A Note on Civil Disobedience

Accepting consequences doesn't mean the consequences are just.

Jun 17, 2024

A man learns about making strategic choices of targets and proper or allowable modes of engagement. (Photo: Getty)

The award for Most-Derided Opinion Piece this weekend went not to anything in a major paper, although they certainly tried their best, but rather to something published in the Harvard Crimson. Way to go, campus media! Hate reads will save journalism, god willing. The piece in question, headlined “Faculty Speech Must Have Limits,” was written by Lawrence Bobo, the Dean of Social Science and W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard, a pricey New England finishing school.

“We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social,” Du Bois said in his famous Niagara Movement Speech, “and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America.” This, I’m sorry to say, probably means that he was not quite responsible enough to be a Harvard faculty member, according the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard.

I do not want to sit here and crack jokes about this piece by Mr. Bobo on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis, although I find that activity soothing and yearn to practice it often. Instead I want to make one simple but, I think, important point about the way that we speak about civil disobedience in this country. I’m saying this up front so that you know that there will theoretically be a “message” in this particular thing you are reading. Before that, though, I must briefly sum up the overall thesis of Mr. Bobo’s op-ed, which is: Faculty members should keep their fucking mouths shut if they want to maintain their employment at a nice place like Harvard. Specifically:

Having witnessed the appallingly rough manner in which prominent affiliates, including one former University president, publicly denounced Harvard’s students and present leadership, this first question must be answered: Is it outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct for a faculty member to excoriate University leadership, faculty, staff, or students with the intent to arouse external intervention into University business? And does the broad publication of such views cross a line into sanctionable violations of professional conduct?
Yes it is and yes it does.

Bobo argues that “A faculty member’s right to free speech does not amount to a blank check to engage in behaviors that plainly incite external actors — be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government — to intervene in Harvard’s affairs,” and even trots out the old “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater” comparison as a metaphor for, in this case, saying that Harvard is doing something stupid. Mr. Bobo, your metaphor is not apt. D minus. See me after class please.

From a labor rights perspective, the idea that a school can tell a (unionized!) faculty member that they can’t say anything critical of their employer if it would “incite” “external actors” such as “the media” to “intervene” in the employer’s “affairs” is, I’m pretty sure, a plain violation of labor law, at least under the current iteration of the NLRB. As a philosophical standard it is an obvious pretext to squelch any speech the school finds to be annoying to its central mission of Soliciting Enormous Donations from Financiers Who Are Trying to Buy Absolution For Their Many Sins. Any half-decent professor of law or labor or speech or history or philosophy could thoroughly dismantle Bobo’s argument, and I’m sure that many have, though much of the jokes about it will probably remain in private group chats. As a “self-employed” writer forced to purchase bad health insurance from the State of New York, however, I retain the pure intellectual freedom to publicly declare that this is shoddy work.

Anyhow, that is not what I want to talk about here. The thing that really caught my eye in Bobo’s piece was this part—the place where he inevitably tries to reconcile his grimly establishmentarian thesis with all the, you know, stuff he is supposed to support as the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Social Science. Just after writing that “for a faculty member to encourage civil disobedience on the part of students that violates University policies” is “extremely problematic” and should have “sanctionable limits,” he adds this:

Having said that, it is critically important that faculty play a role in educating students about the history and nature of social protest — its successes and failures, when it is ethical and when it is not. Boycotts, teach-ins, sit-ins, walk-outs, and marches are venerable tools for expressing grievances and pressuring institutions.
Students should learn about the premises that guide and undergird non-violent direct action protests. They should learn about making strategic choices of targets and proper or allowable modes of engagement. They must also learn from the example of heroic figures like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Congressman John Lewis to recognize and accept the fact that breaking the law is likely to involve consequences, including the risk of arrest.

After you have finished chuckling at the sheer pro forma-ness of Bobo’s gesture at the importance of protest—and at his care to mention that the important thing is educating students about protest, not actually doing any protests—please turn your attention to the final sentence, which I have helpfully rendered in bold type. This is a point that often gets thrust into these debates by those who want to be able to carry the mantle of Martin Luther King while simultaneously arguing for a conservative position. And it is always worthwhile to flag the fact that it is a rhetorical trick.

What I mean is this: Read this carefully and you will see that Bobo is transforming a description into an ethical prescription. To say that King and Lewis and all those who followed King’s version of nonviolent resistance accepted the fact that they would suffer consequences like arrests and beatings is a description of fact—they knew that that was a price they would have to pay in order to carry out their particular brand of protest strategy. But—here now is the trick—accepting that they would suffer consequences was not the lesson of their protest. It was not the point of their protest. It was not the moral value of their protest. It was, instead, an unfortunate side effect of their protest, an awful necessity, a scary injustice that they were forced to endure because they were protesting in violent and racist places. To accept the arrests and beatings with dignity was a tactic, and one that King used masterfully. But the consequences that the police and the local politicians and the segregated institutions inflicted on the civil rights protesters were not some great and valuable part of the moral landscape. They were still unjust! They were evidence of the very racism and violence and hardheadedness that the protesters were trying to fight against. They were bad!

Yet you will notice that the way that the historic example is being used here—and is used often by people who want to argue that MLK was good, but the civil disobedience that kids today are doing is bad—implies that accepting the consequences is part and parcel of the lesson that kids should learn from the movements of the past. This argument seeks to achieve an ethical cover for the institutions that call the cops on protesters: Hey, accepting the consequences is part of the protest. That’s bullshit. The consequences are unjust! We don’t look back at the Woolworth lunch counter managers who called the cops on sit-ins and say, “Good for them for teaching those kids that they must accept the consequences of their civil disobedience.” No! We say, “The brutal consequences that they inflicted served to highlight how wrong those people were to believe that the civil disobedience in question merited punishment.” Here you can see the fundamentally dishonest nature of those who claim to venerate the civil rights movement while also calling for protesters today to shut the fuck up. Just because protesters understand that they will suffer consequences does not make the consequences justified. The consequences are symptom of the injustice being protested. If you align yourself with the side that is calling the riot police on the students protesting for Gaza, for example, you don’t get to claim that you are on the side of the angels because MLK, too, was arrested by police, and so the arrests that the students suffer today will teach them a worthy lesson.

The lesson it will teach them is “This institution is unjust, as are the consequences I am being forced to suffer for pointing out that injustice.”

Rich and influential institutions like universities have many competing constituencies and are always trying to pacify multiple factions and those who run universities would certainly prefer if faculty members would shut the fuck up and not say critical things that might inspire news outlets to write stories with headlines like “Uproar Over Endowment Investments in Genocide Envelops Campus of Harvard, a Subsidiary of Citadel Investments.” It would be less of a headache, yeah.

I sympathize, on a human level, with wanting college professors to stop talking. But the urge to pretend that “suffer the consequences!” was a key lesson that Gandhi and MLK wanted to get across is very unhealthy. If a rule is unjust and you decide to break the rule to draw attention to the fact that it is unjust, the people who impose the penalty on you for breaking the unjust rule are not on the right side. They are on the side of injustice! The lesson of history’s great social justice movements is not “accept the consequences.” It is “fight for justice.” Yes, it is true that when you get involved in these movements, you might lose your job or get fined or get arrested or get smeared or get beaten up or even get officially sanctioned by the Dean of your department (Social Sciences). That stuff happens when you piss off powerful institutions. When it does happen, though, you can take heart in knowing that just because they are enforcing a rule doesn’t make them right. Don’t get it twisted.

The Hammer

Unions are the greatest tool we have to protect us from the poorly reasoned revenge fantasies of various authority figures. I recently wrote a book about the labor movement and its potential to save America. It’s called “The Hammer,” and you can order it here or buy it wherever books are sold. I will be speaking about the book in Rochester, NY this Thursday, in conversation with the great union organizer Richard Bensinger. The information is above, and I would love to see you there. I’m also speaking to a fundraising dinner in Louisville, KY this Saturday night, and you can purchase tickets for that here. If you can’t make it out to see me in person but would like to buy an autographed book, I’ll send you one for $40 via Paypal. Email me.

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