A few weeks ago, I responded to part one in a series of essays advocating an increased use of “collegiality” in training graduate students. In part two, out today in IHE, author Donald Hall, a professor of English at West Virginia and a specialist in specialist in British studies, queer theory, and cultural studies, takes his thesis to even more alarming degrees.

Collegiality was once bad, Hall recognizes: it “was long abused by retrograde forces in the academy — it was deployed to deny tenure to women, people of color, individuals working in identity political fields, and those who resisted harassment or attempted to change a culture of abuse. Sometimes it was referenced with less explicitly nefarious intent but with the same consequences, when departments simply did not understand the shifts that were occurring in the broader academy and reacted with incomprehension to still untenured agents of change within their own institutions.”

Now, apparently, that those “agents of change” rather than the “retrograde forces” are in charge of departments, threats from abusing collegiality no longer exists. As I discovered in my own tenure case, this proposition is absurd. Collegiality as a mechanism for evaluation cannot be divorced from subjectivity, and it therefore is always subject to abuse by dominant pedagogical forces. In the 1950s, as Hall notes, those forces were those intent on keeping women, people of color, or avowed leftists out of the academy. Now, of course, the dominant ideological forces within the academy are of a very different ideological complexion.

In my mind, the risk of abuse from using collegiality in any evaluative manner—either in personnel questions, “mentoring” sessions, or training graduate students—far exceeds any rewards that could be achieved from the process. There are, however, three other reasons to call into question Hall’s thesis. First, who exactly will be teaching graduate students collegiality, or mentoring untenured faculty about the principle? As Hall notes, he has encountered among tenured colleagues “brilliant thinkers and writers, who may even be competent teachers, but who also act abusively toward staff members and colleagues (to the point of ridiculing, barking or yelling, and sometimes even making thinly disguised threats). I have always been stunned when people have defended such ego-maniacal or ‘diva’-like behavior, inside or outside the academy. No amount of talent or even genius gives one the right to treat one’s fellow citizens as objects of scorn or as pin cushions for abuse . . . I do not care how famous someone is or how fabulous his or her writing may be, an ego-maniac should not be a member of a department community if she or he refuses to treat colleagues with respect.” So will some tenured faculty be “collegiality” teachers and mentors and others refused the privilege? Who will decide? What if a majority of tenured members of a department has engaged in behavior documented to be uncollegial? Won’t they then “mentor” or “train” the untenured or graduate students to be as uncollegial as they?

Second, Hall’s essay itself demonstrates the slippery slope down which the academy travels once it elevates collegiality to a prominent role in evaluating scholarship and teaching. Hall approvingly quotes Frank H.T. Rhodes, who complained that that Ph.D. training does little “to meet the fundamental needs and address the larger issues of contemporary society ... to foster research only coincidentally promotes citizenship that addresses the needs of society.” Of course, such an approach brings into the fore—as we’ve also seen in the “dispositions” debate—of how to define the “fundamental needs and . . . the larger issues of contemporary society,” or “citizenship that addresses the needs of society.” These are fundamentally political, not academic, concerns. Critics of affirmative action, pro-life activists, or supporters of Israel all believe that their policies address “the needs of society.” But somehow I doubt that Hall, Rhodes, or likeminded figures would agree. Graduate students or untenured faculty don’t need senior colleagues instructing or “mentoring” them on what the “needs of society” are. They’re intelligent enough to come to their own judgments on such matters.

Finally, Hall’s collegiality-plus approach envisions an academy very different than the ideal presented to me in graduate school. Stressing collegiality, Hall continues, “helps mitigate the destructive force of what [David] Damrosch terms the ‘myth’ and too often ‘reality’ ‘of the scholar as isolated individual.’” We need more group-work and collaborative writing, Hall maintains. As my Brooklyn colleague, Economics professor Mitchell Langbert, notes in the IHE comments section, “Isn’t there enough groupthink in higher education?” “Encouraging harmony in universities,” Langbert tellingly notes, “is like giving water to fish, or delusional ego boosts to Jeff Skillng’s executive team.” I couldn’t agree more.