Inside Higher Ed’s Aug. 17 report on the Uncivil collaborative—“The Heated Discourse About Civil Discourse”—does something odd for a piece about polarization by recounting, at length, sweeping claims about the motives of civil-discourse funders without examining whether the evidence behind those claims actually supports them.
I have a direct stake in this. The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, which I lead, is named in Uncivil’s report as one of 23 foundations funding what the group calls the “civility-industrial complex.” We are, according to Uncivil’s accounting, the most active funder in this space in terms of total number of grants awarded. So I read the report closely. Some of its data is genuinely interesting. Its conclusions are not. And Inside Higher Ed’s coverage repeats them as though the two were the same thing.
Uncivil’s report purports to show, through examining five years of foundation tax filings, that the funders most invested in campus dialogue programs also tend to fund conservative and pro-Israel organizations. They share their data and it is worth a look. But the report’s website doesn’t stop at the data and claims about funders’ ideological orientations. It opens by declaring that these funders’ “real goal is to silence dissent.” Nothing in the report—no grant description, no donor statement, no program requirement, no institutional outcome—supports that claim. It’s an assertion dressed up as a finding, and it rests on exactly the kind of inference that wouldn’t survive peer review.
