LAUSR

The purpose of this commentary is to explore the focal article’s push to define, promote, and reward civility within academia (Cortina, Cortina, & Cortina, 2019). First, I will establish that the “public concern” of the Pickering (1968) test, when applied to academic spaces, is the students. Second, I will define acceptable academic free speech. Then, I will discuss violations to academic free speech. Finally, I offer recommendations for successful civil discourse. An academic institution is nothing without the students. The supporting personnel are the faculty and staff. Indeed, without the students, faculty and staff serve no purpose. Academics give meaning to scholarship, but the scholarship holds no meaning if it is not consumed. Thus, a faculty member’s official duties, such as teaching and writing, are of public concern and therefore public speech. Public speech is entitled to protection under the First Amendment. While constitutional freedom of teaching and writing must be protected, this protection should not be at the expense of student safety. In general, speech is free until it incites violence. Legal precedence of the physical act of violence as consequence of speech is from the court case Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969). The court chose to defend White supremacy by upholding the free speech rights of a KKK member. Every time free speech is decried, it has an echo of White supremacy and has no place in academia. What, then, is violence in academia? Legal precedence delineating free speech is necessary but not sufficient when applied to academic free speech. As psychologists, we know harm is caused by much more than physical acts of violence. Specifically, the academic institution is riddled with epistemic violence. Epistemic violence is a breach in psychological safety that was established in the psychological contract between academics. The focal article discusses one such form of epistemic violence: incivility. The examples of incivility as outlined in Cortina and siblings (2019) were in the form of general rude behavior (i.e., uncivil audience member) and anti-Semitic comments. Although these are clearly wrong, there are many more subtle forms of epistemic violence. We must increase the bubble of incivility to explicitly include, but not be limited to, sexism, racism, microinsults, microinvalidations, and microaggressions. These micro incivilities are important to note, as they have been documented to transcend all social identities (Portman, Bui, Ogaz, & Treviño, 2009). In response to the question, “Should we defend faculty jackassery in the name of academic freedom?” (Cortina et al., 2019, p. 373), the answer is no. Because the students are the main body of public concern, any Title IX complaints or complaints of unlawful discrimination or harassment should be a fireable offense, even if the perpetrator is a tenured faculty member. The reason why tenure is seen as a protection is because the culture of the academic institution does not reflect this call for civil discourse. The reason why we study concepts such as incivility in the laboratory while assholery runs rampant within even our last email chain is because the culture of the academic institution is not ready to hold those accountable. Why does incivility only matter when one