This Open Letter, which can be found at english.uchicago.edu/graduate , came up briefly for discussion in a cc thread from May, 2018. See talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/21570581#comment_21570581 at posts 7 and following. Nearly two years later it remains prominently displayed on the English Department website.
A trenchant critique of the Open Letter has recently been published: see How woke illiberalism is killing the academy - spiked . The author, Ben Schwarz, is a highly respected former literary and national editor of the Atlantic, but, more importantly for us here he is, he tells us in his piece, the father of a son accepted into the class of 2024 who had intended to major in English - until he read the Open Letter.
The Open Letter manages to be both sinister and platitudinous and too vague to apply in any practical way (all as analyzed in Schwarz’s excellent piece) except as sending a signal that, whatever may be the position of the University on free speech, in the English Department you had better watch what you say or there will be consequences. Schwarz’s son, who thinks of himself as a political liberal, was so turned off by this statement (which was signed by more than 40 English profs) that he no longer wants to major in English or even take courses in this department. Yet it is a department now ranked number one in the nation by USNews, higher than almost any other department of the University and far higher than the less formal rankings that existed fifty years ago when the department held giants like David Bevington, Norman Maclean, Ted Silverstein, Michael Murrin, Stuart Tave, Richard Stern and Edward Rosenheim. It’s a topsy-turvy world.
If the 40 profs felt the need to deliver themselves of these sentiments in response to a rather petty dust-up between one prof in another department and another prof in another university, that little tempest is long over and done with and the time long past in which any useful purpose could be served by the gratuitous weighing-in of the English Department. Now the Open Letter just stands guard in its prominent place over academic pieties that either do not need stating because they are so obvious or which signal obscure punishments for unspecified thought-crimes.
I write in sorrow as being myself once a student of English in the College and thereafter an M.A. I say to the English Department, tear down your Open Letter and devote your energies to teaching the damn courses with the same vigor and creativity in which your illustrious predecessors taught them. That is the only way to find and educate promising scholars such as young Mr. Schwarz.
Just sent this post along to a student who is looking into the English Language and Literature major.
In Autumn '99, the number of English majors stood at 162. 20 years later, despite a significantly larger College that now offers more curricular flexibility with plenty of opportunity to double or even triple major, the number stands at 138. English isn’t as popular a major anymore for several reasons - could the tendency for scholarship and inquiry to take a back seat to political correctness and groupthink be one of them?
The decrease could be due to people turned off by PC and groupthink or it could just be all those surveys that show English majors earn the lowest salaries of any surveyed major. In the past 20 years as the price of college continues to skyrocket, people are much more aware of the earnings potential of their chosen major and English is notorious for having low earnings potential.
^ Undoubtedly that’s a factor. It’s very possible that our current civilization simply overvalues scientific thought at the expense of humanistic. I do wonder what the earnings gap reveals about the quality of student who chooses to major in English. it’s possible, for instance, that they are perceived by employers to be less rigorous or critical thinkers than those who graduate with other majors. Also, haven’t English majors ALWAYS earned less than economists or engineers?
At Chicago it’s possible to be an English major and be on the premed track, or choose English as a 2nd major. Lots of options to study English language and lit, if you find the topic interesting. The numbers I quoted above are for totals, not just first majors. Also, I noticed from the Scorecard that history majors at Chicago come in just a little above English majors for earnings, and yet the number of history majors at the University of Chicago has also increased over time, suggesting that students still find the topic interesting and/or at least semi-useful upon graduation. So it’s not just about the earnings gap.
That Open Letter from a couple of years ago included untenured faculty at the time, which seems very controversial (I had checked on that). Were junior faculty compelled to sign, in order to stay in the good graces of their senior colleagues and not risk a firing? If so, that would seem to violate the principles of free speech at U of C.
I disagree pretty strongly with @marlowe1 's post and with the Schwarz piece.
I think the letter is an admirable statement of principles, especially in the context of the controversy to which it was addressed, which was explicitly about the organized White Supremacy movement and some extreme rhetoric directed at a young African-American professor.
Schwarz’s essay is full of deliberately sloppy reading, red herrings, and logical flaws. His objections to the piece boil down to four, none of which stands up to much scrutiny:
– The letter does not include an entire legal code specifying who gets to decide what speech “demeans, intimidates, or harms others,” what procedural protections are available to anyone accused of doing that, and what specific consequences flow from a determination that bad speech is occurring. Of course not, it’s a statement of principles, not legislation. The same criticism could be addressed to the Chicago Principles document Schwarz admires. This letter is from a group of faculty who are pledging to “model forms of discussion that manage criticality in a spirit of open inquiry.” That sounds pretty good to me; I’d like to hold them to it.
– The letter does not repeat verbatim the expression of many of the same concepts in the Chicago free speech policy promulgated by President Zimmer a couple of years before. More gratuitous lawyering from Schwarz. Here’s the relevant passage from the Principles:
Schwarz is correct that the English Department’s emphasis sounds different from that of the Principles, but I think “bullying, racially charged attacks, and the glorification of violence against those with whom one differs,” as well as speech that “intimidates or harms others” can (and should) be read as a good-faith proposal to interpret what “a genuine threat or harassment” or “directly incompatible with the functioning of the University” may mean in some contexts. The letter is also more directly addressed to “maintaining a climate of mutual respect” than the Principles were, but both treat that as pretty important, too.
The letter is also quite respectful of the distinction in the Principles between criticizing offensive speech and seeking to silence it. The English professors pledge to condemn and repudiate hate speech, and to model ways of being critical without being offensive. They don’t pledge to cleanse the world, the university, or even the English Department classrooms of controversial ideas.
– The concepts in the letter, if applied in an extreme and ridiculous manner by someone completely hostile to its intent, could prohibit teaching important texts. Marx and Engels, or Mao, writing about the use of force to effect political change, is not what the letter means by “glorifying violence against those with whom one differs.” Anyone familiar with the internet knows what that looks like; it’s not what happens in SOSC. And of course the letter says nothing about prohibiting any teaching. The English professors may well feel called to repudiate or condemn any number of instances of racism or sexism in Shakespeare, but they’re not cleansing those works from the curriculum.
– Schwarz and his son did not like the way the son’s prep school faculty struck the political correctness balance between free expression and sensitivity to individual classmates’ personal situations, and the letter does not guarantee that Chicago won’t be different. Oh, boo-hoo-hoo! These liberals are all the same! Whatever one does, the others will all do, too. That is supposed to be analysis?
But what’s really, horribly wrong with the Schwarz critique is this: He starts by blythely dismissing the following critical passage as mere “genuflect[ing] to the principle of free expression.”
My experience of the University of Chicago, both directly and vicariously through my alumni children, is that those sentences express the essence of what makes Chicago really special. One way or another, the University has fostered a culture in which people really engage with one another in a civil manner, and debate all kinds of difficult topics by adhering to a set of unwritten rules that make real discussion possible. And chief among those is that people actually listen to one another, and respond respectfully to what other people are saying, with full attention to nuance and qualification, and making recourse to shared principles so that differences can be identified, defined, and addressed.
That doesn’t happen everywhere. It certainly doesn’t happen in Schwarz’s piece. Like a lot of what passes for academic discussion these days, his essay isn’t engaging in good faith with the authors of the English Department letter. He’s playing to a peanut gallery of fellow conservatives – Schwarz is a professional conservative – and flaying some liberal academic rhetoric for their amusement. He doesn’t give a hang about the culture of civil debate at Chicago, a culture that makes Chicago a real haven for right-wing students, because people actually listen to them and take them seriously there. What people at Chicago do is to allow their minds to be changed when necessary to accommodate a legitimate point by an opponent. Schwarz doesn’t even bother to recognize that there are concerns other than his at play in the world.
If his son has the same values, the same style of argument, and the same tactical deafness to things that don’t support his argument, I hope he goes elsewhere for college.
I don’t really know anyone in the Chicago English department, although I have met Lauren Berlant – one of its current stars – and read some of her work. She was my daughter’s departmental advisor for awhile, and she’s a longtime friend of a friend. She’s very, very smart and very, very rigorous. And very, very left, too.
I have been lucky in my life to have met a fair number of people who are considered brilliant with some justification. She’s one of them. If you think Ben Schwarz or Geoff Stone (the author of the Principles, whom I have known for almost 40 years) would get the better of her in a debate, you have another think coming.
Regarding “political motive”: Benjamin Schwarz has worked at the Atlantic, Rand Corporation, the Yale University Press, Brookings Institute, and the American Conservative. Not sure which of those credentials would mark him as a “professional conservative.” Nor am I aware of who with a conservative viewpoint would read “Spiked!” He seems more libertarian than anything else, but his employment history reveals a variety of political leanings (if any). It’s just possible that academic freedom has a broad appeal to many across a broad political spectrum. In fact, where is “Politics” even relevant to this issue?
Regarding “wokeness” and it’s impact on free speech: This open letter from Fall 2017 - concerning a three-year old debate where both sides walked away with completely different interpretations, the issue blew over, and other departments moved on long ago to more recent and meatier subjects - reads as a pretty tiresome statement to those not familiar with the backstory. Doesn’t English have more current news to prominently display, or is there such a problem with lack of civility on campus that this statement is TRULY what is of primary importance? No one here has suggested such a thing. In any case, it’s there, whether forgotten or not, so it’s hardly surprising that a well-educated, thoughtful parent and his son would read it, in light of other recent contexts such as the department’s over-representation in various non-academic pursuits (petitions requesting de-platforming/problems with the Principles/No Safe Spaces, support of GSU, etc. etc.) and reasonably conclude that the Department of English must simply prefer blowing along with the Current Winds to actually doing substantive academic work. If someone is looking forward to being challenged and stretched intellectually, that Open Letter doesn’t exactly inspire.
Regarding the statement that the Open Statement condemns, but doesn’t suppress, certain speech: One thing that really sticks out between the two statements (The English Dept’s Open Letter. vs. The Chicago Principles) is that the former orients scholars toward a different goal than than does the latter. Consider this, for instance:
“The recent online dispute concerning white-nationalist appropriation of medieval symbols, in particular the harassment, threats against, and demeaning of an untenured scholar of color during that dispute, serves as a stark reminder that our academic pursuits do not exist in isolation from the hate, racism, and violence that continue to play a powerful role in US politics and in the social and legal arrangements that endanger the safety and well-being of people of color throughout the country. We wish to reaffirm that our role as scholars and educators centrally includes the fostering of a culture of inclusiveness and mutual respect that prizes our diversity rather than seeing it as a threat.” (Open Letter opening statements)
Versus this:
"More recently, President Hanna Holborn Gray observed that “education should not be intended to make people comfortable, it is meant to make them think. Universities
should be expected to provide the conditions within which hard thought, and therefore strong disagreement, independent judgment, and the questioning of stubborn assumptions, can flourish in an environment of the greatest freedom.” (Chicago Principles opening statement)
We see two distinct directives being promoted here, with respect to scholarship. One is to encourage inclusiveness and discourage “hate, racism, and violence” the other is to encourage hard thought, strong disagreement, independence, even lack of comfort with what someone else might be saying. Again, this merely underscores that the English Department might simply have a different viewpoint when it comes to academic freedom and free speech. While the Open Statement doesn’t say that it’ll shut down certain speech, if of course may assess it very poorly in a student’s work product, should that product not adhere to current fashionable modes of thought, including “inclusivity.” No one choosing UChicago as a place to be challenged intellectually within a realm of ideas - some popular, some not - wants to deal with that. Students will just avoid majoring in English.
I’ll add that Schwarz has published regularly in The Nation–hardly a bulwark of conservatism–and that, according to Wikipedia, his main task at the American Conservative was to “commission articles by writers on the left.” More important and regardless, doesn’t the erroneous charge (smear) that “Schwarz is a professional conservative” directly speak to his assertion in that article:
“Perhaps most perniciously, the department proclaims that ‘the invocation of the right to free speech’ is not legitimate when ‘it is a distraction from the real issue’. Who is to determine what the ‘real issue’ is, and who judges when an invocation of free speech is not to be credited because it is merely a supposed smokescreen? It is particularly disturbing that the English department holds that the invocation of the right to free speech – the foundational precept of democracy and of rigorous inquiry – should ever be regarded as politically suspect. That the underlying motivations of those who invoke free-speech arguments should be sussed out smacks of McCarthyism. The English department, like other critics of free speech, fails to grasp that championing free speech does not imply endorsement of the content of the speech to be protected. After all, the past courageous work of the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of free expression, for example, did not mean that the ACLU was (contrary to the claims of its critics) pro-Communist, pro-Nazi, or pro-Ku Klux Klan.”
Your riposte would be more cogent, @MohnGedachtnis , if either the immediate issue that gave rise to the Open Letter or any ongoing situation affecting the English Department was important enough to justify the otherwise gratuitous rhetoric in the letter.
The initial situation the letter responded to arose when a young Vassar Prof who happened also to be a same-sex person of color (though not an African American) made the assertion that it was necessary for all medievalists to cleanse themselves of the imputation of white supremacy by making clear that their perspectives on this particular subject matter were critical ones - that is, broadly speaking, anti-colonialist, anti-male-hegemony, anti-white-supremacist, etc. She made an exception for minority scholars like herself who ipso facto had no need of such cleansing.
This provoked a strong reaction on the blog of a Chicago History Prof, Rachel Fulton Brown, who is an old-school Christian believer and eccentric with a crush on Milo Yannopoulis. Some of Milo’s followers then wrote nasty emails to the Vassar Prof. The pomo crowd retaliated with nasty emails to Fulton Brown. There was no doubt much shunning and twittering in the medieval community. The Vassar Prof was not hurt by any of this - indeed was seen as a heroine by most in her field - and has moved on to a tenure-track position elsewhere. There were calls for Fulton Brown to be terminated, but she has tenure and that didn’t happen. The History Department for a time had a brief posting mildly rebuking her. That was the context in which this English Department statement was delivered and for nearly two years has remained prominently displayed. Unless one accepts the position that medieval studies equals white supremacy (unless duly cleansed) it is hard to see it as a resounding statement of general principle.
Without the knowledge of that specific incident a fair reading of the Open Letter would lead one to believe that white supremacist knuckle-draggers capable of “bullying, racially charged attacks, and the glorification of violence” are presently besetting the English Department. Really? I don’t believe that, and neither do you. The signers of the letter can’t believe it either. Anyone like that would be sent packing by peer disapproval or other means p.d.q. even on the vanishingly unlikely assumption that such persons would want to do graduate studies at the University of Chicago. No, the barbarian hordes are straw men. What then is the English Department warning us against exactly? “Speech that demeans, intimidates, or harms others” is, as Ben Schwarz says, a pretty vague category of speech. In this context one might logically assume that it was speech that considers medieval culture and literature not from a perspective of “criticality” but, as an older U of C scholar thought the past should be understood, as these vanished writers “understood themselves”. Is this the offense being banned?
The Open Letter has a superficially unobjectional platitudinousness about it, but underlying the platitudes is a proviso against free speech on account of all that bullying, demeaning, etc lurking in it. But if no one believes this stuff actually lurks in that form in this department, then what other conclusion can one draw but that a restriction on ideas as such is what is at issue here? You can bet that the restriction is not on deconstructing the racism inherent in medievalism. No, the statement is a warning to all otherwise civil and thoughtful scholars who might be capable of the wrong-think of trying to understand medieval literature and people on their own terms: Do not come to our Department.
Lauren Berlant has a big rep, but I wish she wouldn’t write sentences like the following, chosen almost at random:
“… the situation’s state of animated suspension provides a way of thinking about some conventions with which we develop a historical sense of the present affectively as immanence, emanation, atmosphere, or emergence: perturbation is Deleuze’s word for disturbances in the atmosphere that constitute situations whose shape can only be forged by continuous reaction and transversal movement, releasing subjects from the normativity of intuition and making them available for alternative ordinaries.” (from the Introduction to “Cruel Optimism”)
Where, @marlowe1 , other than perhaps Fox News, did you derive the logical leap from “demeans, intimidates, or harms others” to “banning” any attempt to “underst[and] as these vanished writers understood themselves”?
I don’t think “intimidates” or “harms” are all that vague. They seem pretty specific and serious to me, and things that aren’t going to pop up by accident in an academic discussion. I’ll grant you that “demeans” is broader and more slippery, but in context, as part of that series, I think it refers to something that would have to be obvious and serious, not some fourth-order implication. So how do you get from there to the basic tenets of 19th Century hermeneutics, which were effectively present at the creation of what we call medievalism. That was a really important development in the history of scholarship, and it remains something important to understand. The literary academic fashion known as New Historicism was very much in that vein, and was completely ascendant 15-20 years ago, so it’s not something relegated to the distant past, either. It’s not the only possible approach to interpretation, and it’s not some higher Truth, but I have a lot of trouble seeing how it demeans, intimidates, or harms anyone.
Meanwhile, you are seriously misusing the term “criticality.” I don’t think “criticality” stands in opposition to 19th Century hermeneutics. Rather, 19th Century hermeneutics is a critical position one can take, and that you clearly want to take. Whom would you be demeaning, intimidating, or harming if you did that?
However, if you are so impressed with the project of understanding the vanished writers of Europe’s Middle Ages as they understood themselves, why does your critical position vanish when you are confronted with the 2017 members of the Chicago English Department? Please explain how you have made any effort at all to understand them as they understand themselves. Everything you wrote – and everything Schwarz wrote, too – was saying, in effect, “We know what kinds of people these are, regardless of what they are actually saying. They are those Bad People, and they are ready to do horrible things, desecrating what we hold sacred.”
That’s what has me really riled up here, because it’s the complete opposite of the academic culture at Chicago that I respect. People at Chicago, at least as I perceive it, have a really strong ethic of talking to one another. The dominant contemporary mode of discourse, in and out of Academia, is very different. It is to talk at one another, or often, it is to talk performatively about some demonized Others for an audience of people you know will agree with you. That makes for fine winding-up rhetoric – and it’s 100% protected by the First Amendment – but it’s completely the opposite of what academic discourse should be, and in an academic context it’s corrosive.
Talking – and, more important, listening – to one another is absolutely necessary. It is what most of us try to do here. It’s what goes on at Chicago every day, and is the essence of what actually makes Chicago special. That’s what the English Department letter was about.
And, yes, Berlant’s writing is jargony and convoluted, although not, in fact, incomprehensible. It takes some effort it understand. I thought the Chicago crowd – the undergraduate Chicago crowd, at least – was proud of their ability to put in that effort. (That said, I wish she wrote differently, too, and the academic fashion of writing like that probably has a lot to do with the declining number of students electing to major in English Literature, among other factors.)
And, yes, The Sound and the Fury, an actual popular novel, although somewhat (but not unpleasurably) difficult to read for its first 80 pages or so, is easier to understand than Lauren Berlant. Duh.
Why don’t you just leave Fox News and “professional conservative” out of this? You’re the mirror image of the Red Hunter who always saw the dark hand of Moscow behind anyone who champions free expression.
“Harmful” and “demeaning” speech is now commonly used to describe expression that is somehow construed to be “offensive.” Segregationists maintained that arguments in favor of integration were harmful, intimidating, demeaning, and deeply offensive–and they used speech codes and contorted legal arguments about fighting words, etc., to shut down integrationists’ speech and acts of protest.
In any case, how can speech in any way “harm” another? Since you know Geoffrey Stone so well, why don’t you ask him if repudiating and excluding from academic life expression that some group believes is somehow harmful or demeaning to others is consistent with the Chicago Principles, which clearly state:
“…it is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive…concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.”
If I too must cleanse myself of retrograde associations I will come clean and fess up that my knowledge of the existence of the piece by Mr. Schwarz came from a blog - a very popular one with something like 25,000 subscribers - operated by Jerry Coyne, a UChicago emeritus prof in evolution (his blog is called after one of his books, “Why Evolution is True”) whose main subject is a stout defence not only of evolution but of atheism. He calls himself a political liberal and has said repeatedly that he will vote for any Democrat in the upcoming election. This is not inconsistent with - and why should it be? - his being a defender of the U of C’s free speech policy and an enemy to that subset of the left that he calls “the regressive left”. It was in that context that he devoted an entire entry in his blog to the Schwarz piece. He too deplores the Open Letter. He’s no more an authority than you or me, but he no more than me fits your aspersion that we are reading lines from a Fox News script.
Not wishing to be offensive, @MohnGedachtnis , but aren’t you the one here attempting to delegitimize arguments by calling people names. If nothing else it’s a bit lazy and certainly stereotypical to equate pushback against the Open Letter with the political Right. Doesn’t apply to Coyne and, as I think you must know, doesn’t apply to me. Doesn’t apply to Geoff Stone. But, if it did, would that fact put anything one might say on the matter ipso facto beyond serious consideration and the kind of robust argument we treasure at the University of Chicago? Stigmatizing your interlocutor so as not to have to listen to him is an old trick, but not a good one.
Now as to the argument itself - the meaning of “harms, demeans or intimidates others” - the reason I gave, and which you did not engage with, for supposing that the words must refer to the expression of ideas not popular in the English Department but not rising to anything like aggressive or threatening speech in any normal sense of those words, was that I was pretty confident that no such actually threatening speech exists in the Department. I asked what that statement could be getting at in the absence of palpable harms and I was left with only one logical conclusion - it is speech that might tend to make some people in the department uncomfortable or even trigger them because of its content - as being outside the received wisdom with respect to, among other things, the proper way to think and talk about the medieval period. Surely I don’t need to refer you to the countless instances, as alluded to by @Mom2Melcs , when those very accusations have been made against the language of speakers with unpopular views. That was in fact the accusation of the Vassar prof against any medievalists who do not reject the traditional approach to their subject. Yes, I can only construe the words on the page, but those words are slipperier than you allow in this context. How difficult would it have been in that statement - which, remember, sprang out of the dispute between a traditional medievalist and a woke one - to clarify that the former perspective was as welcome in the Department as the latter? That the only criteria of appropriateness should be strength of the scholarship itself and not any question of whether someone might think it harms or demeans someone? Even now, that would be an easy addendum - except that someone’s pride or ideology would never permit it.
I haven’t read enough of Lauren Berlant to know whether the agony of construing her prose would be worth any illumination to be had from it. I have a powerful suspicion that when words are being piled up drunkenly in the fashion she does, untethered to anything very specific, something is being evaded or falsified or a triviality blown up into a faux-profundity. Reading George Orwell at an early age ruined me for such stuff. Wild horses couldn’t make me utter the word “criticality”.
“I don’t think “intimidates” or “harms” are all that vague. They seem pretty specific and serious to me, and things that aren’t going to pop up by accident in an academic discussion.”
The obvious question is whether they pop up so frequently at UChicago - a school supposedly known for its culture of civil dialogue - that the English department believes such a statement to even be necessary. It leads one to suspect that they adhere to a fairly broad understanding of what "hate, racism and violence" might be. Perhaps the working definition is even something along the lines of "that which causes someone to feel victimized that way." The college years are filled with such rabbit holes these days, and most would be wise to steer clear.
Social justice types on campuses today assert that all sorts of speech that many others would find perfectly acceptable “harms” or “intimidates.” The “White Board Girl” was widely castigated for her “harmful” and “racist” speech that caused “trauma.” Her expression was provocative and perhaps immature, as marlowe1 suggests, but it was hardly harmful or trauma-inducing. Speech cannot be judged and excluded according to its viewpoint, as a raft of Supreme Court decisions–decisions rendered by liberal and conservative justices–have eloquently shown.
“(That said, I wish she wrote differently, too, and the academic fashion of writing like that probably has a lot to do with the declining number of students electing to major in English Literature, among other factors.)”
The STEM fields are filled with difficult-to-read academic works, and yet those majors have increased in popularity . . . perhaps, when assessing the worth of a particular subject of study, students are able to read genuinely-difficult-to-understand jargon and figure out whether it's representing important and relevant concepts, or gibberish.
It is a source of considerable amusement to me that in another thread @marlowe1 and @JBStillFlying are falling over themselves in admiration for something David Axelrod wrote about “Whiteboard Girl”. Here’s the core of Axelrod’s statement:
Two things jump out to me. First, it undercuts their unsupported assumption above that threatening and harassing language are never real issues at the University of Chicago, so the English Department must have had some other agenda in promulgating its statement. Second, Axelrod’s letter is absolutely, 100% consistent with the English Department letter, and slightly inconsistent with the Chicago Principles in exactly the same ways the English Department letter was. And for pretty much the same reasons, as well: it was addressing dialogue within the university community, and personal attacks on a student, rather than censorship of outside speakers.
The Axelrod letter and the English Department letter are two peas in a pod. The only difference is that the specific case Axelrod was addressing was ugly harassment of a student expressing conservative views, and the English Department was responding to attacks directed at a young faculty member of color expressing views that were not conservative. But there is nothing in either letter to suggest that its author(s) would not apply the same standards and react the same way to the reciprocal cases.