Civil discourse essential to a healthy society, professor argues at UWindsor lecture

A professor who advocates for civil discourse made his case at the University of Windsor on Thursday, arguing that universities need to be places where people feel free to "think out loud."

Randy Boyagoda quoted anti-extremism activist Dame Sarah Khan, saying that unlike other high-risk national security threats, such as terrorism, many threats to social cohesion are insidious and fly below the radar where they are not assessed, measured or even well-understood.

"What happens to unspoken thoughts when people feel they can't think out loud together?" he asked.

"For students, this self-containment can gradually wither their desire and capacities for hard thinking, or the thoughts they perceive as unwelcome or dissenting from a solid-seeming consensus can fester into resentment or mutate into cruder forms and cruder settings than a university campus."

LISTEN: Randy Boyagoda joins Windsor Morning 

Position created after Oct. 7

Faculty, he said, might limit their participation in vigorous intellectual exchanges, their own research and teaching lives becoming increasingly limited.

Boyagoda, an English professor at the University of Toronto, is also its advisor on civil discourse, a role created in the wake of Oct. 7, 2023.

That was the day Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking an estimated 200 hostage, according to Israeli tallies. That attack triggered Israel's current assault on Gaza, which has so far killed more than 41,000, according to the health ministry in Gaza.

Thousands of Canadian university students have protested Israel's military action by setting up encampments on university campuses, including at the University of Windsor, where students began erecting tents on May 13 and camped until July 10, when the university reached a deal with them to dismantle it.

That did not end the controversy, however, as members of the Jewish community and their supporters criticized the deal and pulled hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from the school in protest.

(CBC)

The Israel/Gaza conflict is one of several issues — gender is another — on which people are often unable or unwilling to engage civilly or don't see the utility of it, Boyagoda said.

Boyagoda spoke to both pro-encampment and anti-encampment people at U of T, he said, and found several common viewpoints among those on both sides.

Those who were pro-encampment saw it as a legitimate form of protest against the university and the best way to make their voices heard, he said.

Jewish people who opposed the encampments often considered them a direct personal affront or something that was downright offensive or threatening.

Civil discourse not about politeness

Opponents who were not Jewish saw them as a form of obstruction.

But Boyagoda made it clear that his definition of civil discourse is not about trying to force people to be polite.

Rather, he said, it's about what he called "epistemic humility," or the openness to discovering that one is wrong.

It's also not about trying to force everyone into a "mushy middle," he said; it's about creating what he called a "vital centre."

LISTEN: Nahlah Ayed joins Windsor Morning 

"That's kind of living in a life where people can encounter each other, encounter different perspectives," he told CBC.

"No one expects you to stay there. … but instead, you go there, you contribute, you learn a little bit, and then you leave a little changed. That concept, whether in person or again by way of technology, has become harder and harder to sustain in our present moment."

Boyagoda's lecture, delivered to around 75 people, was recorded for CBC Ideas.

Ideas host Nahlah Ayed described the event as "kind of an embodiment of what Randy wanted to do, which is that we all sat there and thought together – out loud."