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Civility and voice: From “civility wars” to constructive engagement

The challenge posed by Cortina, Cortina, and Cortina (2019) is balancing the need for civility with the benefits of candor and protecting the voice. I extend this work by outlining a four-quadrant model of organizational climate for civility and voice, and providing suggestions for facilitating the high voice, high civility climate for civil discourse, constructive engagement, and collaboration. This perspective is informed by the literature as well as by the extensive experience with multiple institutions of higher education in the context of regional accreditation and has been helpful in my organizational practice. There are many recent examples of “civility wars” in academia, in which administrative push for civility resulted in resistance from faculty and students concerned with de-facto censorship in the name of civility and with the loss of voice (Cortina et al., 2019; Kleban, 2014; Schmidt, 2014). At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, demonstrators carried posters “Civility = Silence, Silence = Death” (Nelson, 2014). Slogans such as “Civility = Silence” suggest that tensions of “civility wars”might in part be fueled by the confusion of two separate dimensions of organizational climate: civility and voice. Thus, constructive work of ending “civility wars” and facilitating civil discourse in academia and other types of organizations might benefit from the following: