On Being Receptive: Listening and Compliance on a University Campus

ABSTRACT How should you listen when you hear about harms in interpersonal life, such as sexual harassment or anti‐Black racism? Across a range of sites on a university campus, from bystander intervention workshops to reporting systems for sex‐ and gender‐based misconduct, we spotlight the way “listening” is mobilized to address harms of various kinds. The desired form of listening is one that is always attentive and responsive but not deliberative: that does not question or challenge the truth value of what people say but instead validates and supports. This register of listening—alert, responsive, “validational”—is an important way in which this university tries to shape interpersonal conduct at scale, for thousands of students along with faculty and staff, in the name of ethical compliance. Listening in this way is a key facet, capacity, and technique of a larger compliance infrastructure, where universities use self‐regulatory practices to manage risk in the face of external, especially federal, oversight. Although this compliance infrastructure claims the mantle of the ethical, we close by gesturing toward its contested ethical status.