New Albany resident Philip Derrow is a regular Columbus Dispatch contributor.
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 University’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 am described on the group's website 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.
Guilty on all counts. Proudly.
My uncivil accuser
Who are these prosecutors of politeness? They call themselves – ironically and appropriately – the Uncivil Collective, 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.
Dartmouth History Professor Bethany Moreton, a member of Uncivil's executive committee, doesn’t mince words.
In an Inside Higher Ed 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 gunned down 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 described it as “pathologizing pro-Palestinian student advocacy.”
The real slurs
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 evil “ethno-nationalist” state.
Those are all 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 Natinoal Association of Scholars study of more than 12,000 faculty members at 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’s 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 their ideological hegemony.
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.”
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.
New Albany resident Philip Derrow is a retired business owner. He was a two-term member of the New Albany-Plain Local Board of Education. He is a regular Columbus Dispatch contributor. Reach him at philderrowdispatch@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: The enemy of free speech is apparently me. Well, lock me up. Go Buckeyes| Opinion
