That was the complaint at North Carolina State University, which revised a residence hall policy that, among other stipulations, prohibited dorm dwellers from wearing T-shirts or hanging posters “disrespectful and hurtful to others” while also requiring students to “confront behavior or report to staff incidents of incivility and intolerance.”
The new policy now includes a written caveat calling the civility effort a set of “voluntary expectations” while emphasizing that the school is “strongly committed to freedom of expression.”
“Civility is an important value,” said Robert Shibley, senior vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which protested the Raleigh university’s civility policy. “But at the same time, it can’t be made the paramount issue in a free society, because there has to be space for people who have intense feelings about things to express those feelings in a way that really communicates the urgency and the depths of feeling that lies behind their opinions.”
When campuses attempt to compel civil behavior, Shibley said, they become “so committed to civility that if you say something uncivil, you are going to be penalized In some way, that’s going too far. It starts to infringe on the very expressions that are protected by the First Amendment.”
Many credit Pier Forni, a professor of Italian literature at Johns Hopkins University, as the dean of the campus civility movement. He started the Hopkins Civility Project 15 years ago, wrote the 2002 book “Choosing Civility” and is a frequent guest speaker on other campuses, including at Missouri earlier this year.
For Forni, the culprits behind contemporary incivility are numerous, from what he called “the crisis of civil engagement” in this country to eroding workplace manners to “radical informality” heightened by Facebook and related social media. Yet he has no interest in making civil behavior a campus requirement.
“Civility should be promoted, not believed in,” he said. “Civility is not something to enforce. ”
Among the schools embracing those beliefs is the University of Arizona, which last year opened the National Institute for Civil Discourse after the shootings in Tucson, Ariz., that killed six people and injured 13, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
In 2010, Rutgers University launched its “Project Civility” just before freshman Tyler Clementi killed himself when a roommate secretly recorded the teen’s sexual encounter with another man. English, the Missouri campaign leader, said the New Jersey student’s suicide helped influence her decision to start a program on campus.
She, too, favors the voluntary approach, though her initial instincts said otherwise.
“My first thought was, ‘I’m a lawyer, we need a rule or a policy,’ but then my thinking was, ‘That’s not really necessary,'” she said. “We can have all the policies in the world, but what we want to do is raise awareness and get people thinking … We want to change the culture so it just becomes embedded.”
Or, as Noor Azizan-Gardner, Missouri’s chief diversity officer, put it: “I’m hoping when they graduate they will know what it means to be civil, kind and compassionate.”
- 5 things CIOs need to know about IoT - March 20, 2017
- First-ever mobile predictive analytics solution - February 25, 2016
- 5 challenges to taking content mobile [Infographic] - September 25, 2014
Comments are closed.