Back when I worked in higher education policy, I worked with a misanthrope who refused to say good morning. Hard to believe, I know.
To remedy my angst, alongside the fuller spectrum of psychic bruises one garners in the sector, I left and enrolled on a MA Philosophy of Education course in late 2022.
At this time, the academy was contending with significant questions about gender, the legacy of colonialism, and the IHRA definition of antisemitism. These controversies did not meaningfully affect my area of policy – I focused mainly on nursing and medical education – but they resonated with my experience of off-the-record comments that lacked moral regard for students and fellow colleagues.
During the first of what was to be two in-person conversations about my dissertation, I proposed a focus on decency, a norm that protects individuals from humiliation. My programme leader at the time, a gender-critical and Jewish scholar, advised that the literature on decency was fairly scant. She suggested that I instead turn my attention to civility – so I did, shortly before she left academia for good.
Another stomach turns
One programme leader later, in early 2024, I submitted my dissertation: The Importance of Civility in Contemporary English Higher Education: In Dialogue with Michael Oakeshott. Outside of our departmental tumult, I saw the resurgence of global violence against civilians, the passage of the controversial Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, and the concerning rise of far-right political power.
Despite these shifts, my dissertation topic elicited little attention and the occasional frosty eye roll.
Anchoring my arguments to conservative philosophical thought was admittedly bold, but was I coming across as archaic? As sanctimonious?
Another can of worms
If you would like a summary of my 20k word tome, it is this: civility in higher education is important. To elaborate, it is important is for three reasons: incivility in the academy is courting heavy-handed governmental intervention; uncivil acts run counter to the civilising and civic remit of the university; and acts of incivility harm important communicative relationships.
I should perhaps start with an attempt to define civility.
For this, I turn to Aristotle, who positions civility as a weak form of friendship for those engaged in public forms of communicative exchange. Civility, as a virtue in citizenship, mandates a regard for rights, as rights are a moral concern, including individual dignity and freedom of expression. Civility, as a civilising virtue, also necessitates a regard for the moral “language” of social norms, including tolerance and sincerity (and good mornings), as well as the laws that codify adjudicated and legitimised social norms.
One conception of how this blend functions is “robust civility.” Coined by Timothy Garton Ash, and referenced in the Office for Students’ regulatory framework (no less), this form of civility significantly emphasises the right of free speech alongside a thick-skinned approach to debate. Other conceptions, such as Teresa Bejan’s “mere civility” and those advanced by civilitarians, temper the right of free speech with a greater regard for social norms and other human rights; how much your feelings should matter in your non-intimate friendships, however, cannot be settled here.
We’re banging pots and pans to make you understand
Despite the varying emphases on legal rights and social norms, what links these varying conceptions is the importance of civility in cohering plural societies that are granted the right of free speech. This brings us to the first of our three issues: in order to advance viewpoint plurality, governments are acting to protect this right.
Back in the 1980s, a time when – as my husband reminds me – our world also featured plenty of actual fascists, the Government signed the Education (No. 2) Act 1986 into law. This was partially in response to “no-platforming”, and of course, was reflective of Thatcher’s position on curtailing civic disorder.
The 2023 Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act follows much the same pattern, and we now have fines too (if not the tort).
It is a stark reminder that the autonomy of the university is contingent upon political will, and incivility in the academy emboldens popular support for governmental discipline, warranted or not.
I killed the teacher’s pet
This brings us to the second reason civility matters: that the university does and should hold an important civic and civilising remit, with civility as an important virtue cutting across both.
Although Oakeshott has little to say on higher education and died before the reforms to English universities in 1992, he proposes that the university in ideal form should repair, reshape and reconsider knowledge. The university is just one of many adjudicative associations that Oakeshott describes, but the university, in his conception, sits somewhat apart by considering academic claims.
By “academic”, he refers to the collective intellectual inheritance of a civilisation. This inheritance, when attended to with moral concern and care, cultivates and civilizes public discourse; incivility, in contrast, only serves to delegitimise two of the university’s most important functions and distance the public.
We gotta bury you, man
We truly need a coherent academic response to our current political and ethical dilemmas; what we cannot afford is for the academy to splinter or dissipate. When we lose students and academics to infighting, unfair treatment, open hostility and humiliation, we lose our solidarity with those who approach the world with intelligence, reserve and a concern for truth.
Civility coheres, accommodates plurality and presents us with good forms of communicative exchange; it is important, and we would be wise to give it the attention it deserves.
