Propriety, good structures, and justice -- thoughts on leadership in academia

In spite of its meritocratic aspirations, academia is not a just place. There is a striking disconnect between the ideals of academia - meritocracy and an emphasis on talent no matter where it comes from - and the reality. This includes prestige bias (in graduate admissions and hiring, see also my earlier paper here), an unwelcome climate for minorities such as trans people), ableism, sexual harassment and assault cases, and so on. 

What can we do to improve our departments, and particularly, our profession? In this post I'll focus on leadership in academia, but the post might well apply to other domains, such as the corporate private sector, any kind of sector that has problems in equal opportunity for employees, sexual harassment, and so on.  I'm going to explore two ideas from Chinese philosophy (both mainly from the Warring States period) that propose two different kinds of intervention, one is more focused on civility and change of culture, the other more on institutional and legal frameworks. 

The aim of both kinds of interventions should ideally be to promote both harmonious relationships and flourishing of members of the profession (not only of tenure-track professors but also, graduate students, adjuncts, etc), and to promote justice, particularly for people who are not in positions of power, such as graduate students, adjuncts, and members of various minorities.

Cultivating propriety

One way we could improve academic structures is to focus on propriety, or civility (li, 禮, in Confucian philosophy). Confucian philosophers such as Mengzi, and of course, Confucius (Kongzi) himself, thought that the best forms of leadership do not require an emphasis on external structure or on punishment and reward, but rather on the cultivation of the right attitudes within the self. If leaders lead by example, other people will follow suit. In Mengzi's view, all humans have the "sprouts" of moral goodness within themselves, and it is a matter of cultivation to render these into full-blown virtues (benevolence, justice, propriety, and wisdom).

For example, we have an untutored sense of compassion, which, properly cultivated, can grow into benevolence. Benevolence helps us to make reasonable adjustments for colleagues for work/life balance, to respond promptly and provide feedback to graduate students, etc.  It is acceptable, even inevitable, for Confucians to be graded in one's concerns for others. It's fine to be more concerned about your own graduate students than about someone else's, but ultimately, one's concern should extend to everyone. As Mengzi wrote, rather optimistically, "In general, having these four sprouts within oneself, if one knows to fill them all out, it will be like a fire starting up, a spring breaking through! If one can merely fill them out, they will be sufficient to care for all within the Four Seas” (2A7.3, 4, Van Norden translation). By contrast, if one fails to develop these virtues, then one isn't even able to care for one's own parents (a minimalistic duty according to Mengzi), or in the context of departments, to exert proper care for one's own (graduate) students. 

One of the Mengzian sprouts is civility or propriety (li, 禮). There is an enduring worry: calls for civility are often calls for disempowered minorities to shut up. For instance, as I wrote about this civility game promoted by the BBC, civility seems to be a demand for people who are already subject to racist abuse to not make their racist abusers uncomfortable by challenging their preconceptions.

However, perhaps in response to these lingering worries, Amy Olberding has recently argued that the Confucian demand for civility/propriety is primarily a demand for the self to be civil: 

Confucian advocacy is framed firmly in the first person: I should be civil. I should cultivate in myself the habits of emotion, mind, and conduct to make respectful and considerate engagement with others my steady norm. This is an approach to civility sorely missing from our popular discourse. Perhaps one reason for this is that my own failures of civility are so much less satisfying to consider than yours.

I think this approach dispels some of the worries for calls for civility, as civility becomes something one needs to personally strive for and not someone one can accuse one's (disempowered) interlocutors of, with demands such as "Please revise your tone!"  While, like Olberding, I am attracted to the idea of civility, and of virtuous conduct in general, I do not think that this entirely takes the problem away of civility policing. For one thing, suppose we each took it upon ourselves to try to be civil. People who notice that their demand for justice is not taken well might then feel compelled to self-police their speech, until they fall prey to what Kristie Dotson terms "epistemic smothering".  This occurs when a speaker realizes her audience is not able or unwilling to take up her testimony, and so she limits and self-censures her speech so that "the testimony contains only content for which one’s audience demonstrates testimonial competence”. 

To avoid this problem, one thing we can do, drawing further on Mengzian ethics, is to realize that civility is just one of the ingredients that make our interactions better. We need to exercise discernment to evaluate in any proper situation whether the demand for justice might outweigh the demand for civility (Mengzi himself gives the example of a situation where one would save one's sister-in-law from drowning even though it violates the ritual prohibition of physical contact between a man and his sister-in law, 4A17). 

Lots of our institutional interactions are steeped in propriety/civility so I think it is not possible, and not wise, to try to dispense with it. Our interactions in email exchanges, conferences, etc. are all formed by propriety, and it is irksome if someone violates such norms, e.g., someone at a conference who asks a very long question and then keeps on asking follow-ups, someone who addresses a female professor he's unfamiliar with as "Mrs" or even "Ms", knowing this is likely not her preferred title. Civility, particularly if focused on the self and not as a tool to condemn others (as Olberding recommends) can improve our interactions. If we become more mindful of what civility demands, particularly in our interactions with people who are in worse positions than us (intersectionally understood), this would be an improvement upon a mere mindless following of rules while punching down whenever one can get away with it. The main risk I see is that the call for civility would disempower already vulnerable people, but if one keeps in mind other goods such as justice, I think this risk can be mitigated. 

Instituting the proper structures

The legalist philosopher Han Feizi had the insight that most leaders, be they presidents or department chairs, are not exceptionally good or exceptionally bad. Most are somewhere in between. He thought that if we set up the right structures, with appropriate instruments for punishment and reward, we are more likely to achieve enduring good government in which people can flourish than if we relied on people's own virtuous conduct alone. The legalist insight applies today: if we do not have structures and appropriate instruments of punishment and reward, people particularly in positions of leadership would need to rely on their individual judgment in particular situations, and that judgment might fail. 

I was reminded of Han Feizi by reading this piece by Kristina Gerhman on the Searle case, in which she pleads for appropriate institutional structures to prevent situations like this from occurring ever again: 

[I spoke out] for a very specific reason, which is that I firmly believe that professors, administrators, and others in positions of power in academia are responsible for creating INSTITUTIONAL barriers to the kinds of predatory, undermining, and alienating behavior that John Searle’s undergraduate research assistants have been subjected to for years and years. We are supposed to be mentors and educators with firm and healthy boundaries even in our closest relationships with our students and mentees. And our mentoring and teaching relationships are supposed to be geared towards the intellectual and professional development and growth of our students/mentees. In philosophy, we by and large fail at that as a matter of institutional culture.

By creating institutional structures, in the form of not only protocols that help students and professors maintain healthy boundaries, but also in appropriate punishment/action if these protocols are violated, we would be able to prevent many egregious cases from happening. Legal and institutional structures are not a replacement of the cultivation of individual good behaviour, but provide a context in which some difficult decisions can be streamlined into a broader institutional context (e.g., how to report one is being sexually harassed/assaulted, and how to evaluate claims that this has occurred). 

Legalist philosophers were correct that the creation of these structures need to come with appropriate instruments for punishment/correction. In a recent interaction with other philosophers, the worry was voiced that such institutional structures would be (mis)used to retaliate. While I can see that this is a worry people might have, I still think it is preferable to have real instruments to help enforce structures rather than toothless best practice guides. Best practice guides can have value in helping people to get a grasp of what good forms of conduct are, but alone they cannot guard against systematic problems of oppression, harassment, and so on. This piece by Catherine MacKinnon on #metoo gives a solid overview of how both changes in culture and in legal structures (establishing the legal claim for sexual harassment in the 1970s) went hand in hand. 

Here, MacKinnon argues that legal change alone cannot effect cultural change: "Just because something is legally prohibited doesn’t mean it stops. Maybe exceptional acts do, but not pervasive structural practices. Equal pay has been the law for decades and still does not exist. Racial discrimination is nominally illegal in many ways but is still widely practiced against people of color, including in lethal forms." 

The take-home message then is to both focus on the kind of propriety, primarily in ourselves, that would make academia more harmonious and more just, and to also, in addition create structural instruments and barriers that make bad actions more difficult and less rewarding to perform. 

Comments

[Anon]

It seems like there should be a long list of answers to the question: "What are all the things that could possibly help address injustice in academia?". And I agree that promoting civility, in the limited sense of "civility" described in the OP, should be somewhere on that long list. I also think that this is a good question to ask and answer.

But I think some more urgent and important questions are ones like this one: "What one or two changes will do the most to address injustice in academia, and soon?" And I'm pretty skeptical that promoting civility will show up in the right answer to that question. (I don't think that you've argued for such a view, but I do get that sense from some of the academics that have recently been talking about civility.)

[A Philosopher]

Thanks for the reflections, Helen. I also agree that, if we're looking for a virtue to cultivate in the leaders of philosophy which will minimize injustice, civility isn't it. Perhaps I'm just being blind to it, but I haven't noticed a lack of civility among prominent philosophers and those at the top of the pecking order in departments. Perhaps the obvious example is aggressive questioning in Q&As, but overall these people usually approach interpersonal interactions in a dry, professional stance (lots of "Dear so-and-so's", etc) which involves no incivility. If anything, it seems to me that this adherence to civility allows a lot of people to skirt their duty to another virtue, empathy. We should be weary of too much civility not only because it's a tool to silence the oppressed, but because it offers cover for a lack of empathy. Empathy requires feelings, and feelings aren't dry and civil. Of course, the proper cultivation of civility, in this case, may mean learning to dial that civility back to make room for empathy. Whether or not too much civility is the cause or a cover, I do think cultivating empathy will have more of an effect on injustice. Someone who deeply empathizes with sexual assault victims or those unfairly losing professional opportunities due to prestige bias is likely to enact the sort of institutional rules needed to curb these problems.

[Amanda]

Civility is good, especially how described here. But when most people hear "civility" I think the regular language intuition is one can be civil while also being a jerk. So we might need another word that demands but also portrays the need for certain types of motivations in addition to actual words and displays.

[Helen De Cruz]

Anon: You're right that civility certainly doesn't seem like the first and more pressing way in which we can solve problems that beset academia - we need strong structures (e.g., unions) to help us do this. But yet the Confucians found civility of absolutely fundamental importance to understand how humans should interact with each other. One way one might understand this is to think that many of us, individually, cannot change the structures but we can change our own attitude and behavior.

Civility in the Confucian view are not sticking to empty formulas (this may alleviate some of the worries posed by A Philosopher above). They are also not there to merely entrench existing power relationships (though experts disagree in how far norms of civility have the power to disrupt, e.g., Michael Puett thinks they are disruptive and transformative, but I feel less optimistic especially if you read some of the rituals described by e.g., Xunzi which seem to merely reinforce status, age etc). In the Mengzian view, and also in Kongzi's view, civility by itself is not enough. You need to exert wisdom to see when it is better to prioritize civility or when you should rather go with empathy (see example above of saving one's sister-in-law, which violates civility but stems from a sense of compassion with the person in distress). Cultivating empathy would be important to address injustices in academia - it would be for instance a motivator for treating adjuncts better, or for being more considerate of healthcare needs of e.g., disabled colleagues, which civility by itself cannot provide. Eventually you can put a lot of this into norms of civility, but it takes a while for those norms to be accepted and widely used.

[A Philosopher]

I must admit I've never thought seriously about civility as a virtue. (It sounds like I'm missing out on a large literature about it.) I'm struggling to clearly articulate in my mind what civility comes to, beyond the sort of thin sense of civility which still allows for being a jerk or just involves forgoing aggressive ways of speaking. On the one hand I sort of give it. I can vaguely see how, given our deeply social nature and the importance of cooperative living, *being civil* is *somehow* really important for properly greasing the social and cooperative wheels of our lives. But as I try to articulate just why or how being civil is important, it seems like a mere enabling condition: maintaining social relations and securing cooperation requires that I "be civil" towards others (not a jerk, not hostile, etc), but it also seems like once you achieve a fairly low level of civility that its function will mostly have been achieved (and hence that civility isn't really a "virtue" to be cultivated, or at least, not one that's difficult to cultivate). It also seems like the sort of civility required for greasing social wheels mostly is just the thin trappings of a certain way of speaking; I have the intuition that when you get beyond those, you're venturing into more substantial virtues like justice and empathy.

Here is a thought: there are different ways to cut up the virtue pie. The Greeks treated justice much more nebulously than we do, including under it a lot of components that don't quite sound like justice to us and which I'd assign as other virtues. You know, it's the highest virtue that leads to all the others (presumably just because they've defined it to include them). Is something similar going on here with "civility" in this tradition? Are they treating it more nebulously, including under it components of other virtues (like empathy), as some kind of "master" virtue?

If I read enough Plato and Aristotle, I can get into the head space of speaking of "being just" in this grand way where it has connotations of the best sort of social creature who lives their social life as best as possible (and thus accrues all the benefits of it). I can get myself in the same space with the term "civil", although in neither case am I sure the concepts themselves, so construed, help me to actually know how to act. If you read either of these virtues as "master virtues", they don't seem to be very action-guiding anymore.