In response to a recent kerfuffle on an academic listserv (unnamed, because it could be any list), I sent an email suggesting the list’s moderation policies are inadequate. The responses were underwhelming. But, I want to focus on one particular aspect of that: the repeated insistence that moderation is unnecessary because we all know how to behave. In response to this, I would like to make a bold assertion: We do not.

Recent weeks have seen outbursts of bad behavior from across academic ranks in Facebook groups, via email, on Twitter, and I’m sure elsewhere. Some of these have been such dumpster fires that they resulted in news coverage. Allowed to behave as they please, many professors behave badly.

We’re all jerks

There is no terminal degree in being a decent person, and no amount of intelligence or education ensures good behavior. Well-respected scholars can be absolute trashheaps as human beings, as repeated scandals about sexual harassment, student exploitation, and other horrors make clear. But, most bad action is both more pervasive and more banal. Professors can pull rank like champions. We name call with pointed eloquence. We can bully, intimidate, and dogwhistle just as easily as anyone else can. Anyone who would argue otherwise is either embarrassingly naive or willfully obtuse.

Further, I would suggest, even those who are generally decent can be real jerks. We can’t all be at our best all the time. And, sometimes we don’t know better and need to learn.

Established: Professors don’t know how to behave. We’re all jerks sometimes, and some of us are jerks a lot of the time.

It takes a village (at minimum)

Over the past few months, I have put a lot of thought into accountability. At its heart, accountability is about the ownership we should take for what we do. A lack of accountability is part of why bad behavior persists. If someone behaves badly, and there are no consequences and no real discussion, there is no opportunity for that person to meaningfully realize they’ve screwed up. This hurts efforts to build community. It implies that the bad action is acceptable. It also hurts the bad actor — who likely will continue to crash around like a kid in a dinosaur suit with no sense of boundaries.

If we are going to have real, meaningful community, we need standards for what community membership looks like. I am not speaking about annual dues here, but about the types of actions, behaviors, and obligations that make us accountable to one another. Different communities function differently (shocker, I know), but in absence of clear standards, the worst impulses of the worst actors set the standard. Moderation sounds top-down, but thoughtful moderation is better understood as a community building and management activity.

Schrödinger’s listserv

Alongside the claim that moderation of the listserv was unnecessary, because we all know how to behave, another line of discussion held that moderation was too much work. In a bold assertion, I want to say these can’t both be true. Either moderation is unnecessary because we all know how to behave, or moderation is an excess of labor because so much of it is needed. Having moderated a diversity of communities of varying sizes in varying forums, I suspect that the real situation is somewhere in the middle.

Moderation is a lot of work, but it is only occasionally necessary. However, when the occasion calls for moderation, a system must already be in place. Otherwise, we risk a reactionary response. Clear standards and systems make a measured response possible. If, truly, we know better, we can do better. If moderation is unnecessary, having a clear policy is still useful since it can help educate new members about standards.

A community manager, elected from among the ranks, could serve as a rotating office within many academic organizations. That person could recruit and train a volunteer moderation team. Everyone gets a title to slap on their CV so the work makes sense to our institutions as service, and responsibility is diffused to the working group.

The status quo sucks

Every marginalized person I know has experience with not just microaggressions, but macroaggressions, mega aggressions, aggressions that should shame us all. The real horror is not that bad things happen, but that bad things pass unremarked — there’s that lack of accountability again. This isolates people from their colleagues, makes explicit the often implicit understanding of who counts in the academy, and reiterates power inequalities that grind people to dust. Study after study shows the entrenched inequalities of higher ed. Surely we can do better.

If someone can post a racist rant in a professional forum without consequence, that says bad things about us all. Alongside discussions about graduate admissions and hiring practices to support diversity, we need to think about community norms broadly. Those norms make up our daily experiences, not just on listservs but in classrooms and offices, at conferences and in hallways. Maybe professors should know how to behave, but we don’t. The best we can do is to build and implement systems that hold us all to the standards of our best selves. We know better. Let’s do better.