Faculty Shouldn’t Reject Civil Discourse Education (opinion)

Iowa became the latest state to have its flagship campus’s civics center generate embarrassing headlines when 11 faculty resigned from its advisory board—and then again when the choice for center director declined the job, two weeks after his hire was announced. Teaching students how to follow evidence and work with others to solve big problems should not be a controversial proposition. Despite what we see in the news, most faculty just want students to show up to class and engage with the course content.

So why the controversy, to which my home university system is not immune?

Too many universities, public and private, have attempted to present civil discourse as a top-down program, led by boards and presidents, with faculty expected to accept the initiative as a fait accompli. The involvement of Republican lawmakers in the creation of stand-alone civics centers or schools like Iowa’s only exacerbates this problem, fueling accusations of partisan interference in the curriculum. Faculty, aware of those who want to use civil discourse initiatives to replace the existing teaching staff, push back, with some faculty alleging that a “civility industrial complex” has nefarious motives. They rightly point to the ugly ways opponents of civil rights have used appeals to “civility” to shut down discussion and stifle dissent.

But faculty should not reject civil discourse as a concept. Instead, we should propose our own approaches, drawn from our disciplinary expertise and experience in the classroom.

I teach American history, the good and the bad, to a diverse and wide-ranging student body at a regional public university in North Carolina that is also one of the oldest historically Black universities in the U.S. South. My students have robust, evidence-based conversations about difficult topics all the time.

And for the last 11 months, I and other faculty from across North Carolina have helped the University of North Carolina system develop an approach to promoting civil discourse education that is faster, cheaper and more effective than setting up civic centers or top-down programs one by one. Our systemwide task force in civil discourse outlined this approach in our recent report, “Civil Discourse and the University of North Carolina.”

The Context for This Work

Our task force came into the work acutely aware of three dynamics:

1. The antidemocratic uses of appeals to civility. We grappled with works such as Alex Zamalin’s Against Civility and William Henry Chafe’s Civilities and Civil Rights, both of which are cited in our report.
2. The debates around UNC Chapel Hill’s School of Civic Life and Leadership, and the ways in which the centers approach is limited to students who opt in, and often, due to the centers’ cost, only students at flagship institutions. If civil discourse is worth teaching, then it is worth bringing to our regional campuses and to students across disciplines in a meaningful way.

3. That there is stakeholder—and faculty—interest in helping our students sustain dialogue across perceived differences and to address student self-censorship in the classroom. Some of this interest is born from worries about increasing political polarization; quite a bit is from concerns about the impacts of algorithmic social media and pandemic-era disruptions in socialization on our students. Being a student who is hesitant to speak up in 2026, when every classmate—theoretically—has the ability to record your comments and publish them is a very different experience from being a college student in 2001 or 1976. Additionally, we heard from employers that they want graduates to have stronger skills in critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, leadership and teamwork, all attributes that can be built through civil discourse education.

As our task force convened, we also discovered a fair amount of skepticism, including among ourselves. The task force, our colleagues and partners had good-faith discussions about what we mean by civil discourse, its connection with existing disciplines and departments, and if civil discourse is worth doing, how it might be done in a substantive way—more than a student orientation training on “being nice.”

Our Interventions

Our report makes two major interventions that, together, point to an important pathway for better civil discourse education, one that draws on our disciplinary expertise and experience in public university classrooms.

First, instead of providing a two-sentence definition of civil discourse education at the postsecondary level, we frame civil discourse as the overlap of three related concepts. Civil discourse prioritizes strong civility. It is rooted in a culture of collaborative problem-solving. And it respects the inherent dignity of all participants.

Strong civility is good-faith conversation that can contain information that is uncomfortable for one or more participants to hear, but it is done in the pursuit of equitable and inclusive dialogue, with a priority on maintaining underlying relationships for the long haul. It stands in contrast to weak civility, which is politeness for politeness’s sake, and pseudo-civility, which is when people appeal to weak civility to silence attempts at strong civility.

In their Foundations of American Democracy courses, UNC system undergraduates already receive an introduction to one of the most famous distinctions between strong and weak civility. The only 20th-century document required by the system’s course objectives is Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” Responding to clergy upset at the tumult they think was caused by civil rights protesters, King differentiates between a “negative peace which is the absence of tension” and a “positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

Our focus on fostering a culture of problem-solving draws from a long literature on the role of the public university in the formation of citizens, concerns about the gamification or performance of civility to check a box, and an awareness that only presenting students with problems and then throwing up our hands can be dispiriting. If citizenship involves tackling common challenges, then the work we are doing as faculty to expand students’ capacity for citizenship should take that into account. This framework also helps expand “civil discourse” to include “easy conversations,” interdisciplinary projects, service learning and practicums, not just structured debates, though those also have their place and can help with problem-solving.

Respecting the inherent dignity of participants—including by not questioning their right to be students on campus—recognizes that students are all members of the same university community and that even the words we use to talk about civil discourse can cause mistrust. Learning and practicing language rooted in dignity, however, helps build trust and end high conflict.

Knowing what civil discourse education is, however, does not tell us where in the university it can or should happen. This is where so many institutions go wrong.

The second major intervention is that while good civil discourse teaching can occur within many different academic disciplines, universities wanting a fast, effective and sustainable increase in civil discourse training for their students should reinvest in pre-existing departments in the humanities, arts and related social sciences. Universities could even hire more tenure-track faculty in history, classics, English literature, philosophy, government and, yes, world languages. Encourage students to take electives beyond the core curriculum.

If the point of a civil discourse push is to provide education for a free people, then that education should happen in the context of the disciplines that introduce students to the breadth and depth of the human experience.

How the Report Has Been Received

We released our initial report in June. Two months later, UNC System President Peter Hans and Board of Governors Chair Kellie Hunt Blue cited it by name in their official response to Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s “National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards.”

The UNC system has also awarded more than $500,000 in grants to faculty to design new courses or redesign existing ones related to the teaching of civil discourse through its Common Ground Collaborative. While this is a sizable investment, it is one that can be done in-house, without special legislative appropriations. The system has now provided 119 grants to 126 faculty at all 17 UNC system campuses; this has been so successful that the system is committing another round of funding for the coming academic year. Compare that, however, to the $59 million being used to create civics institutes on five campuses in Ohio.

Beyond the grants, the Common Ground Collaborative’s convening this past May at UNC Charlotte drew together 100 faculty to share best practices, for the cost of a couple of meals and some support for in-state travel.

Beyond North Carolina

Faculty wanting to engage in teaching civil discourse will not lack ideas about useful approaches. This past summer, Campus Compact, the American Association of Colleges and Universities, More Perfect and the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy launched the Higher Education Democracy Exchange, which offers teaching, programming and research resources. The UNC report contains links to many more.

Faculty want students to engage with evidence, to consider multiple angles when tackling problems and to grow intellectually in the way they only can in an environment protected by principles of academic freedom and free inquiry. This is what an education for a free people looks like—and it is already happening in classrooms across the UNC system. While many of us will have different takes on the final shape of civil discourse education within our disciplines—I’m partial to Mexican Revolution re-enactments—that spread of approaches is also appropriate and excellent preparation for being an engaged, thoughtful citizen in a free society.