ve given for the “no punching” norm is that you know a person who doesn’t like aggressiveness and we should respond charitably to people acting charitably.
So: if I’m speaking to your friend who doesn’t like aggressiveness, will he get agressive with me? Will he also inform me of his history so that I have a reason to avoid responding in kind? Or is the first point linked to the second point: your friend doesn’t like aggressiveness, is charitable to a fault, but the conversation will shut down if anyone else gets aggressive?
I think it’s fair to say that someone who goes out of his way to avoid aggressive behavior has a right to expect “no punching.” I only know a few philosophers who would qualify for that status, however. The rest of us (including me) have our aggressive moments, and don’t have this kind of defense available.
Earlier in the thread you talked about effective organizing, and I do think that those with whom we share projects deserve a heightened respect and non-aggressiveness. I’m just not always sure that blog commenting on the culture of professional philosophy is project-sharing in the relevant sense. I find that I feel quite warmly to some senior philosophers who are pugilistic in their approach BECAUSE we are collaborators. I’m not sure why the non-collaborating and aggressive senior philosophers should receive the same treatment.
LikeLike
Hi Matt! Right, the problem with assessing what was actually going with that exchange is, as you claim, the massive background (outside the thread). I don’t necessarily disagree that what BL was doing was an attempt to ‘end’ the exchange between the two of you. I think we actually agree that it is unclear whether or not he was tone policing (as I said in my comment). I also agree that tone policing isn’t the only way to end a conversation which one thinks is threatening to ones own (high) social status.
Obviously, he committed far greater wrongs in that thread than what amounts to telling you not to call him champ. Even if his having told you not to call him champ IS an attempt to make it more difficult to be a good ally to women in the profession. In this instance, his claim to being treated ‘as an equal conversation partner’ or something along those line is clearly something he refuses to reciprocate in doing. Making the initial claim problematic. (as these things tend to be)
This is, again, I think his attempt to maintain the control over the conversation and how conversations about sexual harassment proceed (namely, by attempting to discredit, or being outright hostile to, many of the (junior) women and their supporters on the thread).
I also don’t think nastyness from below is something to be avoided. People being justifiably angry at their treatment, and expressing that anger, is (in my mind) distinct from both tone policing and nastyness from above.
My real point of interjecting in this thread was to point out what tone policing is doing, and why it is a bad thing. I’m still agnostic on whether leiter was tone policing you (given that he could have been doing some other bad thing, and likely was).
LikeLike
This comment is based on my (mis)reading of Matt’s original comment in which I thought he was registering a disagreement…which he was not. So, sorry to repeat myself!
LikeLike
I think you’ve been very clear. My comment was composed and sent before I saw yours, that’s all!
LikeLike
I just want to chime in and add my thanks as well for this post. Like Ed, I have seen collegiality standards used as a tool to drum diverse practitioners of philosophy out of the profession, for trying to change the environment in philosophy, for themselves and for others. It seems to me that the use of such standards as an alibi for continued or intensified exclusion follows from the expectation that certain people get to control the terms of what it means to be an ally to women in the profession, and what it means to be a philosopher, ultimately. Folks don’t like having that fundamental power challenged. This is how BL can shift so easily to tone policing – when caught in a lie, it seems important to remember – and why he can so cleanly separate sexism from the Ludlow case, or claim that the charge of sexism in this case is ridiculous, as he did elsewhere in the thread. I think it’s not too difficult on feminist grounds to see treating one’s undergraduates as your personal stock and then painting the woman you’ve abused as a liar as straight out of the misogyny play book, but I guess we disagree on the matter. But that’s the thing: he doesn’t get to set the terms of what being a ‘good ally’ looks like in this case, or of what being a philosopher looks like in any case. Those terms need to change, and that work has to be led from below, so to speak. If these suggested standards of ethics are a form of collegiality standards (I’m actually not entirely sure what they are), then I don’t see them helping, for all the reasons Leigh and Ed so brilliantly diagnose here. Most of all, because maybe we shouldn’t view our own comfort or sense of belonging in the profession as proof of our right to police its terms, all while claiming that it is the new kids who are waging uncollegial identity politics on us, when we’ve been such good allies to them.
LikeLike
One of my current projects is to argue against the concept of “allies” and the problems produced by “ally culture,” and instead replace it with cultivating active bystanders.
I just wish I myself didn’t become a case study in the risks of doing so.
LikeLike
sk,
I think fairness dicates that we all be much more careful about using factives in these contexts. As far as I can tell “treating one’s undergraduates as your personal stock and then painting the woman you’ve abused as a liar” in your comment is not supposed to be counterfactual, but in reference to the actual Ludlow case. This was alleged in a lawsuit and Ludlow denies it.
If you think that the things Ludlow admits to in his court filing are problematic, that’s fine. They are. But that should be carefully separated from the much more serious charges that are alleged.
Jon
LikeLike
FYI, in regard to what Ludlow affirms in the case, his university allows relationships between students and faculty.
http://www.northwestern.edu/womenscenter/issues-information/sexual-harassment/student-faculty-relationships.html
LikeLike
anonladygrad and Joshua A. Miller, and to some extent the OP, hit the nail on the head. All of this (the agonizing over the reactions to the Ludlow case and to the Colorado Site Report etc.) is really about power. Indeed, I don’t think philosophy has a sexaual harassment/sexism problem, it has a power imbalance problem of which one particularly vicious manifestation is the prevalence of sexual harassment/sexism.
Our society is already a responsibility-free oligarchy, which is becoming more and more entrenched by the day. One consequence of this is that the idea that power, authority, cannot be challenged is becoming increasingly common and explicit; and that any one who does needs to be punished.* This dynamic is being replicated in the academy (think the ever increasing concentration of power in university administrations and the agenda of corporatization they push; Jon Cogburn’s post on asessement is a brilliant example), and it seems especially in professional philosophy. This is due to our worship at the Altar of the Cult of Genius, that is the wide-spread belief amongst too many philosophers that they’re just so much smarter than everyone else, that philosophy is the Queen of the Sciences (even when it is merely an under-laborer for science), that since philosophers should be kings philosophers know best. Which is, hyperbolically, to say that we have an disciplinary culture of veneration for, and consequent obedience to, what we perceive as intellectual skill and insight. This is gives those who reach the pinacle of such regard, which we tend to equate with those who hold positions at well-ranked departments, an inordinate amount of disciplinary power (they set the fashion, they determine who is in and who is out, who is ‘smart’ and ‘has potential’ and who does not, etc.), which is only increased by their actual institutional power as allocators of resources and goods (admissions, jobs, letters of recommendation, fuding etc.). But our veneration for genius also exacerbates a sense of infallibility — one is prominent and powerful because one is smart — and consequent defensiveness when challenged; such a challenge is to question their judgement, their intellect, hence their power.** When you couple this aspect of our discipline with the growing culture of intolerance towards dissent you get a particularly bad case of concentration of power in the hands of senior philosophers married to a special obliviousness to the harms their actions can have (what nubile student wouldn’t be honored to be groped by a genius! I write this as a joke, but seriously I have met philosophers who think like this.)
Philosophy has a climate issue because we do not have disciplinary norms for calling out and correcting the bad behavior of the powerful. Indeed such an idea is to a great extent foreign to the self-conception of the discipline; our disciplinary norms tend toward obedience and deference to those higher up the genius pole. Brian Leiter’s behavior in the FP thread strikes me as a case in point. So far the focus in this thread has been on his reaction to being called ‘champ’ and his ‘moderate your tone’ reply, but the real pulling of rank and where discussion about appropriate tone should be focused is in his reply to Current Student. And what set him off there? Her calling him out on his concerns about due process and academic freedom as products of his position of power and privilege. His reaction indicates that he could not see how the NU sit-in could be construed as a protest*** of the responsibility-free culture the powerful enjoy****; as a protest against a system that seems to do more to protect those with power than those who are harmed by those in positions of power (this is not to make a judgment on whether Ludlow should have been punished more than he was, or to express an opinion on the merits of the case; it is to say that the NU sit-in action has an interpretation which is not readily available to those whose power is threatened by it). Leiter’s amazement that almost a majority of people thought the sit-in was legitimate just highlights the point: what to people in Leiter’s position looks like the “increasingly ugly cyber-dynamics of the sexual-harassment crisis in philosophy” is the damn of anger at the culture of abuse of power and the obliviousness (sometimes even callousness) to the harms caused by it finally breaking.
So indeed like Joshua Miller suggests, if you’re in power then moderate your tone, if your not in power tell them what you really think.
*A prominent example: Wikileaks and Julian Assange expose the murder of a journalist in Iraq, and they are branded as criminals, terrorists etc. Edward Snowden reveals, amongst other things, that the head of National Intelligence perjured himself before Congress and is branded a terrorist etc. My point is that this dynamic is becoming increasingly common in all facets of life.
**Which, by the way, is one reason why philosophical arguments (in some philosophical sub-cultures) can get so aggressive and vicious; unlike other disciplines that have disciplinary norms determining what counts as good work, and sound results, that are to some degree objective — a proof is either valid or not, an experiment well designed and run or not — philosophy has largely the perception of smartness and significance: the fight is so vicious because the stakes are so low).
***One has to note that given Leiter’s penchant for dumping on conservatives it is really quite ironic that his reaction to the NU sit-in (vigilantes!) is reminiscient of the rhetorical tactics used by conservatives, e.g. health-reform means death-panels, moderate financial reform is like Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
****As an adjunct if I did what Ludlow did (what he admitted to) I would be summarily fired on the student’s accusation alone. I know of fellow adjuncts who have been fired for lesser forms of harassment. Leiter’s worries about the freedom to teach and due process would carry more weight with me if he did more for the equitable treatment of those who do the bulk of university teaching.
LikeLike
To your last point (and to a lesser extent to some of Mark Lance’s comments in his exchange with Joshua Miller on this thread also, as I’ll try to make clear below) — I think that reasons for choosing to be anonymous or pseudonymous on the Internet is much more complex than simply a “decision to attack a senior philosopher.” (I understand that you are noting that many of the more pugnacious comments are anonymous not that all anonymous posts are pugnacious, but I don’t think you can isolate the sharper exchanges out from the broader dynamics I outline below). In fact, the reasons why students do so, and the far greater damage that “punching down” can do as opposed to “punching up,” speak to the very crux of the “tone problem” that Leigh and Ed are outlining.
In addition to being an academic discipline and a profession, philosophy is also a way to make a living, and I fear that it’s very difficult for more senior philosophers to fully appreciate a) just what a precarious way it is to make a living for many junior scholars and b) the extent to which that precariousness informs the way in which junior scholars are able to engage in discussions about the future of our discipline. In short, a great deal more is at stake materially for junior philosophers than for senior philosophers in heated conversations. In the OP, I take it that this informs (inter alia) Ed and Leigh’s last numbered item in their summary: “[civility standards] tend to reinforce or provide opportunities to reiterate the structures of privilege and exclusion already operating within the profession. ”
In a real material sense, what exactly does a fairly senior member of the profession lose or stand to lose when they are “punched” on the Internet [I’m remaining neutral as to whether or not “punching” is ever a good idea here]? Does anyone, for example, think that a tenured professor at say, Chicago, is going to lose his position (or even much ad revenue from, say, a popular blog) because he said a few very very stupid things and made a few extremely offensive comparisons (say, comparing the pushback he’s received to a “lynch mob?”) Speaking engagements? Conversely, what does a post-doc stand to lose if that same faculty member calls them out by name and calls them “unpleasant” or “unhinged?” (I’m going on memory and apologize if I got the “uns” a little wrong) on a part of the internet that bills itself as being a clearing house for news about the profession, that runs a very influential ranking system and, again, prides itself for being “connected” to the big players in the profession . What could a grad student stand to lose had they made the (perhaps courageous but strategically foolish) decision to use their real name when telling that same professor how demoralizing his “reportage” had been when they were then attacked — not just once because said senior professor “lost his temper” but again substantially later on his own blog?
Without making any judgment about how much “jostling” is appropriate in philosophy, can’t we at least agree that we ought to be mindful of the very real power differentials in place here, and mindful that the consequences outside of the blogosphere are asymmetrical also?
Now, when all of this conversation happens to take place in the context of extremely serious allegations against [different] senior philosophers, and when more junior members of the profession are entering into the conversation precisely to draw attention to the fact that, far from being isolated incidents best handled through “crisis mode” (to borrow again from the OP) but point to very real problems and barriers that philosophers from marginalized and underrepresented groups continue to face, the irony becomes bitter. Applying the tone-question evenly, ignoring these very real material differences simply papers over the inequities that are being pointed out.
We worry about the tone of civility when a senior faculty member is called “champ” in the comments section of one blog, but don’t worry about how hard it’s been for junior faculty members to even be heard. Students, in order to be heard about their very real concerns about a senior faculty member, have to stage sit-ins. We then wring our hands over the academic freedom of the professoriat, whilst managing to forget that a sit in is also covered by academic freedom, insofar as it is how students, who aren’t invited to the front of the room, can nonetheless be heard.
LikeLike
What do post-docs or grad students have to lose if they get into internet arguments with senior figures? Honestly, not that much. Without making any comment on the moral rights and wrongs of various ways of conversing, I do think people are greatly overestimating the extent to which these things matter for their careers. Hiring committees work independently, and are relatively narrow in their range of interests and assessment factors, and most senior people don’t even read the philosophy blogs.* By all means be careful not to piss off your graduate adviser, or the particular person in your own field who you want a reference from, or someone on the hiring committee of the particular school you’re applying to, but don’t worry about pissing off the supposed sinister figures who secretly run philosophy. At least in my experience, it doesn’t work that way.
* Note that Brian Leiter is quite visible here partly because he is one of the extremely few senior people in the field who post in the blogosphere with any degree of regularity. Try to count people with (say) full professorships at R1 universities, or the UK equivalent, who post; see if you get to double figures. I think people are in danger of confusing Leiter’s visibility with his power.
LikeLike
A number of people have pointed out that the claims about Leiter’s “revise your tone” comment in the OP are off. I find the claim that he was appealing to a concept of female hysteria even more outrageous. This is a very serious accusation, and should absolutely not be tossed around without strong evidence. To do so is both unfair to the target of the accusation and counterproductive to the cause of fighting sexism; the more unverifiable or disconfirmed accusations of this kind there are, the less weight the accusations will carry in the public mind.
The authors of the OP don’t indicate what in Leiter’s post they take to justify their allegation. I can only speculate that they have his use of the word “unhinged” in mind, as, of the things he said, this is the closest to being a synonym for “hysterical”. But to go from “he called her ‘unhinged’” to “he used the age-old rhetorical strategy of discounting women’s voices by appealing to female hysteria” doesn’t come close to cutting it. This is one of Leiter’s pet terms, and he typically uses it for radical right wingers. He says some other nasty things about McKinnon and the grad student, but the same point applies: he says nasty things about lots of people of both sexes (usually radical right wingers). There’s absolutely not enough to justify making the allegation of the female hysteria strategy. I find it shameful and unserious to toss such a serious allegation off so carelessly.
LikeLike
Suppose for the sake of argument that you’re right, and David Wallace (47) is wrong. Doesn’t that undermine the thrust of the OP? If uncivility would hurt grad students and early career philosophers, then attempts to impose tone norms are superfluous. Whether or not we adopt codes of conduct mandating civility, the vulnerable would still, if you’re right, have overwhelming reason not to be uncivil.
I realize you haven’t expressed disagreement about any of this.
But it’s worth mentioning the silliness of the idea that civility norms play any serious role in reinforcing inequities in academic philosophy. The OP authors certainly haven’t offered any evidence that it does so. The one bit of empirical evidence is Brian Leiter telling Matt Drabek to “revise his tone” in the midst of a blog post shitstorm. The idea that codes of conduct with collegiality clauses will force “outsiders” to cooperate with a sexist majority (or whatever is suppose to be wrong with the insiders) seems to me about as fantastical and as grounded in evidence as the Republicans’ voter fraud bogeyman.
LikeLike
This is a thought-provoking post, with equally thought-provoking comments. I agree with David Wallace that junior people are prone to overestimate the influence of a certain individual. However, I disagree with David Wallace to whatever extent he aims to suggest that said individual has no meaningful influence. The individual in question has considerable influence. With that in mind, I’d like to draw attention to something Stacey Grogen mentions in her comment (#32 above). She says: “I then received an infamous Leiter email where he was not “impolite” per say, but he used no address and he told me, “You, however, have no business even implying that I am not acting like an adult.” That struck me as a problematic thing for a senior professor to say to a graduate student.”
It strikes me a problematic also. Specifically, it strikes me as a performative contradiction. To email someone stating that they have no business implying that one is not acting like an adult is to not act like an adult. Adults, I would submit, do not typically send such emails in response to the (barest) implication that they are not acting like adults.
If this is the kind of thing that has been going on behind the scenes (as Stacey Grogen’s post implies), then perhaps it’s time it was confronted by other senior members of the community, and stopped.
LikeLike