Uncivil rendered its verdict. Now let’s have the debate.

I’ve been exposed.

Not by a prosecutor or investigative reporters, but by a “consortium of scholars and researchers” who fancy themselves a bulwark against what they describe as the “Civility Industrial Complex.”

My offense? Helping fund Ohio State’s Civil Discourse for Citizenship program in the Center for Ethics and Human Values, which teaches students to debate respectfully across the ever-widening ideological divide. I’m also described as a “conservative opinion columnist” who praised state reforms promoting intellectual diversity, informed citizenship, free speech, and civil discourse in Ohio’s universities. Those reforms included the establishment of the Salmon P. Chase Center at Ohio State and similar centers at four other state universities.

In fact, my accusers missed a couple of counts on my rap sheet. A decade ago, my family established the New Albany Center for Civil Discourse and Debate, and we fund the debate teams at New Albany schools.

Guilty on all counts. Proudly.

Who are these prosecutors of politeness? They call themselves — ironically and appropriately — Uncivil, and they’ve filed their evidence against me and others in a dossier they call the “Civility Files.” 

If you favor civil dialogue and thoughtful debate over name-calling and histrionics, you might be their next target.

Uncivil directs most of its fire at the funding sources for its disfavored civility initiatives to discredit them via the logical fallacy of guilt by association. But its own account shows what it’s really protecting.

Uncivil’s spokesperson, Dartmouth historian Bethany Moreton, doesn’t mince words. In an interview, she called the civility push “a real slur against students” and faculty, accused it of fueling right-wing patriotic education efforts, and said it promotes political passivity. In her telling, it seems, ensuring viewpoint diversity amounts to “affirmative action for bad ideas.”

It doesn’t take a scholar to guess who’ll hold the gavel to judge which ideas are bad.

The last few years of campus activism have been anything but passive. Too often, the alternative to civil discourse has been illegally occupying university facilities and shouting down speakers. Charlie Kirk, who made a career of civil campus debates, was murdered in the middle of one.

The Civility Files say the civility push reinforces the Trump administration’s efforts to cast “leftist, pro-Palestinian, and anti-racist expression” as intolerant and threatening. Moreton also condemned what she called “pathologizing pro-Palestinian student advocacy.”

Since no progressive platitude is complete without blaming Israel, Uncivil puts “pro-Israel” in scare quotes throughout its pages — just as it would the “pro-America” views of anti-illegal immigration groups — because both purportedly promote an apparently evil “ethno-nationalist” state. 

Those are all left-wing partisan positions that could just as easily be characterized as a “real slur” against those who hold mainstream moderate or conservative views and believe that patriotism is a virtue. It’s most certainly a slur against the majority of Jews.

A 2024 survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) found that while 71% of university faculty said a liberal would fit well in their department, only 20% said the same of a conservative. A 2020 study of more than 12,000 faculty in universities across 30 states plus D.C. found that registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans 8.5-to-1. By academic discipline, economics had the lowest ratio at 3-to-1, while anthropology had the highest at 42.2-to-1. Ohio State’s faculty is more balanced than the overall average, at 3.7-to-1.

Voter registration is an imperfect measure, as the study authors note. Anecdotally, in my work with faculty at Ohio State, I’ve found nearly all of them to be committed to honest truth-seeking and teaching. But, as progressivism itself insists, we all have biases, and consciously or not, our views and behaviors are shaped by them. 

Progressives are the dominant power on campus. The dialogue programs Uncivil rejects threaten that position merely by inviting the other side into the room. Uncivil’s consortium of progressive scholars isn’t objecting to dissent per se; it’s objecting to any sort of organized debate that threatens progressive ideological hegemony.

Nowhere is that dominance more evident than in the incessant invocation of race and “colonialism” as the drivers of all the world’s ills. A member of Uncivil’s advisory board is Emmaia Gelman, whose book “The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State” casts the ADL not as fighting antisemitism but rather as a “proponent of the racial state and U.S. empire.”

The ADL, unsurprisingly, describes Gelman as a “Hamas apologist” and her book as “a work of historical revisionism.”

Another Uncivil board member, Mary Anne Franks, wrote a book titled “Fearless Speech: Breaking Free from the First Amendment,” in which she faults our constitutionally protected free speech for allowing what she calls “reckless speech.”

Franks didn’t invent the notion of fearless speech. She almost certainly borrowed it from French philosopher Michel Foucault, a patron saint of the academic left, whose 1983 Berkeley lectures carried that title. For Foucault, fearless speech meant risking something to tell the truth, even against the majority’s view.

But the fearless speaker on today’s campus isn’t the activist with the crowd and faculty behind them. It’s the dissenting student who risks something by challenging the progressive consensus.

When scholars seek to stifle open debate, it makes clear their complaints are little more than the reckless cry of ideologues whose views can’t stand scrutiny.

Uncivil leveled the charges. Let the trial be a debate. I know a couple of programs at Ohio State that would be happy to host it.