This post is an essay by Marie Newhouse recently published in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Here’s a link to the original.  She is an associate professor of law, philosophy, and public policy at the University of Surrey and a visiting fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.

She provides a fascinating analysis of the dilemma that universities encounter when they try to establish a system of civil discourse within their communities.  Here’s how she sets up her argument:

To better understand how higher education got into its current predicament, university leaders should consult intellectual history. In her 2017 book, Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration, the Oxford political theorist Teresa M. Bejan traces the historical development of three different conceptions of civility in the work of three 17th-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Roger Williams. These men offered different political prescriptions, but they each viewed civility standards as critical tools for mediating the tensions that inevitably arise between three basic features of any society: the diversity of its people, especially when it comes to their beliefs about sensitive religious and political subjects; the frequency of open disagreements about those subjects; and social cohesion.

The problem is that while “most universities are committed to both diversity and free speech,…many are unable to cope with the social consequences of passionate disagreement.”  And these two aims are also in tension with the third one she identities, maintaining community cohesion.  As a result, universities need to confront the kind of tradeoffs that are required in order to balance all three in the same context.

She shows how administrators have tried to work out a system based on Locke’s notion of “civil charity,” by promoting a thin set of principles about free speech that everyone could agree on.  But when this turned out to be too difficult, they often shifted toward Hobbes’s notion of “civil silence,” which keeps the piece at the cost of stifling the exchange of ideas.

Newhouse recommends that universities adopt the approach of “mere civility,” which Williams developed in the context of trying to govern the Rhode Island colony made of a radically diverse and radically outspoken array of religious groups.  “Mere civility would require students to follow the university’s rules, not to endorse them.”

I think this is great stuff.  I recommend that you give her essay a close read.

The Campus Civility Collapse

​After October 7, discourse broke down.

How can we restore it?

​Marie Newhouse

The past two years have exposed a fundamental tension in higher education. Most universities are committed to both diversity and free speech, yet many are unable to cope with the social consequences of passionate disagreement. As protests over Israel and Gaza spread across campuses, administrators called for a return to civility, as though civility were a switch that could be flipped back on. But the confusion, anger, and institutional paralysis that followed suggest that universities aren’t just struggling to maintain civility on campus; they have no consensus about what civility requires.

To better understand how higher education got into its current predicament, university leaders should consult intellectual history. In her 2017 book, Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration, the Oxford political theorist Teresa M. Bejan traces the historical development of three different conceptions of civility in the work of three 17th-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Roger Williams. These men offered different political prescriptions, but they each viewed civility standards as critical tools for mediating the tensions that inevitably arise between three basic features of any society: the diversity of its people, especially when it comes to their beliefs about sensitive religious and political subjects; the frequency of open disagreements about those subjects; and social cohesion.

Civility is an idea about how people should interact, especially when they disagree. Our more specific notions of civility can differ in various ways. In some contexts, we think of civility as a minimum standard of conduct compatible with inclusion in community life, while in others we might use the term to describe an ethical ideal to which we should continually aspire. Political and institutional leaders can establish formal civility standards backed by sanctions or treated as conditions of community membership or participation. Informal civility norms — the intuitions and practices of most members of a population — arise through complex social processes that community leaders can influence but not control. Hobbes, Locke, and Williams were primarily concerned with civility’s potential to assist political leaders for whom the religious diversity of post-Reformation Europe posed profound governance challenges.

Thomas Hobbes, driven into exile by the religiously motivated English civil war, was convinced that open disagreements about religion and politics led inevitably to “hatred, then brawles and warres.” He therefore endorsed what Bejan refers to as a doctrine of “civil silence.” The proper thing to do when you hear an opinion you think is wrong, Hobbes said, is to bite your tongue, because “trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other signe of undervalue” were among the “principall causes of quarrel.” Even keeping silent can be offensive if it implies that disagreement is concealed. In such cases, Bejan reports, Hobbes thought the proper course was to lie. A system like this works best if people know in advance which opinions their neighbors and community leaders are likely to find agreeable, so Hobbes believed that the government should have the authority to prescribe orthodoxy and punish dissent. As repressive as this sounds, Hobbes’s view was compatible with a very limited sort of toleration. He did not seek to make windows into men’s souls: If you kept your unorthodox opinions out of public view, you were free to have them. Even minority religious services could be discreetly held, Hobbes allowed, so long as participants did not evangelize their beliefs.

Most universities are committed to both diversity and free speech, yet many are unable to cope with the social consequences of passionate disagreement.

John Locke, by contrast, thought the right sort of civility could make open disagreement safe. He proposed to restore a satisfying degree of social cohesion to post-Reformation England by convincing citizens to wholeheartedly endorse shared civic values including “general good-will and regard for all people” — an approach that Bejan refers to as “civil charity.” Citizens who loved and respected their neighbors would disagree about sensitive topics by means of “charitable admonitions and affectionate endeavours to reduce men from errors,” Locke thought, and would never resort to contempt or condemnation. To ensure widespread adoption of his proposed values, Locke recommended educational efforts, such as state-funded moral education for working-class children and a more pedagogical approach by local magistrates, who would try to improve the manners of religious dissenters. Locke’s civil charity is morally aspirational, but Bejan argues that, understood as government policy, it could be exclusionary. Locke notoriously considered Catholics and atheists unfit for public office on the theory that their beliefs conflicted with his proposed civic values. Moreover, Locke’s heavy emphasis on the importance of “sincere” commitment to these values — since people “naturally hate whatever is counterfeit” — could potentially motivate officials to resort to intrusive measures to ascertain their private thoughts and feelings.

Roger Williams had little in common with either Hobbes or Locke. While the latter two spent their adult lives in elite European social circles, Williams spent most of his in tiny, economically insecure, and politically fragile American colonies. But as the leader of colonial Rhode Island, Williams faced the same basic problem: a population comprised of diverse groups of religious dissidents that fractiously bickered with each other and with nearby Native American tribes. He also had few military or economic resources to enforce basic order, much less nurture social cohesion. Williams needed a civility standard to mitigate these tensions and keep his community functioning. But censorship was not an option for Williams; as a Puritan missionary, he believed that freedom of religion necessarily included “preaching, disputing, &c. [etc.],” although he conceded that these could “accidentally” inspire “great contentions and divisions, yea, tumults and uproars.” Nor did he want to exclude offensively wrongheaded people from his colony; if anything, their souls were most in need of saving.

Williams therefore settled on a radical policy of combining extremely broad religious diversity with virtually unfettered speech. To preserve social order, he insisted only on what Bejan calls “mere civility”: adherence to the basic social courtesies that make daily social interaction possible. In his time, these included “hat honor” and “kissing hello.” Today, we might think of using conventional forms of address, taking turns, waiting in line, and refraining from shouting or interruption. Mere civility did not require anyone to follow these rules out of sincere love or respect for their neighbors; Williams’s goal was to make peaceful coexistence possible even between people who despised each other. Because Williams was determined to accommodate a lot of diversity and permit a great deal of open disagreement, he was prepared to forego aspirational levels of community cohesion. Instead, he insisted only on the least demanding civility standard that he believed would “preserve the civil peace.”

The timeless insight that emerges from Bejan’s analysis of these thinkers is that no community can be all things to all people. Universities are no exception: They, too, face unavoidable trade-offs between diversity of belief, open disagreement, and social cohesion. And when we talk about civility standards, we are really talking about the balance that we believe should be struck between these three values. This insight throws the root cause of recent campus breakdowns into sharp relief: Universities have pretended for years that these trade-offs do not exist.

Universities have long striven to maximize their diversity along various parameters including race, ethnicity, sex, national origin, religious affiliation, disability status, rural vs. urban background, and special interests like sports and artistic pursuits. Their leaders have justified diversity-oriented admissions policies on the basis that diverse life experiences tend to go hand in hand with diverse perspectives and values, which would lead to exceptionally robust and educational debates on moral and political issues. Such debates, both within and beyond the classroom, were thought to merit a central place in university life as training grounds for the exercise of responsible democratic citizenship. At the same time, universities have marketed themselves to students as highly cohesive communities: as respectful, supportive homes away from home where students will feel a deep sense of belonging and spend some of their happiest years.

Universities tried to evade the grip of Bejan’s trilemma using Locke’s “civil charity” strategy: establish a thin foundation of shared values, like “mutual respect and inclusion,” that would be compatible with a wide variety of moral and political perspectives. University leaders proclaimed that heartfelt endorsement of these shared values was a defining feature of community membership and could ensure an affectionate and supportive social atmosphere. These shared values would also function as ground rules for the expression of disagreement about sensitive moral and political issues, making these disagreements compatible with students’ continued sense of community belonging. This Lockean approach seemed promising at first because “mutual respect and inclusion” are overwhelmingly popular. Almost everyone will agree when asked that they respect the equal moral value of every person, and that they want to be welcoming to all students.

As Bejan warned, universities have sought to ensure heartfelt allegiance by increasingly intrusive means.

But beyond easy cases like racial slurs and personal threats, university administrators discovered that it can be difficult to decide what mutual respect and inclusion require in practice. Some students, faculty, and staff think these principles logically entail that trans women are women, that unauthorized immigration is not blameworthy since no person is illegal, that institutional policies are either antiracist or racist, that one or another ethnic group has a right to form its own state, or that abortion is a human right. Others vehemently disagree. In hindsight, university leaders ought to have realized that some students who were committed to the self-evident truth of propositions like these would see others who argued against these views, or who used language that did not presuppose them, as violating the university’s shared values of mutual respect and inclusion. The contents of classroom lectures and fraught dormitory exchanges were thus increasingly presented to university functionaries for adjudication.

Universities have tried to resolve confusion about the parameters of their shared values with educational efforts, just as Locke recommended. These efforts include diversity training, speech codes, bias response teams, and gently reforming magistrates charged with providing specific guidance to students and faculty about what language, comportment, and subject matter are compatible with mutual respect and inclusion. As Bejan warns, universities have sought to ensure heartfelt allegiance by increasingly intrusive means. Passive diversity seminars, in which students and faculty were simply told what was and was not considered respectful and inclusive, have been replaced by active-learning methods — group discussion, role playing, and reflective writing exercises — that effectively require trainees to express their agreement with administrators’ interpretations of a university’s values.

Perhaps most concerning is the growing popularity of restorative-justice approaches to student complaints about speech. While conventional disciplinary proceedings ask whether or not a policy violation has occurred, a restorative-justice conversation focuses on the harm suffered by the complainant, encourages the person whose conduct caused the harm to acknowledge responsibility, and seeks a consensus about how best to repair the harm. Because the restorative-justice framework presupposes that speech is inappropriate if it causes emotional pain, it can become a powerful tool for shutting down debate on sensitive topics.

Consider this example: A professor who teaches a summer course at a selective American university was reported to a diversity officer because he had walked his constitutional law students through the steps of an argument against gay marriage. It is noteworthy that this professor told his students at the time that he was personally in favor of gay marriage. But at the restorative-justice meeting that followed — in which this professor was expected to, and did, apologize to his students for the pain and anger that his lecture had caused them — his students explained to him that it had been disrespectful to make them listen to an argument against gay marriage, even one that he disagreed with himself. A process like this one is very effective at training professors not to say the things they are not supposed to say, and this professor has not walked anyone through the steps of an argument against gay marriage since then. Instead, he is among the 40 percent of faculty who worry that their reputations could be damaged because something they say or do will be misunderstood, according to a 2024 survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

By 2022, it was clear that the Lockean effort to dissolve basic tensions between diversity, disagreement, and social cohesion with the spiritual solvent of shared values had fatally overreached. The language of “mutual respect and inclusion” is universally popular precisely because it is vague. But to set expectations and avoid endless controversy, universities had to become more specific, so administrators clarified universities’ defining values until they yielded orthodox answers to many timely moral and political questions.

In the end, many universities that had aimed to cultivate civil charity imposed a Hobbesian civil silence instead. In the new Hobbesian reality, students and faculty who disagreed with their university’s official orthodoxies were tolerated on campus if they were willing to keep their heterodox opinions out of public view. Federalist Society gatherings could be discreetly held, so long as participants did not evangelize their beliefs.

Bejan’s trilemma thus sets the stage for a clearer understanding of the recent shocking collapse of social order. Hobbesian civil silence was an effective strategy for maintaining campus stability following the 2020 murder of George Floyd and the Supreme Court’s 2022 abortion ruling in Dobbs because campus opinion on the underlying social issues was lopsided, and because an official campus orthodoxy regarding those issues had already been established. Universities kept the peace in such cases by issuing orthodox public statements and suppressing dissent. The Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s military response upset this equilibrium by suddenly increasing the salience of a controversy about which campus opinion was much more equally divided, and therefore about which decision makers had hoped no orthodoxy would be required.

It was inevitable that university leaders were besieged on all sides by demands that they prescribe what would be orthodox thinking about the conflict in the Middle East. Hobbesian civil silence had been universities’ de facto peacekeeping strategy for years, so students and faculty had come to rely on official statements as a coordinating mechanism. Since decision makers at many universities could not agree on a party line this time, their only viable course was to rediscover the virtues of institutional neutrality. Informal civility norms do not evolve overnight, however; university communities could not adjust to such a sudden shift in governing philosophy. University leaders seemed to abdicate responsibility just when moral leadership was most required, and a great deal of rage was directed at them for failing to lead as campuses succumbed to chaos.

University leaders can avoid repeating recent history only by making thoughtful trade-offs between diversity of belief, freedom of expression, and community solidarity that they judge necessary in the service of their institutional missions. Those who nostalgically recall relatively harmonious campuses in the 1980s and ’90s should remind themselves that American society in general was less politically polarized then than it is today. There is no policy trick that will make it 1990 on the quad again. Leaders armed with these realizations will be in a good position to assess their options.

Civil charity is possible in our time: It can easily be found in universities that limit community membership to those who already share a robust set of common values. For example, Brigham Young University’s mission is “to assist individuals in their quest for perfection and eternal life,” and its students and faculty adhere to rules of conduct that forbid drinking, smoking, extramarital sex, and “contradicting or opposing, rather than analyzing or discussing, fundamental Church doctrine or policy.” BYU is not, and does not try to be, a university for everyone. But an established orthodoxy on moral and religious questions has not prevented BYU from producing groundbreaking research in fields like engineering, nanotechnology, and life sciences, as well as leading works in philosophy and theology that are consistent with the university’s core commitments. BYU imparts to its students the knowledge and skills necessary to enter competitive secular graduate schools, and it cultivates an enviable community spirit.

Some private universities seem analogously united by their explicitly progressive social and political missions. Antioch University strives to “empower students with the knowledge and skills to lead meaningful lives and to advance social, racial, economic, and environmental justice.” Roosevelt University’s “culture and mission stem from the commitment to social justice on which the university was founded.” Leaders at both institutions called for a pause in Israel’s military operations in Gaza in statements that also acknowledged internal diversity of opinion. Contemporaneous news reports mention students from both institutions participating in off-campus protests related to the war in Gaza, but they do not mention encampments or other campus disruptions at either Antioch or Roosevelt. Perhaps these communities were more resilient during these events because their shared progressive values had previously fostered a strong sense of kinship, or perhaps a shared political framework enabled members to communicate disagreement in mutually comprehensible terms.

An institutional mission that incorporates a political, moral, or religious worldview can facilitate community solidarity, but for a university it carries a significant epistemological cost: While students and faculty at such institutions can seek new truths, they will only find the ones that happen to exist within the boundaries of their shared commitments. Moreover, this approach is incompatible with the determination of some elite universities to make progress by gathering the world’s top talent in this or that specialty under one roof. A hiring or admissions policy designed for the purpose of creating an academic community with a shared worldview would probably constitute illegal viewpoint discrimination at our many public institutions, and it would surely be antithetical to their traditional commitment to make higher education broadly available to state residents.

Universities searching for alternatives to a failed Hobbesian equilibrium should consider mere civility, as exemplified by Roger Williams, instead. Mere civility tolerates the expression of implausible and even offensive beliefs, but it does not excuse coercion or chaos. Williams had his limits, and to grasp what his governance approach might look like in the context of a modern university, it is useful to examine those limits in more detail. Williams described Quakers as the most uncivil of all the religious sects that flocked to the American colonies, Bejan writes, because their religious evangelism took the form of aggressively disruptive conduct. They would sometimes walk naked on public streets to call attention to sin and injustice — a violation of one of those simple social expectations that Williams endorsed. More importantly, they would interfere with other people’s freedom of expression and religious worship. For example, Bejan reports that they interrupted church services to which they objected “by banging pots and pans, or by shouting down the minister.” She even describes a case in which a colonial Quaker removed his trousers and laid down on a church communion table during a service. Colonial Quakers also reportedly shut down the kinds of religious debates that Williams valued by suddenly falling into prayer as a means of silencing an opposing speaker.

Universities that embrace mere civility could lower the pressure on campus by setting more realistic social expectations for incoming students.

The moral zeal that drives disruptive campus protests is expressed in secular rather than religious terms, but university leaders are all too familiar with the tactics described above. A governance strategy inspired by mere civility would include clear and consistently enforced rules of conduct to protect the rights of students and faculty to engage in the structured expressive activities essential to teaching and research, and to ensure equal access to campus spaces for extramural activities. Most rules of this type need not govern expression per se. Instead, they prohibit conduct that is disruptive or physically appropriative whether or not it happens to be expressive. A rule against making loud noises in rooms where classes are ongoing prohibits both chanting political slogans and operating a vacuum cleaner. A rule against blocking other people’s view of a visiting speaker applies to a student holding a large sign in the same way that it applies to one wearing a giant hat or opening a large umbrella. A rule that prohibits camping in community gathering places applies equally to recreational and politically motivated camping.

Mere civility would require students to follow the university’s rules, not to endorse them. America has always had its share of radical movements whose members believed that vandalism, trespass, and other forms of coercion were morally justified ways to combat an unjust institutional order. We have sadly learned that a subset of today’s radicals will even make excuses for the deliberate slaughter of innocents. These ideas range from controversial to horrifying, but they are too common to exclude from academic conversations. When voiced in a seminar or published in a student newspaper, they can be subjected to rigorous scrutiny and cogent challenge as part of the university’s truth-seeking mission. Williams was a devout Puritan missionary — the exact opposite of a moral relativist — but he permitted colonial-era Quakers to join his Rhode Island colony despite his antipathy toward many of their beliefs. Most universities can and should do the same with our 21st-century radicals. If Williams were here today, he would argue that their hearts and minds are most in need of saving.

Mere civility as a governance strategy establishes a minimum standard of conduct; it does not constitute an ethical ideal. As such, it is perfectly compatible with a university’s support for research and teaching activities that focus on the urgent moral issue of how we ought to treat each other, especially when we disagree. Bureaucratic Lockeanism failed because it prescribed answers to diverse populations that would have benefited from searching questions instead. One of the deserved criticisms recently leveled at universities is that research and teaching in the humanities has focused more and more on causal theories of human behavior and less and less on the classic evaluative questions posed by philosophers, theologians, and artists since antiquity: How should we live, what should we value, and for what should we strive? As a governance approach, mere civility creates space for faculty and students to engage in the honest and fearless exploration of these timeless yet pressing questions.

Mere civility is the best path forward for university leaders who have a clear-eyed appreciation of the social and emotional costs of open disagreement in diverse communities during polarized times — and a willingness to bear those costs for the sake of the unfettered search for truth. As a governing philosophy, it has the potential to sustain a stable social order in universities too diverse for Lockean civil charity, because it acknowledges what many institutions chose to ignore until it was too late: No set of shared values specific enough to be action-guiding will be endorsed by all students, faculty, and staff, no matter how carefully those values are selected. Some people will always obey the university’s rules for merely prudential reasons rather than from personal conviction.

Universities that embrace mere civility could lower the pressure on campus by setting more realistic social expectations for incoming students. While students are receiving an excellent education, they can reasonably expect to form some deep friendships, enjoy some extracurricular activities, and meet some inspiring mentors. But few universities can consistently deliver the almost familial sense of belonging promised in their recent glossy brochures, and disappointed expectations lead students to resent the institutions themselves. Universities should advise students that disagreement on heartfelt matters is painful, but that it can lead to greater wisdom about the diversity of human values and the importance of working peacefully and productively alongside people we may not like or admire as much as we wish we did. At best, disagreement inspires personal reflection that brings each of us a little bit closer to understanding what is true and good and beautiful in the world. A student body prepared both for the costs and for the rich potential rewards of deep disagreement would be less like a pressure cooker and more like a tea kettle. After the explosive events on campuses of late, many would welcome the shrill but stable whistle of mere civility on campus.