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Alice Speri
The Guardian
US college campuses have long been associated with the country’s fraying social fabric. Beset by so-called “cancel culture”, mass protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, and mounting conflicts over free speech, a notion has taken hold that colleges and universities represent a convergence of the country’s broader ills.
Dozens of organizations have cropped up promising to foster “civic discourse”, “dialogue across difference” and “viewpoint diversity”. Together, they make up a fast-growing ecosystem that has ballooned, by some estimates, into a $200m a year business some skeptics have billed the “civility industrial complex”.
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Women’s and gender studies departments have been some of the most embattled on campuses in recent years, with the problems plaguing this field being emblematic of the viewpoint diversity crisis in social-oriented disciplines.
The National Endowment for the Humanities—after losing in court over the termination of more than 1,400 grants, totaling over $100 million—began offering this month to reinstate those awards.
Just 10 years ago, almost 60 percent of Americans said they had a lot of confidence in higher education. By last year, that number had fallen to 42 percent. Seventy percent of Americans told Pew last fall that higher education is moving in the wrong direction.
