Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Prairie View A&M University/Getty Images
In the United States, calls for greater civility have generally come from the powerful while being aimed at the powerless. As UCLA professor Gaye Theresa Johnson noted on an NPR Code Switch episode, white people used civility as justification for slavery and the genocide of Indigenous peoples. In the early years of our nation, colonists called Indigenous tribes uncivil “savages” while perpetuating massacres that wiped out entire cultures.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, Black people were portrayed as incapable of higher orders of thought. Vulgar tall tales of Black men assaulting white women legitimized harm to Black men and enabled disregard of the all-too-frequent violence white men perpetrated against Black women. Professor Johnson observed in the NPR episode, “People of color don’t get to orchestrate the terms of civility. Instead, we’re always responding to what civility is supposed to be.”
Since 2016, the number of centers and programs designed to increase “civil dialogue” on college campuses has grown. Scholars and journalists attribute the increase to the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. This trend of prioritizing civility coincides with a rising focus on “polarization” in U.S. politics: the idea that both conservatives and liberals have become more extreme at generally the same rate and to the same damaging effects. Civil dialogue programs appear in a variety of places on campuses: as stand-alone university centers, as programs within individual schools, across the entire university curriculum, as external centers or from companies that provide workshops to institutions.
I have spent more than 10 years attending training workshops, reading communication and pedagogy research, and taking advice from my peers and students to improve my ability to help students thoughtfully engage with challenging topics. Yet, as I learned more about the rising focus on civility and dialogue on college campuses, I began to wonder how these ideas hang together.
As longtime readers of my column will know, I am fascinated by how power works in our world. That means that when I saw a wave of colleges and state legislatures invest their stretched budgets in centers and programs all focused on the same topic, I had to learn more. I wanted to know who runs the programs, how they run them and who funds them. (My need to better understand these centers led me to accept an invitation to join the advisory board of Uncivil, a research collective that explores the connections across these centers and programs.)
One of the things I learned was that the same sources funding humanities and civics centers on college campuses also back civil dialogue initiatives. Inside Higher Ed recently reported that when lawmakers established humanities and civics centers at colleges in Iowa, Utah and West Virginia, promoting “civil discourse” was part of their justification.
Republican lawmakers’ fervor for these programs hasn’t been reflected in student enrollments in some cases. This year we’ve seen headlines noting quite low enrollment for courses in the centers at the University of Iowa, West Virginia University and several institutions in Ohio. The lack of homegrown interest is likely why Iowa and Ohio have now mandated that students must take a set of courses through their institution’s center in order to graduate, even though these courses generally already exist in other departments.
Historian and podcast host Lauren Lassabe Shepherd has argued that civil dialogue programs and civics centers are generally all part of the same project, especially if one looks at who funds them. Undoubtedly some of the people funding (and running) these projects have good intentions, but there is a substantial group that appear to be using the prima facie neutrality of “civility” and “civics” to hide authoritarian motivations to repress social progress. Or what the Ohio legislator behind the bill that created the state’s civics centers and the newest bill mandating enrollment called “liberal bias.”
As I learned more about these various types of centers and programs, I kept feeling like I had heard about this type of project before. And I had.
Today, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (formerly the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists) is better known for aiding the careers of people like Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, columnist Ross Douthat (formerly at The New York Times and now at CBS’s 60 Minutes) and tech billionaire Peter Thiel, while helping to fund “alternative” college newspapers to provide conservative talking points to college students. However, the institute was created to, first and foremost, ensure that higher education curricular environments aligned more strongly with conservative goals.
Shepherd’s book Resistance From the Right highlights how ISI, under the guidance of founder Frank Chodorov and its first president, William F. Buckley Jr., focused on creating pipelines for conservative faculty and increasing access to books and lectures focused on Western civilization—in all its euphemistic glory—and conservative authors. They funded special fellowships that paid doctoral students’ tuition as well as living expenses. To expand the curriculum, they selected values-aligned speakers and funded their travel around the country. They also freely disseminated reading material (such as books and magazines) that promoted Western civilization and conservative values focused on the role of government, markets and society. Their goal was to reduce students’ interest in and commitment to “collectivist” values. This focus on the university happened because, as Shepherd told me recently, “The university is a gateway to culture, to political office, to sources of power.”
All this brings me back to civility. The reason that I kept being reminded of ISI’s past work is that the general purpose of these new centers and programs—fighting polarization—ultimately ties back to ISI’s goals of prioritizing and privileging conservative ideals. As the focus on political polarization in American society has increased, so has some scholars’ attempts to add nuance and unpack the idea. Vanderbilt University historian Nicole Hemmer wrote that “the polarization of U.S. politics was a deliberate project: over the past fifty years, right-wing activists within the GOP labored tirelessly to move the party to the right.”
One of the foremost scholars in the United States on political polarization, Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, published an exceptional article earlier this month wherein she noted, “The current level of political animosity is exactly what one would expect to see if an extremist faction attempted to rescind the hard-earned rights of the vast majority of the country’s citizens.” She went on to explain that “when we focus on polarization as the problem, the solution is for everyone to quiet down and be ‘civil’—an outcome that benefits those who are willing to grab as much power as they can without concern for legality or civility.
“When we see the problem for what it is, the solution is to defend the most robust social progress in American history,” Mason said.
We should be asking ourselves: When is civility useful and when is it a canard for oppression? When is anger a detriment and when is it a righteous tool? Two hundred years ago, it would have been illegal in my home state of Virginia for me to learn to read in group settings. Practically, that meant that I, and any other Black person, could have been imprisoned and whipped for the grave act of learning to read while excessively melanated (though, as many scholars have shown, private citizens would have been the most likely group to deliver the punishment). It was not increased civility across American society that changed that discrimination. That would take a Civil War and Black Virginians pushing for an end to the prohibition.
Audre Lorde once said, “I speak out of direct and particular anger at an academic conference, and a white woman says, ‘Tell me how you feel but don’t say it too harshly or I cannot hear you.’ But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change?” Discerning when civility is being used as a convenient mask for attacks against social progress requires our dedicated effort. But we owe it to our students and to ourselves to do whatever we can to pierce those pernicious veils.
(I always encourage folks to read the work I cite and judge the authors’ ideas for themselves, but I especially encourage it for Mason’s article on political polarization. Read it in full, whether or not you agree with me.)
