It s no wonder that other university citizens often meekly fall into line. It ought to now be apparent why standards of decorous speech appropriate for dinner parties do not apply to universities. The former involves taking pleasure in the company of people as they are. Universities exist precisely to make people other than what they are. In social encounters we take care to observe limits, but higher education aims to stretch those limits.
Polite conversation conveys information, but university discourse effects transformation.
The preceding is not to be taken as an encomium to the purity of the Ivory Tower. In universities at least as much as anywhere else, vast floods of words pour forth to no useful end. Nothing would be lost if they had died aborning. However, internally or externally imposed measures to modulate that flow stifle the creativity sustained by free discourse. They transform universities into institutions that carry the name but lack the essence.