Why are we doing this work?

We founded UNCIVIL to expose these networks and the threat they pose to democracy and higher education.

You may be asking, “Wait—what’s wrong with civil discourse and dialogue?”

We invite you to regard these intentionally duplicitous marketing terms the same way you would “clean coal,” “right to work,” or “Defense of Marriage.” That is, evidence makes clear these terms are deliberately chosen to obfuscate the funders’ and providers’ agendas.

These programs are designed to distract, derail, and delegitimize the organic organizing and opinion formation among students. They deploy language that borrows from social justice in order to further anti-democratic aims.

The actual goal of these programs is to weaken key aspects of democratic life and higher education. The Civility Industrial Complex is trying to prevent us from pursuing the real aims of the university, under the pretext of promoting “pluralism” and “social cohesion.”

These programs are, first and foremost, an attack on truth. They legitimize fringe and far-right ideologies by reserving dedicated space for racism, misogyny, climate denialism, etc. as a necessary part of an unending debate. Like anti-evolutionists, they insist that we “teach the controversy,” pushing the discourse further and further to the authoritarian right. Rather than advocating directly for long-discredited ideas or anti-democratic positions, they seek to require respectful silence as the only intellectually legitimate response to these arguments.

By these lights, widespread allegiance to democratic norms is redefined as mindless groupthink, while positions emanating from billionaire-funded advocacy organizations, the White House, and the Supreme Court are so daringly “heterodox” that they must be sheltered from reply and subsidized with affirmative action. In this through-the-looking-glass interpretation, 19-year-olds who call blackface “racist” are the authoritarians and armed SWAT teams who throw peaceful protesters into unmarked vans are the guardians of free speech. The absence of an organic constituency for an idea is proof that it is unjustly maligned or dismissed—not that it fails to convince.

Wealthy donors have long sought to redefine acceptable intellectual life in ways that limit democracy. They have always found some willing or at least opportunistic allies among college administrators, who in turn have repeatedly mobilized police and the FBI when their arguments fail to convince their own students. Our data demonstrates that Big Civility is just the latest marketing campaign for this tradition of illiberal control.