I expect the second, because the pattern is established. ‘Civility’ is nothing more than a code for ‘opinions not liked by authorities’.

Aside from the fact that he’s not, you are quite clearly judging professors by their (left-wing) political beliefs. Unless you’ve got some comments about (for example) John Yoo, who actually committed crimes.

The best of all possible worlds is in reach.

This, however, is an unfortunate choice of words:

“Without [academic freedom], you don’t have teachers: you have bureaucrats who are handing out certifications.”

Many of the “non-academic professionals, middle managers in private industry, civil servants, and others who see themselves as the social peers of professors” who constitute an audience that “public universities in particular simply can’t afford to lose outright” often have to face the argument that they are “mere” bureaucrats who simply fill in the numbers and hand out forms and credentials once all the triplicates have been filled out. Many people whom it’s easy to deride as “bureaucrats” are actually conscientious people with their own sense of professionalism who want to do right by the customers/patrons they serve and the institutional mission. I’ll add that that conscientiousness might be more obviously in evidence when it comes to the “professionals” and “middle managers,” but it can be found even further down, among the more clerical staff, some of whom may not have even gone to college but still are dedicated.

I realize I’m going off on a tangent here. But I do see a certain contempt in the way that some academics seem to talk about “bureaucrats” as the antithesis to intellectual life and the people without whom life would be so much more amenable to thoughtful living.

Here is Salaita, arguing that the oppresion of Palestinians is the result of the efforts of world Jewry to cultivate their “specialness”:

“In the past century, the Palestinians have been dispossessed of their land,
repressed in every facet of their civic and political life, and subjected to a 40-year military occupation that Desmond Tutu has described as worse than South African Apartheid (Paulson 2007). Others around the world have faced similar forms of oppression. What stands out in the case of Palestinians is the fact that
they are blamed inveterately for their own dispossession. Their oppressors, the Jews, not only have managed to cast themselves as victim in the Israel-Palestine conflict, they have justified that self-image through an assiduous emphasis on their specialness, which grants them access to exceptional privileges.”

And how do you cultivate that “specialness”? Well claiming to be victims of anti-Semitism is certainly one way to do so, and as Salaita says in Israel’s Dead Soul

“it is worth noting that numerous cases of anti-Semitic vandalism in 2007 and 2008 were found to actually have been committed by Jews.”

A claim that has many factual errors. (see for this for example)

So how does it reflect on the idea that the faculty should be left to govern themselves, that when they are given that latitude they elect to bestow tenure on avowed anti-Semites? It reflects either ignorance or acceptance, neither of which is acceptable. I would argue that’s why lay people are not really troubled that University administrators are increasingly injecting themselves into issues of governance. It’s because the faculty themselves have ceased to take seriously the ideals they claim; it’s because they themselves have “abandoned the post”

Interestingly, the other institution I can think of that, at least in some of its iterations, takes the protections of dissent pretty seriously is the Christian church. Obviously, this varies considerably by denominations (and, in fact, you could describe denominations in part by their governance structures, handling of disagreement/dissent by both clergy and lay members, and the theology underlying those practices), but, at least in my own mainline Protestant denomination, the question of how to civilly handle disagreement and dissent both between and within various groups — clergy, lay leaders, parishioners — is very much an active topic of conversation. At least in churches with governance structures that make it relatively difficult for any of the various participants to fire or excommunicate each other, or to leave the denomination while retaining the church property, these things have to be worked out, and a lot of energy is being expended right now in figuring out how. I’d like to see the same energy being expended in academia, but I fear the accumulated power imbalances are such that some participants (upper administrators and trustees) have little incentive to engage in such endeavors.

As to articulating preferences without managerial overkill, I love the stories of Jeff’s colleagues. In practice, sensible people create and manage these bigger and smaller interaction fields without a lot of fuss. So once we get the unsensible people relocated to the reservations, everything will be just peachy.