However distant from academic norms the document at issue may be, university writing engages it on a field of its own device, an institutional site of articulation to which it must remain congruent, a specific history to which it must remain transparent, if it is to allow the document to come forth as science. For a vicious circle neutralizes its written academic objectification. What happens to reading and writing in the university field, to our reading and our writing, touches us very nearly. But it is the lack of agreedupon criteria for assessing even agreedupon criteria for these procedures that makes discussions of the university institution so prone to polemic. Something more and deeper than the touchiness of immediate concern governs this inevitability, something inscribed in the very situation of the inquiry.
Polemics are an aggressive engagement at the edges of politeness.
Polemical language, lifting away from the reasoning that produced its conclusions, is freed to wield its coercive force, and can easily enough fall into an unpleasant tone. Beneath polemic's constant invocation and transgression of argumentative standards, the larger, vaguer notion of tone raises questions of propriety, of where linguistic aggression or rhetorical domination is legitimate and where it becomes wrong. It is Kant who raises explicitly the question of a particular tone appropriate to rational inquiry, a tone he heard distorted in the texts of various Christianizing Platonists. The appropriate tone has practical implications for Kant as well. At the start of his late discussion of the university, The Conflict of the Faculties , Kant objects to the heavyhanded censorship efforts of Woellner, Friedrich Wilhelm II's Minister of Justice, who had in 1794 invoked royal displeasure to silence Kant's rational theology.