US college campuses have long been associated with the country’s fraying social fabric. Beset by so-called “cancel culture”, mass protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, and mounting conflicts over free speech, a notion has taken hold that colleges and universities represent a convergence of the country’s broader ills.
To meet what’s been widely described as a “polarization” crisis, a veritable industry has emerged, booming since 7 October 2023 and the protests that followed. Dozens of organizations have cropped up promising to foster “civic discourse”, “dialogue across difference” and “viewpoint diversity”. Together, they make up a fast-growing ecosystem that has ballooned, by some estimates, into a $200m a year business some skeptics have billed the “civility industrial complex”.
At a time of mounting political violence and shrinking civil rights, the promise of civility and bridge-building is appealing. Donors have flocked to finance these initiatives, while universities looking for a fix to relentless controversy have eagerly embraced them.
“At a surface level, who could be against civility?” said Bethany Moreton, a historian at Dartmouth College whose forthcoming book focuses on the so-called “culture wars” in academia.
But critics of the explosion in dialogue initiatives have questioned their efficacy. Some argue that the industry’s underlying intent is to suppress political activism and what many conservatives have long viewed as leftist excesses on US campuses.
A new analysis of the funding landscape behind campus dialogue initiatives bolsters arguments that they are at least partially linked to a conservative project. Uncivil, a consortium of scholars and researchers of which Moreton is a member, found that 20 out of the 23 foundations most active in the pluralism and depolarization space also fund conservative policy networks or pro-Israel organizations.
Among the main donors to civility initiatives, the researchers found, several also contributed to rightwing organizations like the Manhattan Institute, the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, as well as pro-Israel ones like the Anti-Defamation League, itrek (formerly known as Israel & Co) and the Central Fund of Israel. The Koch brothers’ foundations, which for years have sponsored efforts to push campuses to the right, have also been pivotal to the civility industry’s growth.
The group mapped civil centers and discourse initiatives that were launched across more than 100 campuses, and found that 70% of them had been accused of suppressing pro-Palestine activism. The researchers argue that while presented as politically neutral, many of these initiatives offer a backdoor way for conservatives to push universities to the right.
Even the Trump administration has gotten behind these efforts, redirecting federal funds that in the past aimed, in part, to promote college attendance by underserved populations, earmarking $60m toward initiatives promoting “civil discourse”, and explicitly connecting the effort to student activism and last year’s killing of the far-right commentator Charlie Kirk. “Civil discourse at America’s colleges and universities has been undermined by campus takeovers, violent riots, and even a recent high-profile political assassination,” the Education Department wrote in a call for grant proposals.
Practitioners of civility initiatives promise that the efforts work, that they are responding to a real breakdown in the country’s social relations, and that they can be deeply healing and transformative for participants. But as the efforts become at least in part co-opted by a conservative agenda – and amid an unprecedented rightwing crackdown on campus speech – a growing number of critics are asking whether civility is the response this moment calls for.
From speaking out to listening
The focus on civility marks a distinct shift from the political activism that animated college campuses for generations.
At a recent dialogue workshop for educators run by the Constructive Dialogue Institute (CDI), one of the facilitators, Nicholas Longo, reflected on that shift. When he first embarked on civic engagement work in the 1990s, he told participants, the emphasis had been on encouraging young people to “raise their voices”. Now, the focus was on getting them to “listen” – “eloquently” and “with curiosity”.
“Now when young people raise their voices, it can often be ineffective for making social change in that they may be speaking into an echo chamber with people who already agree with them,” said Longo.
The fact that conservative donors backed dialogue work, he added, is a sign that there is “bipartisan agreement” on the need for it. “This is actually something that we can come together on.”
Longo continued: “I actually think every social movement starts with people sitting in a circle talking to each other, and especially talking to people that they disagree with. It actually is and can be radical.”
That message was appealing to Marcel LaFlamme, an academic librarian who took Longo’s webinar in anticipation of a return to teaching. He appreciated practical tips like “starting from commonalities”. At the beginning of the workshop, participants paired up to find things they had in common, like a love for sushi and the outdoors.
“I think there are forms of activism and dissent that don’t always lead from curiosity; they lead from passion and conviction and wanting to get the message out,” LaFlamme said after the workshop. “To me, the role of the university is absolutely to encourage us to lean into curiosity.”
That’s a sentiment echoed by many facilitators, who believe taking passions down a notch is a precondition to talking. At James Madison University, a large public university in Virginia, every incoming student is required to participate in a series of “civic discourse experiences”.
“We want to improve the intellectual humility of our students,” said Kara Dillard, director of the university’s center of civil engagement. “We want them to understand that issues aren’t just black and white, but that they are complex and that people are complex.”
But to many students and faculty on the receiving end of them, the utility isn’t clear – and the motives are dubious.
While earlier iterations of civility initiatives predated Donald Trump, observers of the civility movement roughly pinpoint its origins to his political rise and the abyss dividing the country that it exposed. Many point to an incident in 2017 when some students at the University of California, Berkeley, violently protested a speech by rightwing internet troll Milo Yiannopoulos. That incident helped turbocharge both the notion of “cancel culture” and the charge that students had become “snowflakes” – how the right often referred to those it deemed too intolerant of opinions outside progressive orthodoxy. (In fact, cancellations have been widespread across the political spectrum). Several dialogue groups prominent today, including BridgeUSA and CDI, were established that year.
“As a society, it felt like we were coming apart. We had lost the ability to communicate effectively across differences,” said Caroline Mehl, who co-founded CDI along Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist known, among other things, for his criticism of college campuses’ “coddling” culture. (Haidt, long a critic of cancel culture, was recently embroiled in a controversy when students at New York University demanded he be removed as graduation speaker.)
More organizations with similar missions followed suit, growing in numbers after the racial justice reckoning that followed the 2020 killing of George Floyd.
But it was the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks, and the historic student movement protesting against Israel’s war on Gaza, that prompted a flood of universities across the country to seek out pluralism and dialogue programming. Legislators were grilling administrators over alleged antisemitism on campuses and universities were facing discrimination lawsuits, federal funding cuts and a barrage of criticism from all sides. “Dialogue across differences”, as it’s often described, seemed like it might offer a lifeline.
“Suddenly, we literally have hundreds of [university] presidents who are coming to us saying we actually need to make this a priority”, said Rajiv Vinnakota, director of the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing “social connection and cohesion”. The group had launched a consortium of university presidents and a faculty institute focused on “civic preparedness” in August 2023, with about a dozen universities onboard. They now work with 135 universities and in April announced a $10m investment in their initiatives from a foundation dedicated to “social cohesion”. Its founder, David Einhorn, hails from a family of philanthropists who have backed the far-right Turning Point USA and have reportedly been behind voter intimidation campaigns. A representative for the Einhorn Collaborative said in a statement that the group that funds the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, is distinct from the family’s foundation.
“Einhorn Collaborative and the Einhorn Family Foundation are separate entities that hold different missions and opinions. A lot of our work is recognizing that people can have different opinions and to be able to respectfully disagree,” the representative said.
The civility industry offers a wide range of products: from online webinars to months-long fellowships geared at everyone from incoming freshmen to university presidents. Today, more than 200,000 students across the country have taken “Perspectives”, an online course by the CDI. Universities like Harvard, Yale and New York University have made it a requirement for incoming students. And some universities have integrated civility efforts with their embrace of artificial intelligence: the University of Wisconsin-Madison, for instance, launched an AI-powered chatbot to help students practice their dialogue skills, part of a larger initiative dedicated to “pluralism” on campus.
“Suddenly dialogue is all the rage,” said Nancy Thomas, the executive director of the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education at the American Association of Colleges and Universities. “It’s become a money-making industry.”
‘Dancing around the central concern’
The Guardian spoke with nine people who work on civility initiatives at universities. Virtually all the organizations working in the dialogue space are committed to some version of political neutrality; many don’t share the views of conservative funders enthusiastically backing the industry.
Several people noted that without universities mandating participation, it’s hard to get the most opinionated students in the room – conservative students often fear cancellation by peers and progressive ones say they don’t trust school administrators and see no point in engaging with people they view as racist or Zionist. Across the board, students have been skeptical of dialogue initiatives coming at a time when speech is regularly repressed.
At the City University of New York, for instance, a group of student leaders were asked to participate last year in a “constructive dialogue” workshop after pro-Palestinian protests had thrown the previous semester into turmoil and scores of students were arrested. But facilitators made no mention of Israel and Palestine, said Leila Markosian, a graduate student. When participants brought up Gaza and the protest crackdown, she said they were told that dialogue was only useful as a “post-conflict tool” – not in the heat of the moment.
“Everyone was dancing around the central concern,” said Markosian, adding that the workshop felt riddled with abstract platitudes. “The feeling among basically everyone was this doesn’t work and nobody wants to do it. It felt like it was being done not to actually bring students into vulnerable conversations … but to just suppress protest and suppress discord.”
The facilitators who spoke with the Guardian referenced a range of approaches to dialogue work, with some emphasizing that conflict should be tackled head-on rather than skirted around.
Moreton, the Dartmouth professor, recently signed up for a dialogue training her college encouraged staff to take. She ended up challenging the facilitators, who she said referred to campus protests as evidence of students’ deteriorating dialogue skills. Moreton asked facilitators to name “a single improvement” in US history that involved no protest.
“Polarization is actually something that’s perhaps necessary in a society,” Moreton said. “No one really believes that somehow we’d have the Voting Rights Act if Martin Luther King had just sat down with the wizard of the KKK and they had hashed out their disagreements.”
But a number of facilitators insisted that dialogue efforts are not meant to replace protests. They noted a divide between their intentions – to push students into meaningful, difficult conversations – and university administrations that sometimes want to just “check a box”.
Thomas has been doing dialogue work since the early 2000s. She now prefers using the word “discussion”, as the notion of dialogue has been co-opted.
“I want to have conversations about authoritarianism. I want to be able to say some things are right and some things are wrong”, she said. But she also said her approach has made it more difficult to get support for her work.
She added that she doesn’t believe conservative perspectives should get shut down. “But what I see happening right now is the opposite.”
