Theory and Research in Education

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When to shut students up: Civility, silencing, and free speech Eamonn Callan Theory and Research in Education 2011 9: 3 DOI: 10.1177/1477878510394352

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Theory and Research in Education 9(1) 3–22 When to shut students © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: up: Civility, silencing, sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1477878510394352 and free speech tre.sagepub.com

Eamonn Callan School of Education, Stanford University, USA

Abstract Teachers sometimes shut students up for the sake of civility. My question is whether silencing for the sake of civility can be morally justified when a student derogates fellow students as members of some widely stigmatized group, and the offending speech is not for any further reason to be deplored, for example, as a personally targeted insult. Exploring possible answers to that question sheds light on a bigger issue: the proper character of ‘civility regimes’ in educational institutions whenever group stigmatization persists in the social background and impinges seriously on some students’ lives. A plausible argument for silencing under the conditions specified is derived from respect for students’ equal dignity and the protection of fair educational opportunity. That argument is nonetheless defeated by considerations about the rightful place of intellectual candor in a culture of free speech and the centrality of educational institutions in supporting candor’s development.

Keywords ethics and education, hate speech, intellectual liberty

I Teachers often shut their students up. Whether one is teaching kindergarten, a graduate seminar, or something in between, the task of silencing students comes with the territory. My interest is in formal educational encounters between teachers and students in classrooms, laboratories, tutorials, and the like (henceforth ‘classrooms’). What the encounters have in common is that they are occasions on which teachers are institutionally responsible for the instruction of particular groups of students who have been assigned to them.1

Corresponding author: Eamonn Callan, School of Education, Stanford University, 485 Lasuen Mall, Stanford, California 94305-3096, USA Email: [email protected]

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What I call ‘routine’ silencing occurs when efficiency or the fair distribution of a teacher’s attention and effort suffice to justify the action. Teachers silence students so that others can hear them, so that digressions are cut short, so that an established rule on who gets a turn to talk is impartially administered, and so that instruction can resume when one student’s obstinacy or verbosity has brought it to a halt. Events of this sort are so common in any well-functioning classroom that we rarely pay them heed. Elizabeth Anderson gives an example that takes us closer to the species of silencing that interests me (Anderson 1995: 211).2 A black student in a political science class asks the instructor a question. Someone else in the class, unimpressed with the question, loudly interrupts to announce: ‘That’s what you get with affirmative action.’ If efficiency or the fair distribution of the teacher’s attention were all that mattered, then something like ‘Don’t speak without raising your hand and then waiting your turn, and keep your comments on-topic’ must suffice. But you might think, as I do, that the interruption Anderson describes was an intolerable breach of civility, not just an annoying distraction, and that silencing should be done in a way that clearly communicates its moral warrant. My guess is that something like the following would be about right: ‘I won’t tolerate such appalling rudeness in my classroom. Now shut up.’ I want to alter Anderson’s case somewhat, creating a modified version to be contrasted with hers. Anderson’s case is easy, or so at least it seems to me; its companion is thus the ‘hard case’. Imagine a political science class where the topic of discussion is affirmative action. The teacher has answered an African-American student’s question without interruption. A student who patiently waits for her turn to speak now says that students of color who have benefited from affirmative action are academically weak. She is con- vinced that their presence in her classes has diminished the quality of her education. They ask foolish questions, and their overall incompetence wastes everyone else’s time. Any student of color listening to this would reasonably feel deeply offended, which is but another way of saying that here too is an instance of serious incivility. Of course, the mere fact that the student who spoke said that affirmative action unjustly favors less meritorious over more meritorious students is no reason for anyone to be offended. But it is one thing to hear that a policy that might have benefited you was unfairly tilted in your favor; it is another to be told that your merits are so trifling that you do not belong in the same classroom with the speaker. One’s standing as a competent participant in the educational process has been derogated. Still, one is derogated only because of what is claimed to be the case in an academic conversation to which the offending claim is a strictly relevant contribution.3 If silencing were the right pedagogical response in the easy case, would it be the right or wrong call in the hard case? To answer the question, we need to be clear about what it means. To silence a student on grounds of incivility is not merely to mark her speech as uncivil; it is to mark its substance as intolerably so,4 a breach of decorum grave enough for a teacher to authoritatively indicate that such a thing simply must not be said in the classroom. The conception of the intolerable I invoke is ethical rather that legal, even though I draw on some ideas from First Amendment jurisprudence to help advance my argument later on. The gap between legal and ethical considerations matters here because incivility-targeted silencing can be open to ethical criticism when no one could seriously argue that a legally

Downloaded from tre.sagepub.com at Stanford University Libraries on September 15, 2014 Callan 5 cognizable violation of any student’s right to free speech has occurred. When students’ incivility is punished through formal sanctions, they may have avenues for redress through law. Yet whatever teachers take to be intolerably uncivil speech they can also suppress in classrooms by means that fall far short of formal sanctions. Given the right circumstances, a dismissive sigh, a rolling of the eyes, or an exasperated ‘you just can’t say that here’ may be very effective ways of shutting students up by indicating that the very content of their speech is intolerably uncivil. Any teacher, or at least any with de facto as well as de jure authority in the classroom, could set the boundaries of what is to be suppressed as intolerably uncivil speech very narrowly, and quickly bring students who cross those boundaries to heel, without exerting power in a manner that a court could sanely recognize as an infringement on the right to free speech. However zealous one may be in defense of students’ intellectual liberty, I assume that the prospect of courts meddling in classrooms because of when teachers roll their eyes is not appealing. The law will inevitably substantially underdetermine the enforcement of discursive civility norms; it could not be otherwise in anything that remotely resembles a free society. A given legal regime might embody a very capacious toleration of speech, while a civility regime nested within the structure of law is much narrower in scope, and the scope of legal and civility norms could evolve over time in divergent directions, for good or bad reasons.5 By a ‘civility regime’ I mean a set of authoritatively established norms that distinguish between respectful and disrespectful conduct in some given social setting; that determine what range of sanctions apply when norms are violated; and that identify who has the right to adjudicate violations and enforce appropriate sanctions. A civility regime might be overly constraining, or too lax in the range of conduct catego- rized as uncivil, or too punitive in response to what is taken to be uncivil. For, even when we agree in declaring something to be a deplorable breach of civility, we have ample range for disagreement about how malefactors should be treated. A civility regime could permit or require any of the following (and more) without any legal entrenchment: pretend that the infraction did not occur; remonstrate gently with the malefactor on some later occasion when correction can be given without causing anyone to lose face; shun the malefactor henceforth as a social pariah; insist that the malefactor meets you in a duel in which one of you must kill the other.6 In comparing Anderson’s easy and my hard case, I begin in Sections II and III by outlining what I take to be the best argument for saying that the same reasons that would justify incivility-targeted silencing in one case also do so in the other. But is the best case for treating the two examples alike really good enough? To determine whether it is good enough, we need some account of how and why both civility and free speech in classrooms matter, and I describe some necessary elements of any good account in Sections IV to VII. I argue that, despite morally relevant common features, the two cases are ultimately different, and the reasons that would justify silencing in the easy one cannot be wisely extended to argue for silencing in the other. The differences have to do with the importance of creating a supportive environment for intellectual candor in classrooms, the need for teachers to publicly engage with some kinds of uncivil speech instead of silencing, and finally, the role of interpretive charity and civic friendship in an educational civility regime.

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The easy case is by no means clearly an example of hate speech.7 Still, contemptuous speech need not descend to that abysmal level for it to count as intolerable incivility. Think for a moment of how the black student demeaned by the insult, as well as other assumed beneficiaries of affirmative action in the same class, could react if the teacher either ignored the interruption or silenced it in a way that suggested the perpetrator was only guilty of speaking out of turn. These students will sensibly infer that the only safe course henceforth is to say nothing at all. To ask a question when you did not understand something the teacher or another student had said would expose you to the risk of verbal abuse from other students, abuse to which your teacher will evidently leave you unprotected. And this means that all who belong within the derogated category cannot freely participate as the equal of others in classroom discourse. That is tantamount to a serious deprivation of educational opportunity. If the insult had been delivered in a different venue, such as a dormitory or some public forum on campus, the victims might assert their dignity just by walking away, perhaps with some choice words for the abuser as one departed. But to walk out of a classroom is to walk out on one’s education. If the teacher will not act to protect students from gratuitous insult inside the classroom, those left unprotected are denied educational opportunity on fair terms. They are constrained from participating freely in the give and take of academic discussion by the looming threat of verbal abuse from their peers, and when the abuse occurs, they cannot honorably withdraw from a humiliating situation without sacrificing their education. So far my argument about the easy case has nothing to do with the particular social evil that a stigmatized social status entails. A student subject to a serious verbal insult of any kind in a classroom is deprived of educational opportunity on fair terms once the teacher leaves the insult uncorrected, and that general fact has nothing specifically to do with race or similar stigmatizing categories. Suppose that instead of an African-American whose question triggered the insult, we had a student who was well known as the child of a wealthy university donor. And then the insult might have been: ‘that’s what you get with legacy preferences!’ The teacher who treated that interruption as a comment that was merely out of turn would also be remiss in protecting both the dignity and the educational opportunity of the student who had been insulted. Still, the severity of the insult in the easy case is surely amplified by the broad social background of racial stigmatization. The lion’s share of civility in our daily lives depends on treating those with whom we interact as presumptively competent and trustworthy occupants of the particular social roles that structure our interaction.8 When we are civil to others it is largely because our demeanor towards them as sales clerks, nurses, police officers, fellow students, colleagues, and the like, assures them of our willingness to entertain the presumption of competence and trustworthiness. Incivility occurs when our behavior shows that we repudiate the presumption to begin with, or we behave as if the least evidence of imperfect performance defeated it. When individuals belong to some widely stigmatized group, they will be denied a decently strong presumptive trust in the quality of their role performance outside menial social roles. Some white racists in the USA will be courteous enough to the African-American who is paid to wash their cars. Yet they will draw the line at extending the presumption of competence to one who

Downloaded from tre.sagepub.com at Stanford University Libraries on September 15, 2014 Callan 7 is a physician, or a student in an elite college classroom, to say nothing of one who is their President. In a society where once stable caste-like structures have been eroded but not erased, people who belong to what was once a comprehensively subordinate category will commonly be found in roles that have some honorific standing. Still, we might also expect to find in the demeanor of all under the residual influence of the declining caste system some of its effects in antipathy and distrust towards formerly subordi- nated compatriots. We should also be unsurprised to find these effects registered in a heightened susceptibility to self-doubt among socially successful individuals who have ascended from the former caste: they will have to resist the internalization of a demeaning image of themselves that the blatant or subtle incivility of others projects upon them.9 That is precisely the background to the insult in the easy case. The insult to the particular African-American student who was ridiculed piggybacks on more general societal attitudes of race-based contempt that are to varying degrees still shared in the USA. That context amplifies the gravity of the insult to the victim. The beneficiary of legacy preferences who might be publicly ridiculed in similar circumstances certainly has reason enough to be mortified. But there is no reason in that case to feel shame as a member of an imputed pariah caste. Americans in general are far too well disposed to those who enjoy inherited wealth for any young adult with family money to be rationally susceptible to shame about being assigned to a despised out-group on that basis alone. If this is why we should regard incivility-targeted silencing as justified in Anderson’s case, can we extrapolate from its details to construct an argument of comparable weight for silencing in the hard case? The student who speaks up against affirmative action in the latter does not single out anyone in particular for insult, and what she says is themati- cally connected to the class discussion. Her speech attests to a rashly negative attitude to the competence of students she assumes to be beneficiaries of affirmative action. That attitude, without doubt, is uncivil, but sheer incivility in speech is not a sufficient reason for silencing. Good faith contributions to discussion will commonly express uncivil attitudes to fellow citizens, and, taken at face value, the student’s words constitute just such a contribution. By a ‘good faith’ contribution to discussion I mean sincerely expressed views intended to advance a common pursuit of truth. Nothing of the sort could be reasonably said for the student in the easy case. Thus the differences between the two cases bring into focus what seems the best reason for not silencing in the hard case: the fact that the student has made an intellectually relevant contribution to academic discussion in good faith gives any teacher grounds to reason with her openly, rather than ending the dialogue by using the authority to silence. So if silencing is clearly justified in the hard case, as in the easy case, it must be because further considerations are enough to show that the student’s utterance in that case should be taken at less than face value. Circumstances might be such that an utterance that bears the outward trappings of a serious contribution to discussion is really just an expression of contempt to students of color. In that event, respect for the speaker as a academic interlocutor is not a value to be weighed against harm to the interests of students of color because there is no such speaker: there is only someone expressing racial antipathy, which is of course just what we have in the easy case. I want now to explore how such circumstances might arise.

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III

My analysis of the easy case depends in part on the claim that uncivil speech in classrooms that is not downright hate speech can be quite bad enough to warrant silencing. Only a blurry, contestable line separates hate speech from lesser forms of contemptuous speech, and another such line divides explicitly contemptuous speech that is not hate speech from the more muted or politic expressions of contempt. And often muted or politic expressions may cause as much or more distress, and contribute just as little to serious public discourse, as more explicit, full-frontal verbal assaults on the dignity of individuals who are assigned to stigmatized groups. To whatever extent such distress occurs, we should worry that the effective opportunity to participate in classrooms will be impaired and dignity violated for much the same reasons as apply to explicitly targeted verbal abuse. In fact, stigmatizing speech that retains the outward forms of sober reasoning and commentary may be more wounding than the ostentatious insult precisely because it cannot be so easily dismissed as mere oafish malice or stupidity which civilized people can be trusted to discount. This is an especially important point about discourse on race in the USA. Racists and their fellow travelers in America now predictably bring a certain rhetorical restraint to the task of putting the people they disdain in their place. Among the results of the Civil Rights movement is the fact that racism has become a kind of civic heresy in mainstream public discourse. No one can say ‘I am a racist, but . . .’ and expect fellow citizens to pay the least attention to whatever comes after the conjunction. Politicians who say things that come too close to the sound of racism may not destroy their careers. But they should expect to find themselves doing penance for a while, repeating their regrets if not their apologies in countless interviews, and peddling some exculpatory tale about just why they said something that provoked the suspicion of heresy. Still, many Americans on national surveys will assent to beliefs that are patently racist or quasi-racist on quite restrictive criteria of racism.10 In venues where the speech norms of educated elites are normative, such as college or high school classrooms, racism (whatever that is) will tend to rear its head only in circumspect guises. The claim that racial minorities who benefit from affirmative action are badly prepared for the high status that is now open to them is a way to vent contempt for blacks without exposing oneself as a barefaced heretic to the American Creed. The considerations just sketched create an argument for strong interpretive distrust toward any claims that seem to move closely toward the orbit of racial contempt. The rationality of the distrust depends in part on empirical evidence of large-scale hostile attitudes to racial minorities, which we have reason to believe will often be expressed indirectly and cautiously, and partly on a strong sense of just how deplorable the attitudes are. And if warranted distrust runs high enough, we might have enough reason to silence not only explicitly targeted racial insults but also claims that bear some veneer of intellectual seriousness and respectability but are strongly presumptive indicators of sheer race-based contempt. To treat such claims at face value would then betray either a psychological naïveté about the tenacity of such contempt under current conditions and the incentives of respectability that channel it into oblique varieties of insult, or else too feeble an appreciation of its evils.

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To be sure, to infer in the hard case that the student who speaks must be just deviously trying to insult students of color in the classroom, and is making no good faith declarative statement at all, may well be distrustful to the point of paranoia. But the anti-heresy case for treating the student’s words with less consideration than we would ordinarily extend to academically relevant contributions to discussion does not depend on that inference. Students whose antipathy toward stigmatized groups is formed in societies where respectable speech requires that the antipathy be expressed indirectly or with rhetorical restraint in public venues will naturally speak in the manner of the offending student in the hard case, without any devious intent to demean particular others. But why should sheer racial antipathy get serious academic consideration just because it comes in a deco- rous rhetorical package and is likely to be free of that particular intent? Although the teacher might be morally obligated to discuss with the offending student what she said later on and elsewhere, silencing is the right call inside the classroom. The victims of the insult in both the easy and hard cases will understand and feel the gravity of the attack on their dignity, regardless of the rhetorical packaging. And the teacher who does not silence their verbal assailants in either case thereby tells the insulted students that they should not expect protection if their own classroom speech provokes yet further insult. Thus it is the victim of the insult who is effectively silenced, rather than the perpetrator.11 To take the measure of the anti-heresy argument, as I shall call it, we need a deeper understanding of both the civility that silencing would allegedly protect, as well as the value of student free speech which teacher silencing threatens. Once that understanding is in place, the ethical differences between the two cases become much more salient. They are salient even if we are zealous in our anti-racism and take a very downbeat view about the effects that racial caste continues to have on what people say and why they say it. That last point is very important. Controversy about how restrictive educational civility regimes should be in limiting the expression of so-called ‘words that wound’ easily founder in disputes about how broadly or narrowly words like ‘racism’, ‘homophobia’, ‘sexism’, and the like should be construed, how widespread the phenomena captured by these words really are nowadays, and how seriously we are committed to fighting against the relevant evils. Those disputes have a way of becoming bitter very quickly (because they are about civic heresy), and reasonable consensus may be remote. The counterargument I make now to the anti-heresy argument is broadly tolerant of student speech that involves ‘words that wound’ against members of stigmatized groups. But the counterargument I make is also compatible with the following claims: broadly inclusive conceptions of racism and the like have greater explanatory power and/or are ethically preferable to conceptions that include only the more explicit and flagrant kinds of prejudice; deplorable attitudes to out-groups continue to pervade the background social context to our classrooms; overcoming them is as important a civic task for schools as any; and we are still far from doing enough to countervail their influence on students’ lives. On the other hand, my case for broadly tolerant civility codes should be acceptable to anyone with liberal egalitarian sympathies who differs with the more radical devotees of anti- racism or the like on one or more of these rancorous matters of dispute. The very last stage of my counterargument does raise some serious misgivings about the merits of the interpretive distrust on which the anti-heresy argument hinges. But the preceding stages of the counterargument do not depend at all on those misgivings.

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IV Civility is the principal means by which we assure others of our regard for their dignitary interests through the overt display of that regard in polite, considerate interaction with them.12 Social interaction is always fraught with the risk of humiliation or embarrassment. Our dignity is permanently at risk and, so far as we forget about the risk, it is only because we have come to trust that others will in fact treat us with civility. More precisely, they will not intrude on our privacy, ridicule our competence, gratuitously impugn our character or the things we cherish, or treat us merely as marginal participants in the social world, who can be taken for granted, belittled, or just utterly ignored. There are certainly much grander virtues than civility – courage, justice, etc. – and someone who is a paragon of civility might be lacking in these. But the evils that characteristically flow from the breach of civility show that it is no trivial virtue. The shame, embarrassment, and anger that incivility arouses are not small things; the collapse of cooperation and eruption of violence that it sometimes triggers are still bigger things. This characterization of civility brings into relief its rightful place in social interaction. Civility communicates to others through words and bodily demeanor that we respect them as worthy of a proper consideration and deference. To the extent that our communication succeeds, others are reassured that we can be trusted as colleagues, fellow students, neighbors, or merely as friendly strangers at a social event with whom small talk might be boring but is at least unthreatening. Yet the relationship between showing civility to others and respecting them is not straightforward. Suppose my behavior toward you had been impeccably civil since we met, even downright charming. But now it turns out that all my apparent consideration was a sham; I was setting you up for what I proposed as a wonderful financial investment opportunity, which was really just a scheme to line my own pockets. I never had the least respect for you, as it turns out. My civility had been nothing more than a faked respect. By the same token, incivility to another can coincide with a faultless respect for the other. Suppose you know that I have the utmost respect for you, and that I would hate to offend you. However, I am mildly autistic, and when excited I forget about the most basic norms of civil communication: I keep interrupting you when you try to speak, and I ignore your not-so-subtle signs that the conversation needs to end. As soon as I become aware of what I am doing, I am ashamed and apologetic: the last thing I would want to do is treat you disrespectfully, and you know this. The differences between respect and civility expose some new aspects to the problem of silencing. The fact that civility can mask disrespect for others means that teachers can be entirely successful in maintaining an exacting standard of student civility in classrooms while failing completely to engage in educationally productive ways with disrespectful attitudes that lurk below the surface of a merely pretended respect. And that creates an obvious problem for anyone drawn to the anti-heresy argument. The anti-heresy argument derives from hostility to the heresy of racism. The heresy is a radical departure from the egalitarian standards of mutual respect that a liberal democratic civic culture must sustain. Yet if civility norms in any social setting can be effectively enforced so that heresy, as understood in that setting, does not show its face, it certainly does not follow that those who are compelled to be civil must therefore

Downloaded from tre.sagepub.com at Stanford University Libraries on September 15, 2014 Callan 11 become less heretical. The premises of the anti-heresy argument would lead us to expect that real candor in the expression of racial attitudes and beliefs in classrooms will often cause grave offense to students of color. And so the need to protect the dignitary interests of all students, and to safeguard educational opportunity on fair terms, incline us to favor a civility regime that sacrifices candor for the sake of a respect that might be faked rather than real. What we ultimately want is a real, not a faked respect.13 Unfortunately, the best civility regime for suppressing all racist speech in a classroom, however broadly or narrowly that category of speech is understood, is not necessarily the best regime for undermining race-based contempt. To make any headway with the problem of civility as a merely faked respect we need to take the measure of the value we lose when candor is sacrificed in classrooms. And then we must try to imagine the contours of an educational civility regime that could be candor-friendly, so to speak, without imposing prohibitive costs on students who might be more exposed to public derogation under such a regime. But, to take the measure of civility as an educational value, I need to say more about students’ free speech first.

V Among the more quoted passages in the history of the US Supreme Court is Justice Robert Jackson’s denunciation of those who would use public schools as instruments for the inculcation of any civic orthodoxy: ‘[i]f there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein’. The words come from West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), and the court’s decision prohibited any public school from compelling children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or salute the flag. Jackson’s repudiation of all compulsory orthodoxies in public education is not to be taken quite literally. He could hardly mean that teachers should not try to cultivate substantive democratic beliefs and attitudes, such as hostility to forms of caste and sub- ordination repugnant to equal citizenship, regardless of whether students or their parents want teachers to do so. Then it must follow that education and liberal democracy has its own orthodoxy, which is also to say that it will have some heresies to contend with. But, charitably construed, Jackson would seem to be using ‘orthodoxy’ in a narrower sense than this. He was not denying that democratic education is committed to teaching a particular civic creed; his concern was with a corruption to which the perpetuation of a democratic creed is susceptible, a corruption that makes the education worth having into the inculcation of a slavish or merely cynical conformity. Victor Blasi and Seana Shiffrin have argued recently that the role of sincerity in the protection of First Amendment values is at the core of Jackson’s argument. Children forced to recite the pledge or salute the flag against what they sincerely believe would be treated in an inherently disrespectful manner; they would also be trained in a vice opposed to a culture of free speech. Forced recitation ‘is already at odds with an underly- ing constitutional respect for individuals’ First Amendment right to develop, voice, and exercise independent opinions and commitments’. And, by its very indifference to the distinction between a sincere and a feigned expression of patriotic allegiance, forced

Downloaded from tre.sagepub.com at Stanford University Libraries on September 15, 2014 12 Theory and Research in Education 9(1) recitation works against the basic human interests that free speech is supposed to protect (Blasi and Shiffrin, 2004: 458–9). What are these interests? A public culture that supports sincere expression is necessary if our speech is reliably to express who we are individually and what we stand for. And, further, our collective capacity to pursue the truth is compromised when speech does not faithfully reflect what people really believe but is instead a function of what they think will please or placate whoever has power over them. Insincerity also corrodes the prospects of trustful mutual accommodation. A culture of insincerity makes it harder to put our faith in the good will of others because our grasp of what they really want from us is tainted with doubt, and whatever terms of cooperation they agree on cannot hold much security. None of this means that sincerity is virtue enough for a stably successful culture of free speech. No amount of sincerity will compensate for rampant close-mindedness, intellectual sloth, and timidity. But, then again, we cannot expect open-mindedness, intellectual vigor, and courage to do us much good in the presence of rampant insincerity. Forcing students to utter a Pledge of Allegiance or to salute a flag when either is contrary to deeply held beliefs is a particularly grotesque example of state-compelled insincerity. Still, it is one thing to be insincere, and quite another merely to be less than candid. If I say nothing about my own thoughts on the merits of a candidate for tenure at a meeting where my colleagues are unanimous about the candidate’s radiant accomplishments, which I believe to be just so much smoke and mirrors, then I am not insincere, even if my silence means that I am less than candid. But my lack of candor is in deep conflict with just the same basic human interests that Blasi and Shiffrin claim to be integral to a culture of free speech. My colleagues cannot benefit from whatever is to be learned from my sincerely expressed views about the merits of the candidate for tenure if I keep it to myself. Nor can I learn what they might teach me about what could be mistaken in my view of the case. And, in these ways, our common pursuit of truth is impaired. The character of my university as a community of mutual respect among scholars is also impaired when I refuse to speak my mind on the matter of urgent, common academic concern. No doubt I do worse if I publicly and insincerely commend the candidate for tenure than if I just shut my mouth. But shutting my mouth is quite bad enough. What Blasi and Shiffrin say about insincerity as a vice that corrodes a culture of free speech is aptly extended to the lack of candor. The argument I make here is primarily about the virtue of intellectual candor, which is not the same as a taste for public self-disclosure about one’s consumption habits, bodily functions, fantasies, and mood fluctuations. The era of reality television, Facebook, and confessional blogging has arguably made certain kinds of public self-disclosure very widespread among the students we teach. These do not necessarily foster much or anything at all in the way of intellectual candor. And the opportunity students have for the latter is not just about whether they have occasions when they can freely say what they believe; it is also about having the chance to think aloud about doubts that pull against what they have come to believe, and then to entertain doubts about the doubts, and so on. Anything said in this spirit of exploratory candor could seem outlandishly reactionary or bizarre to others, offensive, unfashionable, or just plain stupid. But to whatever extent they have learned to be candid, that particular worry

Downloaded from tre.sagepub.com at Stanford University Libraries on September 15, 2014 Callan 13 will not inhibit them; they will speak up, and if some open-mindedness is combined with the candor, they will learn from each other. A good teacher can nudge that process along. Of course, the fewer the other opportunities that children and youth have for the disciplined exercise of intellectual candor elsewhere in their lives, the more important classrooms become as a setting in which a virtue integral to a vigorous culture of free speech can get some precarious purchase in their lives. Taking stock now, we know this: a civility regime constraining enough to legitimate the silencing of speech just because it gives strong offence to members of stigmatized minorities will to that extent sacrifice the cultivation of intellectual candor, a cardinal virtue in a democratic culture of free speech. The extent of the sacrifice might be negli- gible when stigmatization and the attitudes that sustain it are merely a thing of the past, with little influence on the formative context in which children grow up. The extent of the sacrifice will increase, however, to the degree that stigmatizing attitudes and practices persist in the wider society. And given the other institutions that impinge on the lives of children and young adults these days, we have good reason to worry that other venues for cultivating intellectual candor are in very short supply. And so a civility regime for classrooms that does not permit the expression of beliefs about racial minorities that are offensive to them will entail a significant cost to free speech values in just those circumstances that exponents of the anti-heresy argument say are our current circumstances. And the cost is particularly damaging to the long-term interests of those very minorities to the extent that it protects from confrontation and correction the very attitudes that secure their ongoing stigmatization. Still, my argument thus far might suggest to some that we still have a morally disturbing trade-off if we do not silence speech of the sort that the hard case exemplifies. The fact that silencing the speaker in such cases would abridge the scope for intellectual candor in the classroom, and that the abridgement would be a defeat for free speech values, a defeat with bad effects for students of color to the extent that it secures a mere counterfeit respect under conditions of ongoing racial antipathy, is not in doubt. But that does nothing to show that the speaker’s offensive speech would not still be an affront to the dignity of racially stigmatized students. If intellectual candor is among the paramount democratic virtues, we should look for ways to give it adequate scope in educational institutions without humiliating those most vulnerable to humiliation and least well served already by the current distribution of educational opportunity. I think we can break this impasse by thinking about alternatives to silencing.

VI Teachers can engage in open dialogue with the student who makes a derogatory judgment of others, pressing for evidence and argument that would support the judgment, and offering considerations that might point decisively in a different direction. Like silencing, this can be done in many different ways: calmly or indignantly, clearly or confusedly, with or without manifest goodwill for the particular student with whom one speaks, with condescension or without, and so on. The room for non-trivial variation (and hence the possibilities for bad as well as good teaching) must be greater here than in the case of silencing. For if there are very many ways to put an end to some verbal

Downloaded from tre.sagepub.com at Stanford University Libraries on September 15, 2014 14 Theory and Research in Education 9(1) exchange, there are surely many more ways to keep it going. If one had to choose between the teacher who will silence artfully and the one who will engage patronizingly or ignorantly, then silencing may well be the lesser evil. But a choice of pedagogical strategies constrained by the ability of a teacher to engage well with students who derogate some of their peers begs the question of what would be best for the teacher capable both of silencing or engaging in a skillful, or at least a passably competent manner. That is the question I want to address now. A familiar move for civil libertarians in debate about the limits of free speech is to say that the proper remedy for the most odious speech is not censorship but more speech that exposes the odiousness and dissipates the bad effects it might otherwise have. The locus classicus for that argument is Louis Brandeis’s concurring opinion in Whitney v. California (1927). The circumstances of that case were very remote from worries about civility in classrooms. Whitney was among the founders of a revolutionary political organization that allegedly advocated the violent overthrow of the state. Still, it is striking that Brandeis’s argument is very explicitly about education: ‘If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.’ What he means by ‘education’ here is plainly that process in its most encompassing sense: how all citizens, regardless of age, can learn to see evil or folly in the speech of others for what it is if we trust citizens to talk and think about it openly. Yet the idea that more speech will cure us of the harm that bad speech does cannot be true a priori. And that means we must try to distinguish between conditions in which Brandeisian confidence in the power of more speech is warranted and those in which it is not. I would argue that classrooms in which competent teachers have the opportunity to countervail the effects of bad speech with better speech are about as auspicious a setting for Brandeisian confidence as we could hope to find. First, the very structure in classrooms invests an intellectual authority in the teacher’s role that favors the credibility of their speech over that of any student. If I accept you as my teacher, and regard my peers just as other students, then my trust in what you say will, as a rule, favor your claims when they conflict with their claims. This is not to say that a student might not make arguments or bring evidence to class that persuades others that the teacher was mistaken on some particular matter. But that must be the exception rather than the rule; otherwise, the student who becomes the most intellectually trusted individual in the classroom will thereby becomes the de facto teacher whenever what that particular student says conflicts with what the teacher says. Second, the asymmetry of intellectual credibility between students and teachers is reinforced by the latter’s authority to shape an unfolding discussion according to their own persuasive purposes. A good teacher who publicly engages the student in the hard case as an interlocutor might lead discussion in any number of different directions. But a few considerations will surely be prominent: here is an opportunity to teach vividly about the human propensity to concoct invidious stereotypes; about how questions or observations that seem stupid to us might tell us more about ourselves than the quality of the question or the observation; about the multiple meanings of ‘affirmative action’ and what might reasonably be said in its favor, as well as against it. That the student’s derogation of her peers was itself uncivil is also something to be taught here, though if it is really to be taught, rather than merely declared, it will require some verbal precision and a cool temper.

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The teacher’s engagement with the offending speaker is properly intended to be civically edifying both for the student who spoke and for everyone else who listens and participates in the ensuing discussion. But it has two other purposes as well: to reaffirm the standing of students of color in the classroom as equals among peers to be treated with a decent presumption of competence as civility requires; and to blunt the potentially adverse effects that uncivil speech would otherwise have had on their effective opportunity to participate in the classroom. To whatever extent a well-led discussion can achieve these ends, we reduce the trade-off between the civic benefits of a candor-friendly civility regime, in which candor predictably produces some disturbingly uncivil speech, and harm to the dignitary interests and educational opportunity of those who are derogated by such speech. We can have the educational benefits of candor, in other words, while providing strong protection to the interests of students most vulnerable to the hazards of candor in the classroom. The Brandeisian strategy mitigates the harm of derogatory classroom speech to stigmatized groups; it does not erase those effects. Then again, silencing does not erase the effects either. Once silencing is available as an option to countervail some expression of racial contempt, students of color in that classroom have already been on the receiving end of contempt, and it would be foolish to suppose that silencing could simply cancel its effects any more than engagement would. If racial contempt is in fact as pervasive and tenacious as the anti-heresy argument suggests, then perhaps it is rash to expect either teacher silencing or engagement to be very potent antidotes to the harms of racially heretical speech.14 But then engagement has at least the advantage of addressing the contempt that underlies uncivil speech, rather than settling for the evasive comforts of a merely faked respect.

VII I have tried to make an argument for the construction of civility regimes in classrooms that support student candor, despite the threat that candor will pose to students most vulnerable to stigmatization. I have argued that the threat can be better addressed through ‘more speech’ rather than silencing, given a certain threshold of teacher competence and the distinctive authority that belongs to teachers in classrooms. The argument has been deliberately framed in a way that is neutral about the right answer to vexing questions about just how words like ‘racism’, ‘homophobia’, and the like should be construed, how pervasive the attitudes these words name might be in the background culture of our classrooms, and just how ardent educators should be in opposing them. But my argument cannot be entirely neutral because the Brandeisian move at the end means that when competent teacher speech cannot reliably mitigate the bad effects of bad speech, the argument for a candor-friendly civility regime will be shaky at best. Here is a sobering example. When religiously integrated schools were created in Northern Ireland by some brave souls at the height of what locals euphemistically call ‘The Troubles’, they were an experiment in building some respect between mutually isolated and deeply hostile sectarian communities. They have grown a little since their inception, though the vast majority of children in Northern Ireland continue to attend

Downloaded from tre.sagepub.com at Stanford University Libraries on September 15, 2014 16 Theory and Research in Education 9(1) sectarian schools. But, even in integrated schools, classroom discussion about ‘the Troubles’ is still largely taboo (Donnelly, 2004). To infer that this is moral cowardice on the part of teachers might be a bad mistake. A civility regime is arguably still needed that keeps a lid on any verbal exchange that could quickly bring incendiary differences to the surface of conversation. Therefore, a viewpoint-neutral gag rule sacrifices candor for the sake of an evasive but extremely fragile modus vivendi among Catholics and Protestants: the rule is viewpoint-neutral because the burden of reticence that the rule imposed falls equally on Catholic and Protestant children alike. We might see this as a prudent attempt to head off the problem of ‘respect inflation’, a problem widespread in human societies but likely to be especially acute wherever profound social divisions persist or have barely begun to close after a recent history of group violence and hatred. The phrase ‘respect inflation’ is Leslie Green’s, and he locates the problem it names at the foundation of Thomas Hobbes’s political theory (Green, 2009). According to Hobbes, people can ascribe disrespect on the basis of ‘a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their Persons, or by reflection in the kindred, their friends, their National, their profession, or their Name’ (Hobbes, 1991: 88). At the same time, each of us wants security in the sense of being respected; and we need public confirmation so that any doubt or anxiety we might have on that score can be allayed. We cannot see into the souls of others to know whether they truly respect us or not. And so, for the most part, we have to make do with the tokens of civility. Inflation occurs when my doubts about whether you respect me prompt me to demand clear public assurance from you that you really do, and then if your behavior in response does not satisfy me, to demand that you correct your presumptively uncivil behavior according to my lights. But, of course, you may be as insecure as I am about being respected, and my escalating demands will appear to be an affront to your dignity, which can only be restored if I back down. Gag rules that keep interlocutors away from topics that are particularly liable to trigger respect inflation are probably necessary, albeit as a necessary evil, in institutions as shaky as a few embattled religiously integrated Northern Irish schools.15 In the American context, I suppose someone might be so fearful and pessimistic about the resentments and antipathies that lurk beneath interracial contact hereabouts that a gag rule on discussion of race would seem reasonable. But that is not something that I have heard anyone argue for. A viewpoint-neutral gag rule is altogether different from a viewpoint-specific policy of silencing incivility that expresses racism or attitudes that are too close to racism for comfort. In the anti-racist context, a gag rule would prohibit talk about race, and anti-racist educators quite rightly want to talk about race. Still, a good question is how we might have candor-friendly civility regimes in our classrooms while doing other things that might mitigate the risks of respect inflation. After all, one can easily imagine situations in which the Brandeisian approach seems to have worked well in response to some provocative claim that a student made in the classroom. But then we find the same students at each other’s throats elsewhere. Two ideas help to mitigate anxieties about respect inflation that intellectual candor may trigger. First, in any classroom, students’ intellectual candor is properly limited by their evolv- ing sense of discursive relevance, and a teacher’s regular intervention will typically be

Downloaded from tre.sagepub.com at Stanford University Libraries on September 15, 2014 Callan 17 necessary to guide that development. This is part of the business of routine teacher silencing that I alluded to earlier. Restraining verbosity and digressions limits the indul- gence of intellectual candor. Well-guided classroom discourse will typically be about the intellectual merits and demerits of the views that students might express rather than the merits and demerits of each other’s intellectual or moral character. That focus will have some important inhibiting effects on respect inflation. It is one thing to be frankly told ‘what you just said is badly mistaken because . . .’ rather than ‘only a fool (or a racist, etc.) would say what you just said because . . .’ A student might be thinking the latter as she utters the former, and both thoughts are thus eligible as candidates for candid speech. But if she has developed a good sense of academic relevance in channeling her intellectual candor, she will be disposed to say the former and keep the latter to herself. Second, a useful way to think about containing respect inflation is to consider how intellectual and civic virtues must be cultivated together if each is to play its role in producing the shared benefits we seek from them. I noted earlier that candor without open-mindedness is not much use to us. If candor is not to aggravate our chronic susceptibility to respect inflation, at least one additional virtue is very important. Any civility regime will work better to contain respect inflation to the extent that people learn to favor charitable interpretations of seeming lapses of civility. They will be slow to impute incivility when the evidence is unclear or sparse, slow to regard the breach as serious rather than trivial, slow to assign more culpability than innocence, slow to favor harsher over milder informal sanctions for malefactors, and quick to forgive when apologies or other gestures of reconciliation are offered. But the importance of interpretive charity increases the more we are thrown into the company of people who are very different from us, with whom we share at best a very thin society-wide civility regime, and with whom we have little or no personal history. All these things will magnify the range of cases in which we have some good reason to suspect that we are receiving less than the respect that is our due, and so our social relations had better be infused with a strong dose of interpretive charity if we are not to be drawn quickly into the lethal Hobbesian spiral of respect inflation. The great common asset of interpretive charity in human cooperation is its strength as a bulwark against respect inflation. I shall not belabor the fact that classrooms are replete with opportunities for teachers to show and encourage interpretive charity among students in the enactment of civility norms. And if our students can acquire that virtue in tandem with candor, they will be well placed to enjoy the benefits of candor without quickly succumbing to respect inflation.

VIII I have argued that it is wrong to silence students for making derogatory generalizations about particular social groups when the generalization is academically on topic, even if the social group is widely stigmatized, some members of the derogated group are in the classroom, and we recognize that their stigmatization is a grave social evil. Personally targeted insults, of the sort that the easy case exemplifies, are another matter; they are not reasonably interpreted as good-faith contributions to academic discourse. Flagrant, individually targeted insults do not express the virtue of intellectual candor. The hard

Downloaded from tre.sagepub.com at Stanford University Libraries on September 15, 2014 18 Theory and Research in Education 9(1) case is different because to silence the student would be to curtail intellectual candor. I have tried to show that candor is a cardinal civic virtue that any educational civility regime should seek to foster, and why the hazards of candor can be mitigated through additional educational measures. Among these is a commitment to cultivating interpretive charity in the practice of civility alongside intellectual candor. Against the anti-heresy argument, which would treat the easy and the hard cases alike as warranting silencing, my counterargument at this final stage depends on the propriety of an interpretive attitude flatly at odds with the interpretive distrust implicit in the anti-heresy position. Recall that what motivates the distrust is by no means unreasonable: the recognition that race-based contempt is repugnant to liberal democratic norms on any defensible interpretation of these; that much racism and kindred attitudes are still common; and that they will often surface in words that disguise their repugnant character. Charity is no guarantee of accuracy. Still, I would argue that the civic benefits that go with charitable interpretation in classrooms far outweigh the risks of sometimes failing to unmask invidious racial attitudes there. First, if we take to heart the fact that denying someone the respect that is their due on grounds of race really is an appalling departure from liberal democratic moral norms, then accusing someone of racism when the evidence is unclear is to risk a serious injustice to the accused. Of course, if we are sufficiently concerned with rooting out civic heresy without injustice, then we could respond to unclear evidence of race-based contempt in an investigative spirit, asking probing questions to determine whether or not this really is a case of civic heresy. Unfortunately, such investigations will predictably trigger respect inflation. Neither those who really are guilty of such contempt nor those who are innocent but fall under our suspicion are likely to respond with good will to questions asked for the purpose of ascertaining whether they are civic heretics or not. That is a point that applies quite generally, but there is an additional consideration that is specifically about classrooms. There is something unseemly about teachers engaging in academic discussion with their students in a spirit of interpretive distrust. Addressing our interlocutors as presumptive enemies might be tough-minded prudence in some public arenas. But in classrooms that attitude is another matter. For if we are in the business of education, then surely we should expect that our students have shown up in good faith to learn from us, and, when they say things that seem foolish or even offensive, our first response should be to act as if they are cordially inviting us to teach them better. At the core of the interpretive charity that I have described is a family of defeasible assumptions about those with whom we share the public world. They are assumed to have goodwill toward us; they have no desire to discount our dignitary interests or anyone else’s, and so, when things go awry, we look for some explanation that allows us to continue ascribing that desire to them. We shall take them to be our civic friends, unless there is strong reason to be more wary, as sometimes there will be. And though we may be thick-skinned enough to take some delight in Millian discursive combat, we do not get carried away with such pleasures. We remain mindful that our intellectual and political adversaries are at a more basic moral level our friends. Now maybe the ideal of civic friendship is often rather too utopian for our own good within the very imperfectly liberal democratic societies that now exist. But if it has a compelling value somewhere, it is surely in classrooms.

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Acknowledgements Earlier versions of this article were presented to the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University, Kingston, and at the London Institute of Education. On those occasions I learned much from my audience’s questions. I am also grateful to Geoff Cohen, Rachel Lotan, Ira Lit, Nicole Hassoun, and Sigal Ben-Porath for encouragement and comments. Randall Curren and an anonymous reader for Theory and Research in Education posed very trenchant questions about the penultimate draft. But to address those questions as thoroughly as I should, I would need to write a short book rather than a long article. I just might do that now.

Notes 1. Teachers and students will meet each other in other circumstances: among book stacks at the library, at a political rally off campus, a lecture on campus by a visiting speaker, a reading by an author at a bookstore, and so on. When they do, they may find themselves in conversa- tions much like the ones they have when they encounter each other as teachers and students in classrooms, though I do not assume that teachers have just the same responsibility to control student speech in these non-formal venues. School-sponsored, teacher-supervised events straddle a murky boundary between the formal and non-formal: class retreats, field trips, etc. We should also allow for a Lord of the Flies Proviso for close teacher oversight of student speech when students are minors, regardless of whether the setting is a classroom in my sense. This does not mean that a different set of values should shape how teachers constrain the speech of minors. The argument I make for a candor-friendly civility regime is as relevant to younger as to older students; my point is only that, with younger ones, teacher control of speech takes place within a more strongly paternalistic relationship, and a relationship in which we also need to keep a very sharp eye out for the impulsive infliction of harm on others. The ease with which even petty rudeness can modulate into bullying and violence among children and adolescents makes vigilant teacher monitoring of incivility a pervasive necessity. 2. This article is really a series of afterthoughts to Anderson’s (1995). She says: ‘It is not hard to tell the difference between personal discriminatory attacks on University members and offensive claims that may be of general academic interest’ (Anderson, 1995: 216). That seems right to me. But suppose we omit the word ‘personal’ in the sentence I just quoted. I do not think it is easy to tell the difference between discriminatory attacks on university members that do not single out individuals for verbal abuse and ‘offensive claims that may be of general academic interest’. This article asks about how to address that more elusive distinction. 3. I am assuming that the student who spoke in the hard case was not sneering pointedly at anyone when she spoke, or the like. In that event, the case for shutting the student up would be easy. A lot of incivility has to do with body language, vocal tone and volume, and hurt- ful rhetorical embellishments to claims that might have been said just as well without the embellishment. Some students, and, worse still, some teachers, may have a taste for the rhetorical evisceration of those who disagree with them. This particular kind of cruelty can be shown as much in the expression of mainstream, uncontroversial opinion as any other, and even politically radical belief can be expressed with the utmost courtesy. (Read Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ if you have any trouble imagining the latter.) I see no reason to be particularly tolerant of such cruelty within the sphere of classroom civility. I would gladly vote against tenure for a colleague who had a poor record in this regard, irrespective of other merits. And students who show signs of this should be promptly silenced. Repeat offenders should know their teachers’ wrath. 4. My reference here to the ‘substance’ of speech is important. If a teacher corrects a student by justifiably saying ‘You could have made your point here without being disrespectful to those

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who disagree with you’ and then engages the relevant point in discussion, the student is not silenced in the sense that matters to me. See note 3 on the difference between gratuitous rudeness and offence that the very substance of speech may provoke. 5. James Q. Whitman’s comparative study of the relation between law and civility in Germany, France, and the USA shows how variable that relation may be even among constitutional liberal democracies. See Whitman (2000). . 6 The immense variability of possible civility regimes makes moral generalization about civility a hazardous business. Too much depends on the particulars of regimes for claims about civility’s moral status to be credible unless they are narrowly contextually bounded. On the one hand, some civility regimes will operate to protect oppressive social practices by inhibiting serious social criticism (Mayo, 2009); on the other, to abandon civility altogether would be to annihilate any distinction between respectful and disrespectful social demeanor, and that is hardly an appealing prospect. 7. L. W. Sumner offers a very broad definition in an essay on Canada’s hate speech law: ‘I will consider hate speech to be any form of expression whose dominant purpose is to insult or denigrate members of a social group identified by such characteristics as race, ethnic- ity, religion, or sexual orientation, or to arouse enmity or hostility against them’ (Sumner, 2009: 208–9). One might reasonably surmise that the student’s utterance in Anderson’s case meets the first criterion that Sumner specifies; then again, another reasonable surmise is that this was an oafish and cruel attempt at comedy, the dominant purpose of which was not the denigration of any group. I do not suppose that the second interpretation necessarily puts the student who uttered the insult in a more favorable light than the first. Tom Gray has elaborated a much narrower conception of hate speech that could warrant formal sanctions in academic institutions within the framework of American constitutional law. The student’s utterance in Anderson’s case would not even come close to meeting Gray’s threshold, which required words commonly taken to express ‘visceral hatred’ for stigmatized groups, among other things. His conception was carefully designed to honor First Amendment constraints, and was integral to the policy on discriminatory harassment in effect at Stanford University from 1990 to 1994 (Gray, 1993). Stanford’s President decided to abandon the policy when it became clear that its defense might require protracted litigation. 8. Democratic moral norms require that we respect others as equals, regardless of differences in their merits. What does that egalitarian respect have to do with our presumptive trust in others as role performers? It would make no sense to say that the latter attitude should hold regardless of inequalities in merit. I think the connection is (roughly) this. We can often have good reason to take a dim view of the competence of some role performer to whom we initially extended the presumptive trust that civility requires. I am guilty of no disrespect for persons if I get a new physician because I have come to doubt the competence of the one I have been using. But when differences in the degree of trust I extend to two role performers is to be explained by the fact that I identify one as a member of a socially stigmatized group and not the other, that is reason to infer that I do not in fact respect the stigmatized individual as an equal. The presumptive trust in role performance that civility requires can only be rational in the context of reasonably stable institutional structures in which role performance can be expected in the main to be above a certain modest threshold of competence and trustworthiness. But, without that context, we can surely expect little or nothing in the way of any civility regime. 9. The literature in social psychology on race and stereotype threat is suggestive in this regard. Stereotype threat occurs when individuals feel themselves at risk of acting in a way that will confirm some negative stereotype of the group to which they belong, and the pressures of stereotype threat may also adversely affect self-appraisal. Incivility that members of stigmatized groups experience as attesting to some negative generalization about the competence of the group in a merit-based social role is the kind of situation that creates serious stereotype

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threat. The relation of race stereotype threat in the USA has been explored in the highly influential work of Claude Steele (Steele and Aronson, 1995). 10. Although their study is a bit dated now, Sniderman and Carmines’s data on white American racial attitudes is particularly disturbing. On a survey question asking whites whether specified negative or positive traits were ‘very good’ or ‘very inaccurate’ descriptions of ‘most blacks’ nearly one out of two were willing to say that most blacks are ‘aggressive or violent’, ‘boastful’, and ‘complaining’ (Sniderman and Carmines, 1997: 63). In a more recent study, over 20% of all white Americans believe that genetic differences or differences in intelligence between races explain some or a great deal of the current economic and educational gap between blacks and whites in America. Nearly 40% believe that at least a little of the gap is to be explained by such differences (Huddy and Feldman, 2006). 11. The idea that hate speech silences its victims, thereby curtailing their effective right to free speech is familiar, though highly controversial, in American legal theory (Fiss, 1998). The argument here shows how one might plausibly claim that contemptuous and stigmatizing speech that is not downright hate speech could also silence those who are its tar- gets. A somewhat similar case is found in Applebaum (2003). But her argument ultimately depends on claims about the need for classrooms to become a ‘safe zone’ for everyone’s identity, and that would seem to require a much more extensive curtailment of speech than I consider here. 12. Scholarly interest in civility has grown apace in recent years. The definition I offer here is broadly consistent with the literature, or so I hope. The most important contributions in ethics are Buss (1999) and Calhoun (2000). In the philosophy of education, Laverty (2009) presents contrasting views on the moral status of civility. Norbert Elias’s magisterial history of civility (Elias, 1969,1982) has no doubt been the main spur to academic interest in the topic. 13. A selective indifference to the distinction between civility as overt performance and respect as an attitude is probably conducive to sanity, and it is certainly consistent with a wholesome self-respect. I certainly do want to be treated with civility when I phone my Internet provider. But I do not honestly care whether or not the person who talks to me is a hateful misanthrope who is only being nice because he wants to keep his job. Much more could be said about the circumstances in which we reasonably settle for civility, regardless of respect. My point here is only that, to the extent that stigmatizing attitudes persist in a given society, we cannot reasonably claim that their evil is dissipated in educational institutions once their overt expression has been suppressed. 14. My argument thus does not depend on high hopes for engagement as a universally reliable solvent of stigmatizing attitudes. But an important additional consideration about the liabili- ties of silencing as a solvent might be noted here. Some research in social psychology attests to a serious ‘rebound effect’ when stereotypic thoughts are suppressed before impinging on behavior (e.g. in speech). Suppression seems to exacerbate the negative valence of the suppressed stereotype (Macrae et al., 1994). Many thanks to Geoff Cohen for telling me about this research. 15. Stephen Holmes has written wisely about gag rules: ‘But conflict-shyness is not merely cra- ven. By tying our tongues about a sensitive question, we can secure forms of cooperation and fellowship otherwise beyond reach’ (Holmes, 1995: 202).

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Biographical note Eamonn Callan is the Pigott Family Professor in the Stanford University School of Education. He is the author of Creating Citizens (Oxford 1997) and many articles and chapters in the philosophy of education. Address: Eamonn Callan, School of Education, Stanford University, 485 Lasuen Mall, Stanford, California 94305-3096, USA. [email: [email protected]]

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