The Specter of Collegiality

A specter is haunting academe: the specter of collegiality. Everybody knows what it is not. Nobody knows what it is. So no powers—young or old, faculty or administrative—have entered into any sort of holy alliance in order to exorcize the specter. Perhaps in fact, some would maintain, it should not be exorcized. Instead, it ought to be made more manifest than it is, and more actively promoted or pursued. But how? Exactly why? And in either case, or in any case, in whose interests?

Suppose we begin by considering the following statement on the "Obligations of Collegiality," as initially drawn up by the Academic Council of Wesleyan University in 1980:

An academic community is a privileged arena for the free development and fearless exchange of ideas. Disagreements inevitably arise, but the way to resolve them is through persuasion by reasoned argument. Threats of violence or efforts to intimidate are not acceptable as forms of persuasion anywhere, lest of all within the University. We regard it, therefore, as a breach of collegiality for a faculty member either to engage personally in threatening behavior or to counsel others constituents in the University to exert undue pressure by insulting, intimidating, coercing, or threatening individual faculty on controversial issues.

This statement is typical of the discourse of collegiality by virtue of what it does not say as much as by what it does say. It does not say what collegiality is. The word is presumed to be understood, founda-tional, already in place. "Like any polite society," writes Philip Stewart in The Academic Handbook (1995), "the academy is held together in part by conventions of decency, honor and mutual obligation." He goes on to speak of "the mandates of civility" and "the kind of ethos we represent" (339). "Collegiality" is, in a sense, just another word for all these good things. And yet it is also a word that needs to be invoked when there is some doubt about the conventions that formerly made it unnecessary to invoke such a word in the first place.

In another sense "collegiality" is a most peculiar word, because, first of all, as the Wesleyan statement makes clear, it at once comprehends a "community" whose nature is academic and whose boundaries are local while it appropriates rhetorical authority from a larger society whose nature is not strictly academic and whose boundary is "anywhere." Compare the word, "consensus." As Raymond Williams has explained, its negative sense, especially as expressed in the term, "consensus politics," has evolved in the twentieth century not only to describe "deliberate evasion of basic conflicts of principle, but also a process in which certain issues are effectively excluded from political argument—not because there was actual agreement on them . . . but because in seeking for the 'middle ground' which parties could then compete to capture there was no room for issues not already important (because [others] were at some physical distance from normal everyday life—faraway or foreign, or because their effects were long-term, or because they affected only minorities)" (1976, 68-9).

"Collegiality" aims to occupy the same social space as "consensus," only with a more neutral connotation and without any unfortunate political dimension. If, on the other hand, a society is a society in part because not all of its "disagreements" are entirely rational or susceptible to "reasoned argument," collegiality sponsors a notion of a "community" where all conflict has been redefined a "controversy," and all controversy, in turn, is about "issues" whose very importance has already been agreed upon. Collegiality aims to accomplish the same evasive effect as consensus but without political work. Indeed, without a middle ground, which it is the burden of collegiality simultaneously to efface and reestablish in order to ward off alien or minority threats. The problem with such threats? They are simply not "collegial"!

No wonder, in contrast, why Raymond Williams concludes "consensus" is now "a very difficult word to use" (68). Its own middle ground remains too exposed, too contentious. Efforts to occupy this ground have been either too inert or disingenuous. In political terms, the word "collegiality" is the word "consensus" reborn without...