Freshman Required Courses: Courtesy 101, Empathy 102, or You & Internet Law

(Sorry for the longer than usual post).

           

Maybe this is just me, but any time someone sets up a task force, I figure they’ve either got to appear like something’s happening, or they’re in a rush to get it to happen.

Such was the case at Rutgers University, when the suicide of freshman Tyler Clementi ignited a national—no, global—scrutiny of civility, bullying, and the ethics of the Millennial generation (of which my daughter is a member).

In their response, Rutgers set up their own Civility Project. Several universities have them: P.M. Forni, the guy heading up the Rutgers project, was key to the one at Johns Hopkins.

For about a week I tracked the commentary thread on a particularly inflammatory op-ed piece in Rutgers’ student-run paper, The Daily Targum, and it was anything but a civil discourse, with disagreements devolving to infantile profanity and name-calling (eg, "ur a d*#k"). But in this regard, the now-commonplace phenom of abusing those who disagree with us is not limited to Rutgers students or even Millennials, given how easy it is to fire off venom from the safe anonymity of one’s computer.

This year was interesting for me as a consultant, because more and more I’ve been asked to speak on the value of workplace civility—in one case, to a group with a notorious workplace bully in a position of power.

What does all this mean for the current American workplace?

• Schoolyard bullies generally evolve into workplace bullies. The nature of their victims changes, however. Whereas schoolyard bullies tend to pick on kids who seem vulnerable or different, workplace bullies target personable, competent, popular achievers—and usually drive real talent away from the organization.

• The inability of any generation to hold civil discourse means there’ll be more conflicts—especially at work, where process disagreements are bound to occur. It wasn’t just that the Targum commentary thread got ugly, but that both the comments and the op-ed piece were inarticulate. Aside from spelling and grammatical errors, the sentiments were badly expressed and seemed (un)hinged on the belief that disagreement was a green light for reality-TV-style flying off the handle. There are conflicts that clear the air, strengthen relationships, and fix process bugs: this type of disagreement is not that.

How you handle yourself in conflict is considered part of your skillset. If you can’t articulate yourself in written or spoken words when you have a serious point to make, how can you expect to advance in your profession?

• Very little has been said about the role of the bystander. All week, it’s haunted me that few ever speak up for the victims of bullying—very likely because school administrators and workplace leaders are so passive about addressing it, everyone fears retribution from the bully. And yet some change might begin if only two or three people stood up to the bully on the victim’s behalf and said, “Stop it. Just stop it. This is abuse. We’re colleagues, this is not acceptable, and if it happens again we will do something about it.”

Why do bullying and incivility continue? My gut tells me bullies will always be with us, in every generation, because there will always be weak, frightened, attention-seeking individuals who need that rush of power over someone else.

What can and should be changed are the way we respond to bullying and incivility, and the environmental variables that foster these terrible behaviors. Add in too, the manner and speed with which transgressions are addressed. (At this writing, Rutgers’ Civility Project is a two-year commitment, and a recent Targum poll posed the question, “Should the University implement safeguards against Internet abuse in residence halls?” . . . Hmm. You tell me if these are durable solutions.)

As for civility itself, that white tiger of human values, all I can say is that whether or not you enact a task force to restore it to your workplace, ultimately, inevitably, it boils down to one person and how you choose to respond, especially in the face of conflict and disagreement. And, like the white tiger, it's a beautiful thing when glimpsed and experienced.

Caril and Charlie, Holly and Kit, Ravi and Michelle

Finally on Saturday night I caught a movie I wasn't permitted to see back in 1973 when it first released, which I haven't seen in the years going from 15 to 52. And, as Lauren Bacall once said, any time you see an old movie for the first time, it's really a new movie.

Pretty ironic, to finally watch "Badlands." Martin Sheen is lean and gorgeous, playing a small-town hustler who's so desperate for a sense of importance, he fixates on other men's hats as a way of adding to his own stature. There is foreshadowing of the bad boy Charlie Sheen played later in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," but the character of Kit is neither irreverent nor iconoclastic. This guy's an outright psycho, trigger-happy and self-involved, all the more because it's dressed up with a chilling good-ole boy courtesy—meaning he'll open the door for you after he's shot you in the back and sees you're staggering to get out of the sun.

And then there's Sissy Spacek, ostensibly a small-town good girl, so virginal she grabs her schoolbooks after Kit's shot her father, before she hops into the car to join Kit on a cross-country killing spree. His shootings garner little more than an eye roll, as if she's saying, "Oh, there you go again." She doesn't concern herself with the same social niceties as Kit. On the surface she seems passive, strangely dead-assed, but her voice-over sounds so much like a cheap novel, you realize this kid's got some twisted pathologies as well.

Why so ironic? Because these two are so desensitized and self-absorbed, I couldn't help thinking of Ravi and Michelle, the two Rutgers students who so cruelly outed a fellow classmate, he committed suicide last month rather than face what they'd done to his life. Like their prototypes, Caril Fugate and Charlie Starkweather, Kit and Holly invaded a rich man's home and went through his things.

They relied on a gun, whereas Ravi and Michelle had video cams and the Internet. Back then they put Starkweather in the electric chair, then wrote off the spree killers as a grotesque blip on the social radar. Nobody wanted to contemplate a world routinely populated with Starkweathers, no more than we want to think maybe kids like Ravi and Michelle aren't anomalies but part of a norm — kids who are bright and promising, but utterly lacking in empathy and compassion. Academic excellence with zero character. No one who would say, "Ravi, you're being a first-class jerk. Nothing good will come of this. Stop it now or I'll do something to stop it."

We lament the bullies but don't ask, "Where are the kids who risk social censure to protect the vulnerable and stand up to bullies?" What is done to support them? (Meanwhile prosecutors are muddling, "Is this a hate crime? Is it merely invasion of privacy? What is it, exactly?")

One imagines Ravi finding himself center stage among his mates, a temporary king of comedy. Nothing else could explain the audacity of his Twitter posts. Little is yet known about Michelle Wei, but could she have been a seemingly passive sidekick whose pathologies found a catalyst in Ravi? Did they really think Tyler Clementi would join them later in laughing about it all, like one of Ashton Kutcher's "Punk'd" episodes? that he wouldn't mind their invasions? because whether the invasion is done with a gun or a Twitter account, it's still all about violence, and I'm not sure the Ravis and Michelles of our times get that. We still think "real" violence is meted with physical blows, maybe from a gun.