None of your beeswax!

The lost art of keeping your opinions to yourself

The phrase “none of your business” used to be a helpful and normal thing to say (if a bit more awkward than “I prefer not to say”) to protect your privacy from intrusive questions. The more child-friendly version when I was growing up in New England was “none of your beeswax.”

My new piece “The Noxiousness of Civic-Discourse Platforms” out today in Chronicle of Higher Ed looks at the systematic dismantling of any sphere of privacy or even intellectual autonomy by colleges and universities aiming to prove “viewpoint diversity.” The current obsession with civic discourse platforms is doing students great harm, I argue. Colleges used to be interested in fostering professional maturity, instilling a certain sense of decorum to go along with the gowns and floppy hats. There is dignity in reticence, or at least knowing how to perform reserve and restraint.

But campuses these days seem to see self-censorship as a problem to be fixed, not a habit of mind that is often a professional necessity. I’ve stood in front of classrooms for over three decades without revealing to my students my personal or political views. I would never ask them theirs. Yet enter, stage right, two enticing new platforms, Sway and Dialogues:

These platforms work by pairing students with opposing viewpoints on controversial topics (abortion, gun control, immigration, Israel-Palestine, climate change) and “facilitating” conversations through text chat or live video. They begin by “sorting” students into positions so that they can be paired with someone with “opposite” positions. Sway’s pre-chat survey requires that students “rate” their agreement or disagreement on a seven-point scale. “None of your business” is not an option. Students must indicate how “confident” (read: “moveable”) they are in these opinions. Then, flashy new AI tools moderate and guide the discussion, generating assessments based on peer ratings and self-reported outcomes. Afterward, students complete surveys rating their partner’s reasoning, listening skills, curiosity, and respectfulness. Everything, it seems, is documented.

Am I being a Boomer here? Is knee-jerk protection of my private thoughts from compelled transparency an older generation thing? Once again, I think of Erving Goffman’s civil inattention, the concept of granting one another a degree of indifference to facilitate coexistence. Why do universities keep trying to replace this harmony-producing practice with demands to say what you’re thinking or else?

Both Sway and Dialogues have sold universities on the idea that on top of all the other metrics and data being collected, they need now to elicit students’ political beliefs as raw material for institutional assessment. These apps seem to be drawing on “affective polarization” research that recommends “intergroup contact” to reduce social friction and sees student anxieties about political speech as psychological. Instead of “safe spaces” we have “brave spaces” to speak your beliefs. Then you can be “matched” with someone with “opposed” beliefs. Who thought this up? The only appropriate response is “none of your goddamned beeswax.”

College students fought for the right to tell their colleges and universities that their religious and political views were none of anyone’s business. This effectively ended in loco parentis in the 1960s. The whole point was for students to explore ideas uncertainly, perhaps hold provisional opinions at 2:00 am in a dorm room conversation and change their minds by noon, without anyone telling anyone’s parents. It’s enough that cell phone cameras have made the holding of provisional opinions problematic. But I didn’t expect institutions to join so eagerly with the surveillance state so they could crow “look at our viewpoint diversity!”

Ideally some young influencers will start a “just say no” to Sway and Dialogues, neither of which allows a refusal to answer. I worry that the Institute for Citizens and Scholars’ “Gen Z Civic Vibe Check” report justifies institutional meddling. The private sphere seems to be a problem for administrators to solve. They assume hesitation to enter public life is a lack of skills or confidence; they ignore the possibility that silence could be a deliberate choice to maintain privacy. Apparently 42% of teenagers are motivated to participate by the hope of college admissions. Talk about encouraging a fake, transactional sincerity. I’d prefer to train students how to politely say they’d prefer to keep their personal views to themselves.

What is the professional cost of not teaching students that much of their adult lives will be spent in environments where airing political beliefs isn’t appropriate?

Most employers need graduates who put their views and feelings aside at work. By training students to communicate their views and the views of others, these initiatives are misleading students about the importance of personal views in the workplace, compared to needs such as weighing evidence, understanding policy, balancing the needs of a customer and a company’s bottom line.

You actually don’t want your nurse or your mail carrier or your computer repair person or your accountant to be wearing a political button proclaiming a view opposed to yours and to query you about your views. You want them to be focusing on the task at hand.

Unlike debate clubs, which measure performance on the ability to marshal evidence and speak persuasively, these platforms measure personal change. Because so much of civic and professional life requires the bracketing of personal beliefs, the emphasis of these platforms does students a disservice.

As a Boomer I see everywhere an alarming absence of the social tact necessary for adulthood. My complaint against professors who wear their political views on their sleeves is that they are modeling poor behavior to their students.

And yet, overly-political professors aside, the infrastructure for developing good judgment already exists within the traditional faculty-student relationship. Faculty already require students to analyze conflicting data and build complex arguments. Forget the apps. Pay faculty more and reduce class sizes.

For nostalgic sorts advocating a return to dressing up on airplanes as respectful and dignified social behavior, reclaiming “none of your beeswax” will do a world of good. The ability to understand boundaries and to decline to answer a personal question is a vital professional and intellectual skill. The preservation of the private sphere is essential for the maintenance of a society that values the freedom of thought.

If the goal is to build good judgment, colleges must first recognize that training students to see intellectual life as a high-stakes performance of “my beliefs” versus “your beliefs” is a mistake. We need to train students in the skills that employers actually need: the ability to put aside personal views, analyze a complex problem, weigh probabilistic evidence, and make a decision under constraints.

Without the right to privacy, both the university and the nation cease to be sites of free intellectual exploration. Nobody wants to return to compulsory political performance and secular tests of devotion. Reclaiming the right to remain unprobed is the foundation of the liberal university model.