How can this history itself be critiqued in writing? 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. Peggy Kamuf, considering Locke’s essay of 1693, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, observes that "his treatise is polemical, and in this it shares what seems to be an inevitable mark of the genre, a condition that will have remained more or less constant from Plato to his latterday disciple, Allan Bloom." 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. In reviewing recent discussions of the University, Bill Readings remarks on "a question of tone," and identifies a shift between "mellifluent pomposity consequent on entire selfsatisfaction" characteristic of considerations earlier in the century, and the "vitriolic complaint" that shows up in contemporary discussions. 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 works of a certain Schlosser and a Count zu Stolberg provoked from Kant the polemical essay, "On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy." "At bottom," Kant finishes there, "all philosophy is indeed prosaic; and the suggestion that we should now start to philosophize poetically would be just as welcome as the suggestion that a businessman should in the future no longer write his accounts in prose, but rather in verse." 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. Even if heresy was abroad in the land, Kant feels, there was no call not to have combated it quietly in the university, with argument and pedagogy, "for young clergymen had tuned their sermons to such a tone that no one with a sense of humor would let himself be converted by such teachers." Governing both philosophers and clergymen, the question of an appropriate tone transcends the distinction between speculative and practical employments of reason.