To expand on the other commenter who posted the 'bullying' article I think the flipside of this idea is also important to remember: Harassment is not a critici

To expand on the other commenter who posted the 'bullying' article I think the flipside of this idea is also important to remember: Harassment is not a criticism of ideas. I work in academia, there are good ideas and bad ideas. There are good and bad discussions of good and bad ideas. There are well formed and also poorly formed critiques. Rarely can you simply categorize something into only one category. All of these are separate from bad faith actors and asshole colleagues. My general rule is if someone feels the need to end their 'critique' by explicitly stating it is a criticism not harassment, its probably harassment. If it wasn't, the criticism would speak for itself and stand on its own. The simplified and mythicized narratives of how scholarship works and the increasing esotericism of some fields discourse leave them increasingly open to bad faith attacks. To the letter you posted, you can easily find signs of what I am talking about: >"First, if there’s an institutionalized rule that criticism of academic work is harassment, how would Critical Theory, which is entirely predicated on criticizing existing systems, have emerged? " This is a straw man, no such idea was proposed in the original article. Instead, what the original author did was draw clear bounded lines between critique and sicking the twitter verse on academics you disagree with and noting that Prof. Boghossian did the later and claimed it as the former. >"Ruth’s article criticizes my use of Twitter, but criticism of academic ideas should not be locked wholly behind the paywalls of scholarly journals because ideas coming out of the academy affect everybody. Beyond the academic merits of open inquiry and free discourse, the public has a right to know what’s happening in universities — especially in public universities like Portland State. One reason I use Twitter is to inform the public of what is going on in university classrooms and in what counts these days as academic scholarship." Subtle but critical in here is a shift from critiquing ideas in academia, in the first sentence, to this entirely different idea of 'revealing the truth' in the last one. If he was engaged in sincere critique, this paragraph wouldn't end the way it does. It is a transition from purporting to criticize ideas and engage in scholarly work to trying to shame universities for treating certain people's work as scholarship in the first place. Its gatekeeping as opposed to critique. In other words, reading this as an academic, this is weaponized and knowing bad faith that relies on the (often unfortunate) simplifications that academics have allowed to perpetuate about what is and is not scholarship. Put it this way, the original article only mentioned people by name once, and used their full name. The response used the original authors first name repeatedly. That is an intentional slight, especially when deployed against female academics, and the author knows it.