Civility Needs to Return to Higher Education
According to The Institute for Civility in Government, civility is “about more than just politeness, although politeness is a necessary first step. It is about disagreeing without disrespect, seeking common ground as a starting point for dialogue about differences, listening past one’s preconceptions, and teaching others to do the same.”
If we go by current events in academia it seems that civility has all but been lost. We see students actively impeding or shouting out at outside speakers just because those guests do not adhere to a particular “party line,” a pure version of a particular ideology, or are not always considered “politically correct” enough. We also see some speakers coming to campuses whose main motivation seems to be to provoke in order to generate headlines or sell their latest books. Physical confrontations are not uncommon in these circumstances. Other times we hear students saluting each other in public by using lewd language or using hate or vulgar language as it they were part of the normal vocabulary.
Sometimes civility vanishes behind the scenes even among adults who should know better, like when sometimes faculty loudly confront administrators with made-up or exaggerated accusations at public meetings. Pushing and shoving in athletic facilities of campuses during competitions is also becoming more and more frequent.
And, of course, bad manners seem to proliferate through the use of social media. Postings by both faculty and students using offensive language or just calling for the killing of this or that person have also become quite frequent and have attracted press attention.
And it is not just words that can hurt. In more extreme cases, we have seen how some confrontations include firearms – with sometimes-deadly consequences. Such was the instance of the 2010 shooting during a biology faculty meeting at the University of Alabama when professor Amy Bishop – after being denied tenure – killed three colleagues and injured three others with a 9-millimeter handgun.
When others criticize many of these behaviors, we hear reactions such as “this is protected by the First Amendment,” or that carrying a weapon on campus is fine because of the Second Amendment. Of course, these arguments are used by people from both sides of the political spectrum to justify their actions.
From a legal standpoint, these are not straightforward issues. Although some will argue that you can use the 1942 case of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, in which the U.S. Supreme Court limited free speech by concluding that the use of “fighting words” is not protected by the First Amendment. However, since then other courts have taken a narrower view of that conclusion, limiting free speech only in cases where the words represent a real threat or incitement of physical violence.
Most campuses have come up with speech codes, especially in the use of the Internet or at public events. But when challenged in courts, institutions of higher education almost always lose because the courts see those codes as an attempt to limit free speech. Others have come up with what they call “civility training,” like in the 2008 case of Johns Hopkins University, which tried to make all members of the university community take mandatory instruction in manners. There was, not surprisingly, a strong pushback from the faculty because of the vagueness of the concept.
Some institutions have codified what they call “collegiality” among the standards measured for getting tenure and/or promotion. The problem is that this is another vague term that can mean many different things to many different people. For example, you can have a faculty member that does not seem to be particularly gregarious or extroverted, but happens to be both an effective teacher and productive scholar. Another may be a very nice and popular person, but a mediocre professor at best. Which person should be granted tenure?
The only thing we can agree on is that widespread civility on campuses is no longer part of the norm. So, what has happened?
For one, we have a nation as polarized as we were before the Civil War. The media have fueled many people’s minds with false stories (regardless of their ideological inclinations). Their audiences only listen (or read) the media they agree with ideologically. Critical thinking seems to be an after-thought for many people. And our political establishment is, for the most part, trying to take advantage of these divisions.
There was a time when colleges and universities were a model of civil discussion, where the facts were laid out and used to illustrate different perspectives, where debates were part of the teaching process, where students were encouraged to defend a position different than their own so to put themselves in another’s shoes. There was a time when people accepted that nobody has a monopoly on the truth.
We keep insisting that higher education is the cradle of future leaders. If we really believe that, then we better get our act together. And changes have to start at the top. There is nothing more persuasive than college leaders demonstrating by their own example that they are open minded, tolerant and humble. They need to demonstrate that they are running the shop with transparency and effectiveness, and creating the conditions that promote civility on campus despite the loud shouts from others.
We constantly hear the importance of promoting diversity on campuses, but that diversity should not be confined to racial, ethnic, or gender groups. It should also include intellectual diversity. But for that idea to prosper we need to reinstall civility in our debates. And civility is not something that you can impose by edict, but by example.
As the English writer, Mary Wortley Montagu once said, “Civility costs nothing, and buys everything.” Think about it.
PDF Version:
Civility needs to return to higher education