Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, But Words?

In the past month, the Echo, WestConn's student newspaper, has run two very thorough and interesting pieces about WestConn's decision to terminate Rosalie Appel, a tenured professor of Art. (Jake Kara, "Professor Fired After Forty Years," The Echo (April 8, 2008))The Echo's article said that the termination, which was the culmination of a lengthy and failed process of remediation, might have been the result of two possible types of incidents. According to documents obtained by the Echo, the University claims that Professor Appel was fired because of her "verbal abuse" of employees on campus and her "unprofessional" lack of social skills which have led to "interpersonal conflicts." Professor Appel, according to the Echo, claims to have been fired for testifying against her department in a lawsuit filed by an applicant for a faculty position.

I do not know Professor Appel, nor do I know the circumstances around her termination, so it would be inappropriate for me to discuss them here. But this case does bring up an interesting hypothetical question: If tenure is supposed to protect the rights of faculty members to hold controversial opinions, should a faculty member be terminated for the manner in which those opinions are expressed, in the absence of any other dangerous or violent actions?

My answer is a qualified no.

The qualifications are hate speech and sexual harassment. No professor, or for that matter any student or administrator, should be afforded any protections to allow them to display nooses, burn crosses, or engage in any behavior that has the profound connotation of violence toward a minority group (whether based on race, gender, or sexual orientation), because this kind of speech, like Justice Holmes's famous "shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic," has such a narrowly tailored relationship to actual violence. A stand has to be made against this speech.

That being said, in other cases, the idea of "verbal abuse" strikes me as simply a way in the backdoor of censoring unpopular ideas. I think the argument that "it wasn't what you said, just the way you said it," is simply a way of distancing yourself from having to stand up and oppose an opinion. And I would think in this hypothetical case, universities trying to use "conduct" as a reason to fire someone are simply making an end run around the academic freedom of professors.

There is an easy litmus test to prove this point: if conduct (the manner in which words are said) is the issue, and not the content or argument behind those words, then it should follow that if the words were replaced with something that could would be agreeable or complementary to the person alleging "verbal abuse," that it would still be seen as verbal abuse. Hypothetically, then, imagine these two situations:

Situation One: A faculty member walks into the computing center, walks up very close to an employee, and screams belligerently at the top of her/his voice:

"You're a bunch of bums! My computer hasn't worked in years! You're so incompetent my three-month-old grandchild could do a better job than you! Go get a real job! $%##%@#%!"

Situation Two: A faculty member walks into the computing center, walks up very close to an employee, and screams belligerently at the top of her/his voice:

"You folks are wonderful!!! You are the gosh darn greatest group of computer geeks on the face of the earth! Bless you all!!"

As you can see, these two situations are not the same. I am willing to bet my bottom dollar that the second situation, while odd, would never get reported as a case of "verbal abuse," where the first one would. This means that such accusations of verbal abuse aren't really about conduct, but actually about the content and opinions of a statement--content that tenure is supposed to protect.

Some might argue here that I've missed the point--the problem is not the content but the way the content is phrased. They would argue that the thesis of situation one, put in a gentler way, would be acceptable.

But here this "gentleness" is just a smokescreen for the social control of ideas. This "gentleness," in the form of active listening, is taught by communications experts and psychologists as a constructive means of communication. We are all supposed to say "I acknowledge you when you say x", "I hear you when you say y," and "I feel this," "I feel that." But all this does is reward an evasive discussion style that will privilege and empower only those people who are expert in manipulating this form of communication. I think ultimately that this psychologically "right" form of communication is just a form of disingenuous dishonesty. In the case of Professor Appel, according to the Echo, the university recommended psychological counseling to have better verbal skills. But the purpose of such communications skills is the maintenance of a societal norm of communication behavior. Psychology privileges the idea that communication be rational and sensitive, but then defines for itself what constitutes that rationality, thus constructing itself as a system of power (see Michel Foucault, Birth of the Clinic (New York: Routledge, 2003) for a more articulate explanation of this).

Policing the way that people say things to others automatically polices the content of that speech. Thus, in the hypothetical example of a professor who is terminated because his or her manner is considered to be offensive, what is really at issue will always be the content of his or her ideas. That's my opinion, anyway, even though I might well be wrong.