Respectful workplace policies and the silencing of protest in post-secondary education

• In Event: The protest within: How to cope with protest academically vs. academic protesting?

Proposal

Many post-secondary institutions have adopted respectful workplace policies that on the surface purport to promote ‘civility’, but in fact do more to police the conduct of, and silence criticisms made by, scholars whose professional and societal obligations necessitate that they take difficult, controversial, and disruptive positions. Such policies can particularly disadvantage scholars from marginalized communities whose voices urgently need to be heard but whose identities, stances, and epistemologies may unnerve institutional powerbrokers and conflict with extant power structures. Further complications arise when considering the extent to which academic freedoms afforded to university professors protect speech that is extramural (i.e., public-facing) versus intramural (i.e., related to institutional governance), and the intersection of respectful workplace policies with other university mandates such as Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI). This contribution to the panel examines the role of respectful workplace policies in North American university settings, and analyzes how they are used to maintain institutional hierarchies and weaponized to silence critics, especially those from minoritized communities. Implications and tensions related to academic freedom, the early-career induction of novice academics, and other university policies such as EDI are explored.

Author

• Clea Schmidt