"But what exactly is civility�and is it a prerequisite for a vibrant intellectual climate?"

Asks Joan W. Scott in "The New Thought Police/Why are campus administrators invoking civility to silence critical speech?"

As with all polemic, tweets can be satirical, ironic, blasphemous, outrageous. To read them literally is often to misread them, as was the case with one of the tweets most often invoked to indict [Steven] Salaita as an anti-Semite...

The medium of Twitter is complicated because it provides a public space for private, personal expression. In one sense, it is no different from a speaker�s rostrum at an antiwar rally or any other highly charged political event....

Twitter disrupts this careful separation of the hidden and the acceptable, blurring the boundaries by offering a public forum for venting private feelings. In so doing, it makes the hidden visible and seems to reveal the �true� nature of the tweeter�the reality ordinarily concealed by the rules of decorum and politesse. They may not realize it, but those... who take tweets to be indicators of the �real� nature of the tweeter (and so the ultimate proof of his or her unfitness as a teacher and colleague) are also acknowledging the limits, if not the inauthenticity, of civility as a form not only of political but also of intellectual exchange. For some members of the UIUC faculty, as for the chancellor, the tweets exposed the underlying premises of Salaita�s scholarly work, the hidden transcript of his articles and books. The tweets became not an easily compartmentalized instance of extramural speech (and so of the First Amendment right of the scholar as citizen), but the key to the entire body of his work and to the unacceptability of the politics that informed it....

Much more at the link (which goes to The Nation).