When Accountability Stops Being Reciprocal

A conversation can change its character without changing its vocabulary. People continue to speak of evidence, openness, fairness, and accountability. Yet one participant has acquired the power to interpret the other’s motives, while the other has acquired an obligation to defend them. An argument becomes a question about the person making it. An objection to that interpretation becomes evidence of defensiveness. A request to pause becomes evidence of unwillingness to answer.

The decisive change is in the distribution of authority. What began as a shared search for understanding now proceeds with an arbiter and a defendant. One person’s interpretation governs the exchange, including what counts as an acceptable response to it.

Accountability becomes a means of domination when the authority to demand explanations is insulated from the obligation to give them. The practical test is whether a judgment’s grounds can be examined and its errors corrected. A decision may survive scrutiny and remain adverse. The failure occurs when the process protects the judgment from the very responses that could expose a mistake.

Reciprocity does not require identical roles. A complainant, an investigator, and a decision maker properly have different responsibilities. It requires the consequential use of authority to remain answerable. Mark Bovens’s account of institutional accountability makes the relationship concrete: an actor explains conduct to a forum able to question and judge, with possible consequences for the actor. That structure also makes it possible to ask who examines the forum’s own exercise of power.^[1]

This essay examines pressures against scrutiny and failures of accountability in selected university and progressive-organizing settings, where equality and open inquiry are among the commitments invoked to justify authority. The criticism follows from those commitments themselves. Individual cases can reveal a mechanism; surveys can illuminate the conditions around it. Neither establishes a uniform culture or a uniquely progressive human weakness. The question throughout is what happens when someone challenges a consequential judgment.

How an accusation protects itself

Questioning a claim and making a claim about its author are different intellectual acts. Someone can reasonably remain unconvinced without preparing a counter-essay. But an assertion that the author is dishonest, prejudiced, manipulative, or authoritarian introduces an additional proposition. That proposition needs support of its own.

The problem begins when these acts are treated as interchangeable. Disagreement is taken to disclose a motive; the motive discredits the disagreement; resistance to that description then confirms it. The accusation supplies both the verdict and the rules for interpreting the defense. Ralph H. Johnson’s principle of vulnerability identifies the relevant intellectual obligation: an argument must remain exposed to legitimate criticism.^[2] Rejecting an objection after considering it differs from treating the objection’s existence as grounds for disqualifying the objector.

After David Shor’s expulsion from the Progressphiles professional network, correspondence reproduced by Jonathan Chait shows requests for evidence about alleged harassment being criticized as insensitive. One participant recommended private objections to moderators.^[3] The episode illustrates a moral cost attached to public scrutiny, without establishing that confidential review was unavailable.

A denial is not automatically persuasive. Neither is it automatically evidence of guilt. Testimony, context, and patterns of conduct can all support an accusation. The question is what they establish beyond the circular inference that resistance proves the charge, and whether relevant contrary evidence can change the conclusion. A judgment about harmful conduct may be warranted without proof of malicious intent; it still needs a defensible account of the conduct and the standard being applied.

The obligation to answer also needs a scope. A person who limits how much explanatory work they will undertake may be accused of trying to dictate what the other person believes. In ordinary conversation, deciding when to stop speaking does not decide what anyone else must believe. Both parties can remain unconvinced. A pause alone should not manufacture a character verdict. Formal responsibilities are different: an employee or officeholder may owe specified answers within a legitimate process. But even that process needs a defined question and an endpoint. An indefinite obligation to establish one’s moral acceptability leaves a person permanently on the defensive without saying what would discharge the obligation.

When an institution gives an interpretation official standing, the consequences can extend to employment, participation, or reputation. The quality of the procedure then matters independently of the sincerity of those involved.

When an institution adopts the judgment

At Hamline University in October 2022, art-history instructor Erika López Prater showed historical Islamic depictions of Muhammad after giving advance warnings. An informal offer of spring teaching was withdrawn, and an administrator subsequently described the classroom display as Islamophobic. An inquiry by the American Association of University Professors found failures of investigation and opportunity to respond, and no legitimate academic rationale supplied for the nonrenewal. It regarded the connection between the classroom incident and the withdrawal as strongly supported by the circumstances, rather than conclusively established.^[4]

The report also documents what happened when religion professor Mark Berkson questioned the governing interpretation. He asked how an injunction to trust Muslims on Islamophobia should apply when Muslim scholars themselves disagreed. His intervention was curtailed. An administrator later condemned a faculty member’s “repugnant and repulsive need to be ‘right,’” referring, the inquiry concluded, to Berkson.^[4]

That sequence reaches the central issue. The institution had to consider a substantive disagreement about the classification of an educational act. Official disapproval instead attached to a colleague’s effort to examine that classification. Respect for a group cannot resolve disagreement within the group about what respect requires; someone must explain why one interpretation should govern the institution’s action.

In January 2023, Hamline retracted the charge of Islamophobia. That correction matters, as does its timing.^[4] The relevant distinction is between a usable opportunity to challenge a judgment before its consequences harden and a correction secured after a public controversy. An institution’s capacity to recover from error deserves recognition; it does not make the earlier exercise of authority adequate.

What the institution loses

Some of the clearest accounts of the damage come from progressive organizers themselves. In his 2022 essay “Building Resilient Organizations,” Maurice Mitchell, then national director of the Working Families Party, describes strategic differences becoming judgments of corruption, cowardice, or inadequate commitment. He criticizes using identity and prestigious moral terminology to shield positions from examination. His concern is the capacity of progressive organizations to carry out their purposes: internal conflict can absorb the attention and discipline needed for effective collective action.^[5]

Tema Okun warns against weaponizing her own “White Supremacy Culture” framework. She reproduces a facilitator’s account of communications work brought to a halt after staff identified editing as white supremacist, and rejects using the framework to target individuals. Her warning distinguishes using a framework to understand a problem from using it to establish another person’s inadequacy.^[6]

LeeAnn Hall, Libero Della Piana, and Daniel Martinez HoSang describe a white staff member accusing a Native leader of anti-Blackness for discussing tribal sovereignty without discussing Black people. Their account shows how a personal accusation can displace the substantive question of how commitments to tribal sovereignty and opposition to anti-Blackness should inform the organization’s work.^[7] That question becomes especially pressing when several communities have claims at stake.

Authority to describe an experience, authority to interpret its causes, and authority to impose a consequence are distinct. People reporting harm may possess knowledge that others have ignored. Taking that knowledge seriously requires listening and investigation; it does not eliminate the need to assess competing explanations or justify a remedy. Otherwise, the institution risks privileging the account most readily recognized by its decision makers while overlooking other affected people.

A framework may illuminate a real injustice and still be applied in ways that block correction. Its stated purpose cannot guarantee the quality of every judgment made in its name. The declared ideal can remain available to justify arrangements that defeat it, as those administering a common standard acquire exemptions from the scrutiny they demand of others. When an accusation acquires immunity from scrutiny, it weakens the institution’s ability to distinguish supported complaints from mistaken ones. That failure can injure the people the institution intends to protect as well as those it judges.

The intellectual cost is specific. Instead of asking which strategy works, what a proposal implies, or whether an argument is valid, participants must first establish that they are the kind of people entitled to ask. Moral standing becomes a prerequisite for substantive participation, while its criteria remain under someone else’s control. A meeting can continue and an institution can issue a statement even as the work that justified the encounter has stopped.

Why the pattern can persist

Moral conviction can make scrutiny seem less necessary precisely when it matters most. In experimental scenarios studied by Linda Skitka and David Houston, beliefs about a defendant’s guilt or innocence could dominate judgments of fairness, diminishing the importance of how the outcome was reached. The scenarios supplied information about guilt, whereas real institutions must often establish disputed facts themselves.^[8] The danger arises when decision makers treat their confidence as sufficient reason to dispense with safeguards that could test it.

Accountability itself can reinforce this problem. An experiment by Philip Tetlock, Linda Skitka, and Richard Boettger found that anticipated scrutiny could encourage more complex consideration before commitment when an audience’s views were unknown. When those views were known, it could encourage alignment; after commitment, it could encourage defensive justification.^[9] A subsequent review by Jennifer Lerner and Tetlock explains why the effects of accountability depend on how it is arranged.^[10] Asking an official to examine evidence before deciding differs from asking the same official to defend a public verdict. An institution can be responsive to an audience demanding action while remaining unanswerable to the person affected.

Research on employee voice and silence supplies broader evidence that power, anticipated reactions, and perceived openness affect whether concerns are expressed.^[11] A plausible reinforcing process follows. A charged accusation creates an immediate reputational problem. Examining its context takes time and may attract criticism of its own. Distancing the institution from the accused can offer a quicker visible resolution. Observers learn which questions are expensive to raise; their silence may then be mistaken for agreement. A minority able to impose costs can deter a larger number who privately disagree. This sequence is a hypothesis about institutional incentives, not an established explanation of the cases discussed here.

Comparable individual dispositions can produce unequal institutional effects when some participants have greater power to turn their interpretations into consequences. The prevailing outlook may then pass as a neutral baseline whose assumptions need no defense. Dissenters, including insiders who contest how shared commitments are applied, must defend both their position and their standing to question that baseline. This need not reflect a uniquely intolerant disposition. Honeycutt and Freberg’s faculty survey found greater hostility reported by conservatives alongside similar liberal and conservative stated willingness to disadvantage ideological opponents.^[12] Waytz, Young, and Ginges found American partisans attributing more benevolent motives to their own side’s involvement in conflict than to the other’s.^[13]

Research on political expression supplies further context. A UW–Madison survey experiment found less favorable hypothetical hiring responses to particular conservative than liberal statements; content and perceived professional relevance remain possible explanations.^[14] FIRE’s faculty surveys found greater reported concealment among conservatives, although low voluntary response limits generalization.^[15][16] In a different setting, a correspondence experiment found no statistically significant partisan difference in replies to prospective graduate students mentioning work for Obama or McCain.^[17] These studies do not directly test whether consequential judgments can be challenged or corrected.

The pressure need not make dissent literally unsayable. In his proposed preface to Animal Farm, “The Freedom of the Press,” Orwell examined voluntary censorship and prevailing orthodoxy within a society that retained substantial intellectual freedom.^[18] The relevant question is what happens to people who use the freedom formally available to them.

Making judgment answerable

An organization may legitimately require commitment to its mission; a university may assess professional competence and conduct. Those judgments need an intelligible connection between the standard, the relevant evidence, and the decision. The institution must also be able to defend its purposes and standards; explaining how an unjust rule was applied cannot make the rule just. Unequal outcomes do not themselves establish unfairness. A defective process does not establish the accused person’s innocence, just as a correct conclusion does not excuse every method used to enforce it. The authority must explain and defend its exercise of power.

The demand that work speak for itself is a demand for relevant assessment. Proofs need checking, methods need criticism, and conflicts of interest may matter. A judgment about the work should identify relevant grounds in the work or conduct; presumed moral allegiance cannot substitute for that assessment.

Stanford Law School’s response to the disruption of Judge Kyle Duncan’s 2023 appearance offers an example of reasoned institutional restraint. Dean Jenny Martinez explained why administrators charged with enforcing the disruption policy should not use that role to question whether an invited speaker was worth hearing. She also explained the decision against individual student discipline in those circumstances, citing difficulty distinguishing protected protest from punishable disruption and mixed signals from administrators. Her memorandum defended lawful protest and announced mandatory educational programming on free speech and professional norms, while expressly allowing disagreement with its content and her own reasoning.^[19]

The memorandum’s strength lies in applying constraints across the conflict. Protecting the speaker did not require indiscriminate punishment of protesters. Correcting administrative failure did not require pretending that every participant had acted well. It made the institution’s reasoning available for scrutiny, including its account of its own responsibilities and failures.

Some of the same discipline appears in Mitchell’s constructive proposals: clear decision-making structures, leadership accountable to organizational purpose, and collective bargaining that clarifies responsibilities and provides a shared basis for resolving disputes.^[5] Formal authority can be easier to question when people know where decisions are made and how they can be challenged. Leaving authority unnamed does not prevent its exercise.

Several requirements follow. State the conduct at issue and the applicable standard. Separate established facts from disputed interpretations, including inferences about motive. Explain what evidence or reasoning could change the conclusion. Give the affected person a meaningful opportunity to respond and provide review by someone able to reconsider the decision without having to defend their own prior verdict. Match any sanction to the conduct actually established. The explanation and the safeguards should be proportionate to the consequences. A private disagreement cannot require the machinery appropriate to a decision affecting someone’s livelihood.

These protections must work for complainants as well. People reporting abuse may face disbelief, retaliation, and exhausting demands to repeat their account. Evidence can be examined through a fair confidential process without requiring a public encounter between complainant and accused. Urgent protective measures can be provisional, with a specified basis and prompt review, rather than presented as final findings. A meaningful process must be usable by people without the time, status, or resources to force a public controversy.

Review also needs an endpoint. A reasoned adverse decision may stand after a fair opportunity to contest it; new evidence can justify reopening it. Where the institution finds that it made a consequential error, correction must address what the error did. A quiet amendment may be inadequate after a public accusation. The responsibility to account for a judgment includes repairing its avoidable effects as far as possible.

In ordinary relationships, where explanations have already been offered, further questions should identify what remains unresolved rather than silently reset the conversation to an evidential blank slate. The freedom to pause and the possibility of correction can coexist: neither gives anyone unlimited access to another person’s time or immunity for their own consequential claims.

The common principle runs from the smallest exchange to the largest institution: the power to require an account must carry a responsibility to account for its own use. An accusation should not confer immunity from scrutiny, and an appeal to fairness should not decide in advance who is permitted to judge whom. The same standard binds criticism of the institution itself.

Equality requires more than distributing the power to judge. It requires making judgment itself answerable.