Over the past decade, Americans have become increasingly distrustful of higher education—and concerned about political polarization. In response, many universities and nonprofits have created initiatives to tackle these issues head-on, building centers on appealing-but-vague ideas like “public discourse,” “civic thought,” and “civil dialogue.”
A new group of university faculty rejects these projects wholesale. This week, Inside Higher Education reported on how a “consortium of scholars” called Uncivil “argues that ‘billionaire funders and extremist politicians’ are funding campus dialogue programs to ‘suppress organic student organizing.’” Per its own website, the group seeks to show how this “Civility Industrial Complex” is part of a vast conservative and pro-Israel funding network whose “real goal is to silence dissent.”
Uncivil’s main objective is to map “the donor networks, conceptual frameworks, and political goals that underwrite” various civics and civil-discourse programs across the country. Its linchpin report identifies 185 programs along with 400 funders, and it uses this donor data to argue that the “fast-growing Civility Industrial Complex is driven by an anti-democratic agenda to suppress organic student organizing.”
The project more or less openly attempts to establish guilt by association. Uncivil’s report identifies the top 23 funders of what it deems the “Civility Industry” and examines where else those funders have donated. “The most deeply committed funders in the Civility Industrial Complex overwhelmingly show strong affinities for conservative and/or ‘pro-Israel’ causes,” the report concludes.
Much of the report simply lists donors and their grantees. The John Templeton Foundation, for example, funds “civility industry” groups like the Constructive Dialogue Institute and Interfaith America, as well as “conservative” organizations like the Mercatus Center and the Cato Institute. The Klarman Family Foundation funds groups like Common Ground USA as well as many pro-Israel groups like the Israel Science Foundation and the Anti-Defamation League.
On this basis, Uncivil denounces civics and civil-discourse programs—seemingly all of them—in the strongest terms, declaring them a threat to “democracy and higher education.” Needless to say, this is quite a leap, and one that fails to stand up to good-faith scrutiny.
The project employs something of a sleight of hand. Uncivil’s website defines the Civility Industrial Complex as “the private- and State-funded ‘civic thought’ centers and the booming campus initiatives focused on ‘civil discourse,’ ‘depolarization,’ and ‘viewpoint diversity.’” By this description, one would expect its report—which purports to map out this growing ecosystem—mostly to examine funding for campus-based programs like the University of Florida’s Hamilton School or UNC Chapel Hill’s Program for Public Discourse. Yet a vast majority of the “Civility Industry grantees” it identifies are nonprofits that have no formal connection with college campuses.
Moreover, the report’s main conclusion—that pro-Israel and conservative donors also heavily fund civil-discourse projects—is entirely unsurprising, but for banal reasons: both groups are understandably attuned to the need for more civil discourse and viewpoint diversity. Just days after October 7, some campus groups advertised pro-Palestinian demonstrations using an image of a paraglider, an open celebration of Hamas’s brutal attack. And last month, the American Association of University Professors, the country’s largest and oldest faculty organization, chose to make its first-ever political endorsement—for Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, perhaps the highest-profile progressive running for office this year. (Ironically, the AAUP dismisses concerns about viewpoint diversity while illustrating higher education’s political homogeneity.)
But rather than taking these projects at their word and critiquing them on substantive grounds, Uncivil dismisses them as a part of a nefarious plot. It comes off less as a scholarly attempt to understand a movement than as a call to action.
In this way, Uncivil mirrors the activities of UnKoch My Campus, a project that had some success in rallying campus activists against programs funded by the Charles Koch Foundation. Isaac Kamola, the director of the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (CDAF) at the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), sits on Uncivil’s executive committee. Kamola has explicitly described his desire to use CDAF to launch an UnKoch-style campaign against new campus centers.
“I would really love to see kind of a robust research project on these right-wing centers and individuals—like, naming and shaming and discrediting and undermining the legitimacy,” Kamola said in an audio recording that I reported on in June. “I would love to strategically map who these f---ers are, and figure out what the weaknesses are, and design a research agenda that just goes through them and tries to knock them out.” While, according to Inside Higher Education, Uncivil isn’t affiliated with the AAUP, its stated goals match Kamola’s plan almost exactly.
Ironically, Kamola would fail his own guilt-by-association test. His organization was created through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Mellon is guilty of many of the practices Kamola—and now Uncivil—decry, from funding openly partisan campus projects to strong-arming universities with restrictive contracts.
Still, Mellon and Uncivil shouldn’t be dismissed as nodes in some nefarious plot. They ought to be assessed on their merits: as, respectively, a nonprofit foundation that’s lost its way and a group of professors hawking a tendentious report.
John D. Sailer is the director of higher education policy and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
One wonders if our universities are beyond repair.
It's not a coincidence that people supporting violent terrorism politically on the object levelare themselves opposed to civility on the meta level.