Link and Wu and Liu and Havel still resonate–now in a different context:
As Vaclav Havel had noticed in Czechoslovakia, there are fissures in any society, no matter how totalitarian, and inside them a citizen can be civil. Treating each other with dignity, people together can push upward and outward to expand the scope of a citizens’ culture that contrasts with the harsh official culture, and can reach to people “inside the system”— why not? If the authorities lash back, citizens should not fight but retreat, wait a while, then reoccupy the lost ground, perhaps going a bit further. This strategy can win in the long run because the garden-variety moral values of the populace are on its side, not the side of the regime.
If fissures exist in any society, do scholarly institutions have fissures too? And are dignity and civility the right choice?