What’s the Difference Between Civility and Civil Discourse?

Civic centers and civil discourse programs are cropping up across the country, but the debate over them is often distinctly uncivil.

The School of Civic Life and Leadership at UNC-Chapel Hill, also known as SCiLL, is one of the most prominent examples. It has been riven by conflict since its conception, and both its critics and some of its supporters have described it as a conservative political project.  

So it’s notable that a new report released by the UNC System Faculty Taskforce on Civil Discourse doesn’t mention SCiLL by name a single time. (It does include a single reference to CivComm, SCiLL’s living-learning community.) 

That omission is by design. Robert Taber, a Fayetteville State University historian and chair of the task force, explained in an interview with The Assembly in early July that the group wanted to look at civil discourse across the UNC System. Most schools don’t have the funding to start something like SCiLL, most universities are not the political hothouse Chapel Hill is, and most have student bodies with very different needs.

So the task force recommended an alternate approach: investing in existing programs and faculty strengths to ensure civil discourse is neither politically biased nor a mere box to check, but something that ensures students have the skills and knowledge to live in a diverse country.

“I’m a historian of democracy,” Taber said. “I teach a class on the age of Atlantic Revolutions, looking at how you move into being an independent society, a more people-focused society, how do you build a republic or a constitutional democracy. This is one of the big scholarly questions in my life.” 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  

Why did you take this working group on? What was your interest in this kind of work? 

In higher ed at this moment, we’re looking at this overlapping series of challenges. 

Employers are identifying that students often meet their technical needs but lack so-called soft skills, such as communication, teamwork, leadership, professionalism. Easy access to generative AI means students need training on how to evaluate outputs for hallucinations and especially unspoken assumptions, and how to use large language models in a high-agency way, where they’re the ones directing the AI rather than being directed by the AI. Then we’re all living in this algorithm-driven social media world, this attention economy that’s trying to keep us on certain apps by giving us an entertaining, comfortable view of the world that can also be deeply incomplete, if not outright misleading. 

The other problem that we’re facing is that a lot of the scholarly disciplines that are best positioned to help students through this series of overlapping challenges are the same ones that we’ve been shoving to the back burner over the last 25 to 30 years. 

Then we also have this larger, sort of existential question of what is higher education even for, whether it’s worth it. 

So it becomes important to say, “Yes, higher education matters, a liberal arts education matters. Yes, it’s worth it, and here’s how higher ed can help tackle all of these societal challenges through civil discourse education and programming, including reinvestment in the humanities.”

What was your experience like on the task force? Was everyone roughly in agreement from the start, or were there big-picture questions you were split on?

We wanted civil discourse to be meaningful, and we wanted to be evidence-based, to have that rigor. What we realized pretty quickly is that rather than develop a two-sentence definition of what we mean by civil discourse, we needed to instead think about different frameworks for how we can distinguish between effective, meaningful civil discourse programming or education versus what is less effective. 

There’s this challenge that the lay definition of civility is often where people’s minds go when they’re thinking about civil discourse. And civility is often interpreted as being just polite. And politeness for politeness’s sake is not civil discourse in a meaningful way. 

Okay, well, what does that look like? That’s where we got into strong civility, where we got into a culture of collaborative problem solving, evidence-based problem solving, and respecting the inherent dignity of all of the participants. 

What do you mean by strong civility?

We look at it really as a conversation that can include hard truths, jarring information, but it’s done to pursue equitable and inclusive dialogue that maintains the conversation and underlying relationship for the long haul. 

There’s a part of the report where we look at how even the phrase “we’ll just agree to disagree” can be a bit of a challenge, can cut strong civility short, because you’re giving up on the discussion instead of pushing through. 

It doesn’t have to lead to persuasion. It doesn’t have to lead to a unanimous decision. But you should be able to keep conversing.

The most prominent example of civil discourse in the UNC System is SCiLL, which is not mentioned in this report. Can you talk about that decision?

One of the things that we are looking at is the fact that many people inside and outside of the university are concerned about the fall-off in enrollment in the kinds of classes that give the students grounding in these different perspectives. History, literature, foreign languages, philosophy, religion, classics, and interdisciplinary deep dives into particular groups or regions: They all help students broaden their perspectives and build crucial skills in building bridges across perceived differences. 

Part of our charge as a task force is how to get the most bang for our buck. The budget of places like Fayetteville State is not unlimited. We found that of their own volition, a lot of faculty, across many campuses, across many disciplines, are already doing really good work that falls under these parameters of civil discourse. 

But enrollment in these classes is dropping, and the thing that we didn’t quite realize until we were digging into the data is that enrollment in these classes is actually dropping much faster than the number of students majoring in these disciplines. 

We’re not calling for every student to switch their major to philosophy—though I’ll note that the New York Times business section just a few days ago had a recent article called “The Revenge of the Philosophy Major”—but we do suggest that students add that fifth class for their schedule, and they can do that at any campus. 

Lots of the concern about partisanship and self-censorship on campus is dominated by concerns at flagships and elite colleges. Do you see the same problems, or does it take a different shape where you are? 

It takes a very different shape. There are those concerns where students are worried about going viral for the wrong reasons. They are worried about being perceived as ignorant by their classmates. But it’s a very different kind of thing. 

One place where I’ve butted heads with administrators in the past is this idea that our regional publics and HBCUs should actually be cutting back on the liberal arts, cutting back on the humanities or social sciences, and just focus entirely on, like, nursing.

Full respect to my nursing and business colleagues, but I see restricting foreign language instruction and humanities instruction to the flagships as rather elitist and against the mission of the public university. 

For me as an educator, civil discourse is about equipping students with the tools and experience they need to consider evidence and discuss and evaluate solutions as part of a community before any big contentious or controversial issues arise. 

You recommended building on existing faculty expertise and not siloing civil discourse into its own school, which is obviously the trend across the country. Why do you think that is? 

A lot of state legislatures, just the way they work fundamentally, is there’s a very small professional staff. They are doing so many things. The way a lot of higher ed administration works is you’re just trying to solve an issue very quickly so you can move on to the next issue. This is where lobbyists and especially vendors come in and say, “Oh, you’ve got this problem. Here’s this great turnkey solution. Pay me a lot of money.” 

One of my fears with civil discourse has not been that every campus is going to create these siloed centers, because our campuses, frankly, just don’t have the money for that. My fear was that it was all going to happen within residence life or student affairs. Or just get folded into the Foundations of American Democracy requirement, like, “Here’s this worksheet.” 

On the other side of the coin, there’s what happened with critical thinking. Sometimes faculty just shrug and say, “Oh, yeah, we teach critical thinking just by delivering content the same way we always do.” 

I got a small course redesign grant from the system that I’m going to incorporate into a history of Mexico class. We’re going to do a robust version of a role-play where each student will be a different historical character in the Mexican Revolution for two to three weeks, debating different issues. Is it always civil? No, one of the game mechanics is that you can assassinate one of your classmates. This is the Mexican revolution! But they have to make evidence-based arguments. They have to build a coalition to get different laws passed.

That really helps students to practice their oral presentation skills, how to listen to his speech and respond quickly to it without just responding reflexively to it, because it’s not as connected to present-day political issues. They don’t have a strong opinion on the price of maize in 1915 Mexico City and price supports there. It’s just not something that’s come up. So it gives them a chance to practice that in a deliberate way, but within a pre-existing history course that’s already on the books. 

The emphasis on civil discourse has been strongly coded as a conservative project. 

Which is very unfortunate, that it’s coded partisan.

You were framing this as creating the ability, skills, and culture for people to have hard conversations together. But there’s also been legislation here and elsewhere in the country to prevent the teaching of divisive concepts, which seems to run in the opposite direction. How has that context shaped the way you are thinking about civil discourse?

I just want to briefly touch on the legislation because it’s about endorsing a certain very defined list of concepts, but does not prevent the teaching about those concepts. And that’s really important because I teach African American history. We talk about controversial concepts quite a bit, including what I think most Americans could agree is explicit white supremacy in the 19th century. That’s a controversial idea that falls well within academic freedom for students to look at and discuss—not to endorse it but to see what the power of those ideas have had in our history. 

What is important to keep in mind in terms of civil discourse is that viewpoint diversity is a means to an end. As we articulate in the report, we cannot let it become the end in itself. Perspectives and arguments still need to be based on evidence. This is an institution that is about the discovery and transmission of knowledge. Arguments have to be able to withstand the scrutiny of peer review by experts in the field. 

One thing that the task force talked about a lot, as an example, is flat earth theory. That could be worth mentioning in a religious studies class, depending on the topic, but would have absolutely no place in the geological sciences.