VIRGINIA POSTREL: There’s More Than One Kind of Workplace Civility: The sexual harassment scandal is changing social norms. Let the new ones respect human variety.

In a provocative essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller argues that campus speech codes penalize people with Asperger’s syndrome, who have trouble reading social cues yet are often brilliant researchers for whom the university has traditionally been a tolerant haven. “The more ‘respectful,’ campuses became to the neurotypical, the more alienating they became to the neurodivergent,” Miller writes. . . .

Even neurotypical people can, of course, inadvertently be caught by rules against such vague and arbitrary offenses as “unwelcome jokes about a protected characteristic,” to take an example from the University of New Mexico, where Miller works. Disparate impact isn’t the only factor that makes speech codes a bad idea.

But Miller is making a deeper point about norms and exclusion. Strict standards inevitably shut out potentially valuable deviants. “Eccentricity is a precious resource, easily wasted,” he writes. . . .

The norms appropriate to a research university devoted to advancing knowledge aren’t necessarily the same as those for a teaching college nurturing undergraduates. We shouldn’t demand that cutting-edge researchers all be socially adept, but maybe we should keep some of them away from 20-year-old students. Not every workplace needs to welcome pets or expect after-hours socializing, but that doesn’t mean none should — even if the dog haters and teetotalers feel left out.

We don’t demand propriety in a stand-up comedian. But we do expect it in a judge.

Actually, nowadays we do demand it in comedians. And the rules change constantly, and are applied retrospectively. Because fairness!