Dialogue Programs Aren’t Right-Wing Conspiracy (opinion)

Inside Higher Ed’s Aug. 17 report on the Uncivil collaborative—“The Heated Discourse About Civil Discourse”—does something odd for a piece about polarization by recounting, at length, sweeping claims about the motives of civil-discourse funders without examining whether the evidence behind those claims actually supports them.

I have a direct stake in this. The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, which I lead, is named in Uncivil’s report as one of 23 foundations funding what the group calls the “civility-industrial complex.” We are, according to Uncivil’s accounting, the most active funder in this space in terms of total number of grants awarded. So I read the report closely. Some of its data is genuinely interesting. Its conclusions are not. And Inside Higher Ed’s coverage repeats them as though the two were the same thing.

Uncivil’s report purports to show, through examining five years of foundation tax filings, that the funders most invested in campus dialogue programs also tend to fund conservative and pro-Israel organizations. They share their data and it is worth a look. But the report’s website doesn’t stop at the data and claims about funders’ ideological orientations. It opens by declaring that these funders’ “real goal is to silence dissent.” Nothing in the report—no grant description, no donor statement, no program requirement, no institutional outcome—supports that claim. It’s an assertion dressed up as a finding, and it rests on exactly the kind of inference that wouldn’t survive peer review.

In similar reckless fashion, Bethany Moreton, Uncivil’s spokesperson, told Inside Higher Ed that the field is “abetting an authoritarian capture of the public sphere.” That’s a serious charge to level at 185 civil dialogue, character education and civics programs on the strength of a funding chart. And there is no evidence to support it.

That funding chart, moreover, was constructed in a way that all but guaranteed its own conclusion. To reach its list of “23 top funders,” Uncivil discarded every foundation that gave less than 1 percent of its total grant making to civility work, a threshold that, almost by definition, excludes large foundations with diverse portfolios, while keeping smaller, sometimes more ideologically focused ones. This threshold thereby excluded 19 foundations active in this space including the Ford, Hewlett, Knight, Packard and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations; the Democracy, Omidyar Network and Rockefeller Brothers Funds; the Lilly Endowment; the Carnegie Corporation; and George Soros’s Foundation to Promote Open Society.

Per Uncivil’s own data, these 19 other foundations gave more money to civility programs, in absolute dollars, than the 23 foundations Uncivil kept in their dataset combined. A filter that excludes the majority of the money in a field before calculating what share of the remaining dollars is conservative is not a neutral filter. It is a selection effect, and it deserves scrutiny before its output gets treated as a “finding.”

But there is more. Uncivil’s claim that 97 percent of the approximately $82.3 million in funding for civil dialogue programs from the foundations in its top-23 sample “came from foundations that are heavily invested in conservative and/or ‘pro-Israel’ networks” depends on treating support for mainstream Jewish organizations such as Hillel and the American Jewish Committee as equivalent to conservative political giving, and then merging the two into one tainted category. That choice sweeps in funders whose broader giving clearly leans progressive. The Klarman Family Foundation, which Uncivil lists as a top-four funder of the field, reportedly gave nothing to conservative organizations and more than $70 million to progressive ones, yet is counted inside Uncivil’s conservative supermajority because some of its giving also supports Hillel and similar groups.

Something similar can be said about the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Uncivil’s own data shows that we gave more to progressive-coded organizations than to conservative and pro-Israel ones combined. But we too are represented as part of the conservative conspiracy. When a report’s proof that a field leans right depends on counting foundations like these as conservative, the classification scheme is what needs defending, not the field.

It is worth noting that if the funders profiled in the Uncivil report hoped their support would expose students to conservative-leaning practices and habits, they have either tricked them or failed badly. A recent report by More in Common found that students and faculty largely see civil-discourse programming on campus (under its various descriptions including “constructive dialogue,” “civic dialogue,” etc.) as left-leaning in political orientation.

The Uncivil Collective also argues these programs aren’t needed and don’t work, and here the reasoning breaks down further. It cites a survey finding that only 2 percent of college students say they don’t feel they belong on campus because of their political views and treats that as evidence dialogue programs are solving a problem that doesn’t exist.

But belonging and willingness to speak are different things. A student can feel entirely welcome and still calculate that voicing a view on immigration, or Israel and Palestine, or policing will cost them socially or academically. FIRE’s 2025 College Free Speech Rankings, drawn from nearly 59,000 students, found that 17 percent of students self-censor “fairly often” or “very often” due to concerns about how peers, a professor or an administrator might respond.

The Knight Foundation’s 2024 survey found two in three students self-censor on some topics during class, and two in three say that this limits educationally valuable conversation on their campus. A 2025 national faculty study our foundation commissioned, conducted by the American Association of Colleges and Universities and the American Association of University Professors with NORC at the University of Chicago, surveyed more than 8,000 faculty and found 52 percent had at least occasionally felt concerned about their ability to state what they believe as scholars, and 45.3 percent had refrained from expressing an opinion for fear of drawing outside attention. None of that shows up in Uncivil’s “2 percent” framing. None of it shows up in Inside Higher Ed’s account, either.

Uncivil further argues that dialogue interventions don’t work because research shows their benefits “completely evaporate” after three months. That’s a non sequitur. Flu vaccines lose effectiveness within months, too. But no one concludes from that fact that vaccination doesn’t work, only that protection requires boosters. The serious literature on dialogue treats engagement across difference as a practice to be repeated, not a one-time inoculation. A finding that single interventions fade over time is an argument for better program design. It isn’t evidence the field is a sham.

Inside Higher Ed’s story doesn’t undertake any examination of how Uncivil’s headline numbers were built. It simply presents the report’s claims, alongside institutional denials, as the state of the debate. That’s a disservice to readers trying to understand whether the programs are actually failing students, suppressing dissent or manufacturing a crisis. The data on student and faculty self-censorship says the crisis is real. An analysis of funders built on a selection effect and a classification error does not prove anything about anyone’s motives. Readers deserve to know the difference, and so far, the coverage of this debate hasn’t given it to them.