BY RESHMI DUTT-BALLERSTADT
We find ourselves living in a precarious space and time within our institutions where suddenly there has been a resurgence in appeals to civility codes (that perhaps started with Steven Salaita’s firing from University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, in August 2014 as a result of his tweets). Following the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the rise of the extreme right ideologies that have infiltrated within various institutions, there has been a shift to a different kind of civility code to accommodate the free speech rights. These civility codes require faculty and students to engage in “mutual respect” with vile and discriminatory ideas and ideologies being openly promoted on college campuses. We are being told that all ideas must be debated and any form of protest or disruptions against these vile ideas are seen as “uncivil.”
It is undeniable that the free speech as used by the extreme right, as they have forced their ways into various college and university campuses have proved to be downright racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic and Islamophobic among other things. In other words, the extreme right have co-opted free speech to promote hate speech, exclusions, and discriminations of the protected class— at the same time demanding that institutions make legitimate space for such promotions of exclusionary ideas.
Salaita wrote in his article “Why I Was Fired” that “Incivility is the only civilized response to barbarity.” Yet, post the election of Donald Trump as the US president in 2016, we are once again witnessing a rise of barbarity as white supremacy and ethno-nationalism and fascism have unleashed attacks on various minoritized subjects and groups by using college and university campuses as their recruiting grounds. Here faculty members are subjected to rebukes, surveillance and trolling by various right wing organizations like Turning Point USA (which hosts the Professor Watchlist). The Watchlist targets professors who teach or have protested various forms of white supremacy, white male privilege, intellectual racism, and others. Ted Thornhill, an African American sociologist teaches a course called “White Racism” at Florida Gulf Coast University and is named as the “Professor of the Month” for September 2018 on the Professor Watchlist. While the Watchlist is one such site rebuking faculty members for their social justice oriented teaching, remarks and research, sadly, many of our neoliberal institutions have caved into the pressures of the extreme right groups and their donors and have taken punitive measures against many faculty members for the extramural speeches and utterances instead of protecting their academic freedom of these faculty members.
When I wrote the article “When Free Speech Disrupts Diversity Initiatives: What We Value and What We Do Not,” for the Journal of Academic Freedom, I was well aware that both free speech and calls for civility have always been deeply embedded in forms of exclusions. What has often counted for civil behavior or who had access to free speech historically have also privileged the ruling class, the colonizers, the bourgeois, and males with a deep heteronormative sense of being in the world. Yet, Tobias Kelly and Sharika Thiranagama have reminded us in their article “Against Civility” that “being civil when facing gross injustice appears simply hypocritical and inauthentic. Advocating civility can place etiquette and manners above equality and justice, and the call for all of us to “get along” risks glossing over serious and important political divisions.” It is precisely these forms of “incivility” as forms of protest (and not physical violence) that various faculty and students across the country have used to object to promotions of exclusionary tactics.
While important political divisions on various institutions have indeed been glossed over, I have been consistently taken aback by the glossing over of weakening of various diversity initiatives (deliberate or not) on college and university campuses by repeated calls to broaden the definition of “diversity and inclusion” to include exclusionary ideologies as masked under “viewpoint diversity.” Viewpoint diversity, or what is also been called as “ideological diversity” is also present in the selection process in some academic journals or academic conferences. In September 2017, an article published in Third World Quarterly titled as “A Case for Colonialism” by Bruce Gilley received overwhelming condemnation from the global academic community demanding the retraction of the article. A petition signed by over 10,000 academics made it clear that “We do not call for the curtailing of the writer’s freedom of speech … Our goal is to raise academic publishing standards and integrity. We thereby call on the editorial team to retract the article and also to apologize for further brutalizing those who have suffered under colonialism.” Vijay Prasad, who served on the editorial board of the Third World Quarterly not only spoke out against the paper on social media but also said how the publication of Gilley’s article violated Third World Quarterly‘s postcolonial legacy.” On September 13, 2017 Prasad tweeted, “@thirdworldq was started as an intellectual venue for anti-colonial thought, to build ideas against colonialism.” At the heart of the debate was the question of academic freedom and its relationship to free speech. Joan Scott has reminded us over and over again that “free speech makes no distinction about quality; academic freedom does.”
It is this “quality” (or a lack thereof) that is precisely at stake here as this debate on free speech have led to both veiled and serious attacks by the right on various diversity initiatives. Weakening of diversity initiatives are bound to have serious repercussions on not just the rights of the protected class of students and faculty on college and university campuses, but a detrimental impact on curricula expansions and implementations using various social justice frameworks that were borne out of the civil rights and women’s rights movements in the 60s and early 70s. At a time when we are witnessing an erosion of rights –– immigrant, women, sexual minorities, disabilities, religious –– we cannot afford to not see through the smoke screen of how free speech and civility are being used to provoke and promote these erosions.
Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt is a professor of English and co-coordinates the gender studies program at Linfield College and holds the Edith Green Distinguished Professorship for 2018-19. She is the author of a scholarly monograph, The Postcolonial Citizen: An Intellectual Migrant (2010), and her forthcoming co-edited book of essays, Civility, Free Speech, and Academic Freedom in Higher Education: Faculty on the Margins, will be published in 2019.
The AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom publishes scholarship on academic freedom and on its relation to shared governance, tenure, and collective bargaining. The Journal is published online annually, and is supported by funding from the AAUP Foundation.
I agree with Dutt-Ballerstadt that “both free speech and calls for civility have always been deeply embedded in forms of exclusions.” I especially agree with her condemnation of the use of civility standards as a tool to silence progressive voices. It’s notable that she does not suggest imposing new civility standards to silence the right, and instead calls for a universal rejection of civility as an academic rule imposed on anyone.
I also agree that expanding diversity initiatives to include “intellectual diversity” is a bad idea. However, I can’t agree with Dutt-Ballerstadt’s proposals to limit free speech. We should protect free speech for the same good reasons Dutt-Ballerstadt argues that we should protect incivility, whether you think it helps the right or the left.
I think Dutt-Ballerstadt’s Journal of Academic Freedom essay is a deeply misguided and wrongheaded understanding of free speech. It’s particularly dangerous that Dutt-Ballerstadt imagines that a college “mission statements” should be used to censor offensive speech (“Free speech cannot and should not be divorced from the values and ‘mission statements’ that many institutions promote”), and I can’t see how this limited vision of free speech is compatible with the broad vision of free speech required to reject civility rules. Why isn’t civility regarded as a value that’s part of the mission statement of a university? Incivility is just a subset of free speech, and we ought to apply the same logic to both, to say that we must defend the right to have them, even if criticize how some people use them.
The point in my essay is not about free speech, or limiting free speech per se. Rather it is about the intersection that free speech shares or does not share with academic freedom. Most college mission statements honor one’s right to academic freedom as both a principle and a protection. Accordingly all speech is not protected under academic freedom. Joan Scott makes this quite clear in her JAF article, “On Free Speech and Academic Freedom” She cites Robert Post (legal scholar) making this distinction clear between freedom of speech and academic freedom . “[The]invocation of free speech has collapsed an important distinction between the First Amendment right of free speech that we all enjoy in some circumstances and the principle of academic freedom that refers to teachers and the knowledge they produce and convey. Post clarifies the distinction between the two. The First Amendment, he writes, consists of three core rules that apply to public discourse: (1) the state is prohibited from regulating speech; (2) the expression of all ideas is permitted (there is no such thing as a “false” idea); and (3) restraints on “the voluntary public expression of ideas” are prohibited. He points out that classic First Amendment doctrine “cannot apply to ‘speech as such,’” but only to what seeks to express or inform public opinion It is when we are acting as “sovereign agents of self-government” that we are protected by the First Amendment. Post insists, as well, that it is questionable whether the First Amendment applies to any speech at a university, since the education of students does not assume them to be such sovereign agents. Nor do professors have an unfettered right of free speech in the classroom.” Scott also points out that the “scope of academic freedom is not determined by First Amendment principles of freedom of speech, but by the metrics of professional competence. Professors are free to teach in ways that are regarded as professionally competent.” It is disciplinary associations that train and certify this competence, a form of expert knowledge we depend on for the advancement of knowledge in all fields.”
Also civility codes are neither established using any democratic process, nor do they adhere to any neutrality in terms of power structures here. Those in power within our neoliberal institutions implement civility codes. Also, what is civil or what is uncivil is defined by them too — and these distinctions are often arbitrary, and often unequal. Legal scholar Cheryl Harris has talked about this issue. Using a colonial framework, codes of civility were framed and imposed by the colonizers on the natives. Any native uprising (and all uprisings were not always violent) and natives questioning any colonial policies and exploitations were seen as uncivil. In recent times, when faculty members and even students have stood up against their administrators, they have often been deemed as being “uncivil” and civility codes have been imposed and punitive measures have been taken. So my point is that we must be cautious of such civility codes, especially if maintaining civility becomes a smokescreen to prevent critical, important and dissenting dialogues.
Thanks for the response. I haven’t seen a study of this, but I doubt that many colleges mention academic freedom in their mission statements (it would be a good idea to try to change that). So that’s why I fear that using mission statements to limit free speech on campus is especially dangerous.
I have very strong disagreements with Post on the First Amendment and academic freedom. The notion that the First Amendment only applies to political speech is an old conservative doctrine that I hope we consign to the trash heap of legal theory. The notion that students are not “sovereign actors” is shockingly similar to the theories that hypocrite colonialists like John Stuart Mill used to justify suppressing free speech in most of the world. And the use of this theory by Post to suggest that the First Amendment does not protect any speech on a college campus is a very scary extension of the Garcetti doctrine to everything at a university.
Academic freedom is a close cousin of free speech, and a part of the First Amendment, and not merely determined by professional competence. The most important part of academic freedom for the past half century has been extramural utterances, and the AAUP’s insistence that free speech rather than professional standards should apply to them. Post has admitted that his theory can’t really explain or defend extramural utterances, which is a devastating problem for a theory of academic freedom.
Finally, your critique of civility codes is quite correct, but I think it also applies to all speech codes, and if we do get rid of civility codes (which we should), administrators will simply use other terms (“unprofessional” or whatever) to punish people for incivility unless we have strong general protections for free speech on campus.
Administrators and those in positions of power already use the word “collegiality” or lack there of to take punitive measures on faculty who disagree with them, or have dissenting views. I have had to distribute AAUP’s definition of collegiality a few times to colleagues when they have expressed dissatisfaction with dissenting views as reasons to deny faculty tenure or promotions.
And yes, John Stuart Mill was no champion of civility. As a postcolonialist I know this quite well, especially his affiliation to the East India company and his support for their imperialistic missions.
I also do not think most administrators understand extramural speech protections that faculty members have. And even if they did, it appears that the pressures of the donors and the right wing trolls have had more of an impact on them than defending extramural speech of faculty members. Perhaps this is one more thing that needs to be included in mission statements
I also think faculty should take a very active role in revising their mission statements. Of course, private colleges and institutions are more bound by their mission statements and less bound by constitutional protections of free speech within the confines on their own college campuses.
Thanks for your comments.