The Heated Discourse About Civil Discourse

Proponents of what’s often called civil discourse education are pushing to expand this teaching—and mandate it—across entire campuses.

Earlier this month, Institute for Citizens and Scholars President Rajiv Vinnakota told state higher ed leaders that he doesn’t just want to foster civil discourse, he wants to promote “civic practice” and build “civic muscle.”

“That means giving every student opportunities to practice three essential skills: having productive conversation, discerning and using credible information, and collaborating to create solutions, even with those with whom you may disagree,” Vinnakota said.

And he went beyond calling for mere opportunities for this education. “Every student, not those who just opt in, must learn and practice these skills,” he told attendees of the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association’s Higher Ed Policy Conference in Chicago. He asked for their help, now.

“The question is no longer whether a focus on these skills belongs in higher education,” he said. “The question is how we make it central to every student’s experience, and how quickly we can move in this moment.”

But some faculty are still questioning this focus, and the motives of those who fund it. A consortium of scholars from multiple institutions called Uncivil argues that “billionaire funders and extremist politicians” are funding campus dialogue programs to “suppress organic student organizing.” It released a report in June listing which private organizations have been funding entities focused on civil discourse, “constructive dialogue” and other terms. The report also lists other groups that these donors fund, and labels those other recipients as progressive, conservative or “pro-Israel.” In doing so, the report suggests the donors’ own political allegiances.

Bethany Moreton, a Dartmouth College history professor who’s on Uncivil’s executive committee, said that what her group calls the “civility-industrial complex”—185 dialogue programs, character-education initiatives and civics centers and their funders—is perpetuating “a real slur against students” and faculty. She said this is true even if organizations such as the Institute for Citizens and Scholars have good intentions and don’t necessarily share the motivations of others who are pushing civil discourse.

“You can’t analyze the Big Civility providers without acknowledging the context, in which they’re adding fuel to the ‘patriotic education’ kinds of initiatives by giving credence to the suggestion that—somehow—American higher education is failing to help people learn how to engage with ideas,” Moreton told Inside Higher Ed.

The American Association of University Professors—a century-old professional association and now left-leaning faculty union that’s become increasingly politically involved—has raised similar objections to such criticisms of faculty. Uncivil’s executive committee includes some prominent AAUP members, but Moreton said it’s not an AAUP project.

The disagreement shows that the debate over the need for civil discourse education has itself become polarized, after universities have widely adopted these programs. The Trump administration has poured tens of millions of dollars into higher ed initiatives labeled “civil discourse.” The programs have also spread across campuses with both right- and left-leaning reputations. And advocates are currently ramping up efforts to test whether they work.

Moreton excoriated the civility-industrial complex, saying it promotes political passivity “under the color of greater engagement.” She said it doesn’t actually push people to engage with arguments and instead stokes “moral panics around the form that the argument takes” while “undermining the distinction between evidenced argument and what you might call affirmative action for bad ideas.”

“Willingly or not, they are abetting an authoritarian capture of the public sphere—if what you think you’re teaching people about appropriate political engagement is to sit quietly and listen to powerful people tell you you’re subhuman,” Moreton said.

Caroline Mehl, co-founder and executive director of the Constructive Dialogue Institute, said her group—which doesn’t specifically use the term “civil discourse”—isn’t trying to suppress student political expression. “One of the key outcomes that we care about is improving students’ comfort [with] speaking up about their political views,” she said.

She also said civil discourse groups aren’t a monolith.

“There are a group of other organizations all doing this work, but it isn’t coordinated in any kind of way right now,” she said. These organizations have started discussions about coordinating, but haven’t even decided that’s a wise move yet, she added.

And while she said her group is nonpartisan, she noted some others aren’t. “This is just a topic that people across the political spectrum care deeply about,” she said.

The Institute for Citizens and Scholars didn’t provide an interview for this article, but a representative for the group said in an email that “our organization is built explicitly to transcend partisan divides, not reinforce them.”

“C&S’s civic engagement work is backed by a deliberately broad coalition of philanthropic funders and institutions spanning the ideological spectrum, with no single funder driving our direction,” the representative wrote. He added that “meaningful civic preparation does not require ideological conformity or the suppression of disagreement. In fact, meaningful civic learning depends on helping young people navigate disagreement, complexity, and real-world challenges with both conviction and curiosity.”

A Panoply of Presidents

Vinnakota said numerous university presidents are eager to require civil discourse education campuswide.

“Campuses are moving beyond one-time events and isolated dialogue programs to make civic preparation part of the student experience, spanning everything from orientation to general education to residential life and community engagement,” he said.

He told the SHEEO conference attendees that C&S started its College Presidents for Civic Preparedness initiative back in 2021 and it now involves about 140 institution presidents reaching one million students across 34 states and Washington, D.C. He said 60 of these institutions are taking part in “Campuswide Immersion” initiatives.

C&S says participating presidents include Wesleyan University’s Michael Roth, who frequently condemns the Trump administration, and the Indiana University system’s Pamela Whitten, in whom IU Bloomington faculty voted no confidence after IU Bloomington enacted controversial restrictions on pro-Palestine expression in the wake of the October 2023 start of the Israel-Hamas war.

During the conference panel, Vinnakota spoke alongside one of those presidents: Harrison Keller of the University of North Texas. Keller said one obstacle to requiring civil discourse education is that faculty express “some fear” about what could happen to professors leading discussions about hot-button topics. Keller noted that out-of-context statements can be posted on social media and “reposted by a policymaker even before you know what’s going on.” He added that faculty wonder, “‘Would the institution have my back? I could lose my job.’”

“We had to defuse that and say, ‘We’re not asking you to do that at all, really. What we’re asking you to do is help students build this other kind of tool kit that’s actually in your area of expertise,’” Keller said. “And that really changed the whole conversation with the faculty.”

The University of North Texas, during Keller’s presidency, has repeatedly been criticized for restricting faculty rights, including ending faculty groups for minorities; removing words such as “race” and “equity” from course titles; and citing a diversity, equity and inclusion ban to stop funding conference attendance for certain journalism professors. Keller told Inside Higher Ed it’s “not optional” to follow state and federal law, though his university has been accused of overcompliance.

Dollars for Discourse

The Uncivil report, in its critique of funding for various programs, noted a $2.6 million gift from the John Templeton Foundation to C&S.

On its website, the foundation announced that, starting last fall and going through fall 2028, it’s providing $2.6 million to C&S for civil discourse work. The foundation is a massive donor to diverse organizations—its latest IRS filing online shows it gave more than $134 million in gifts in 2024 alone—many of which include colleges and universities.

The gifts often center on religion, and recipients also include conservative and libertarian groups such as the Mercatus Center and Atlas Network and free speech groups such as PEN America. An Uncivil report listed Templeton among the top 23 private funders of the civility-industrial complex.

In an email to Inside Higher Ed, the foundation said, “We are committed to curiosity and humility. We partner with a wide variety of philanthropic organizations to support the generation and exchange of ideas.” College Presidents for Civic Preparedness also lists among its supporters the Lumina Foundation, a higher ed–focused private foundation.

Mehl, of the Constructive Dialogue Institute—which was also targeted by Uncivil—said the report employs “guilt-by-association reasoning.” She said that “in general, funders support a broad range of issues, and that doesn’t mean that those issues are necessarily connected.”

She said many of the civil discourse groups, including hers, began “really in reaction to the 2016 election and the widespread divisiveness” that became apparent across the country. C&S dates back to 1945, but mostly under another name: the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. In November 2020—just after Joe Biden was elected president—it announced its current name, saying in a news release that Wilson’s “racist policies and beliefs are fundamentally incompatible with the organization’s values and work.” (Wilson, a Princeton University and U.S. president, supported segregation and famously showed The Birth of a Nation in the White House.)

Universities sought to ramp up their civil discourse education efforts after pro-Palestinian student protests rippled across campuses. Those demonstrations and encampments attracted condemnation from some Jewish and pro-Israel groups, and from politicians. Moreton, of Uncivil, argues that traditional conservative funders of civil discourse programs have been joined by pro-Israel groups.

“Pathologizing pro-Palestinian student advocacy—the utility of that move to the authoritarian and ethnonationalist forces in the United States should be obvious,” Moreton said. “It is a shared ethnonationalist project to pathologize protest, and it will have consequences.”

Whatever the political persuasion of the civil discourse programs are now, or in the future, students should brace for more of them.

“We’ll know we’re doing it right if, by the time students get to junior year … they’re like, ‘If I have to do one more collaborative problem-solving activity, I’m going to vomit,’” Keller said. “Then I think we’ll just be right about at the sweet spot.”