Dr. Elizabeth Smith on Civil Discourse at Furman

Furman has more work to do to take civil discourse from the classroom to the "real world."

This month, we bring you an exclusive interview with Dr. Elizabeth Smith, a professor and former chair of Furman’s Department of Politics and International Affairs.

Last spring, Dr. Smith taught a course on civil discourse. We asked her what she learned from teaching the course and how she assesses Furman’s ongoing efforts to strengthen civil discourse.

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Tell me about yourself and your role at Furman.

I have been at Furman for 28 years. I am a professor of political science in the Department of Politics and International Affairs, and I’m also the assistant faculty director of the Cothran Center, which is the center for vocational reflection on calling and purpose. I previously served as chair of the politics department and am originally from Charlotte. I went to graduate school at the University of Minnesota and attended undergrad at UNC Chapel Hill.

In the Spring of ‘25, you taught a course on civil discourse. Tell me about the class, what you wanted to accomplish through it, and your experience teaching it.

The course was structured to meet three goals. The first goal was to get students to really think about the essential role of civil discourse in democracy—especially our democracy—and the value of a marketplace of ideas.

We talked about the First Amendment, representative government and deliberation, and also the historical context. We discussed whether we are in a uniquely uncivil time, which I think a lot of people think, or whether this is just part and parcel of living in a democracy where you have disagreements.

The other thing we considered during the first part of the semester was what “civility” and “incivility” actually mean. We looked at a lot of different scholars and a lot of different opinions, and there is real disagreement.

Some would say uncivil discourse occurs when you’re not polite; that rudeness is a form of incivility. But there are also forms of civility and incivility that are deeper and perhaps more significant than whether you’re polite or impolite. Some scholars say that civility requires a kind of responsiveness where you recognize someone else’s ideas.

Others talk about civility as public-mindedness, where there’s a commitment to the common good in the exchange you’re having as citizens about politics. There’s also deliberative civility, which occurs when we ask, “Are you playing by the rules of the game in terms of how we talk to one another?” be they written or unwritten rules.

Other scholars talk about moral civility, which means recognizing another person’s right to exist and to have an opinion different from your own. So there are many ways that we can approach judgments of discourse as civil or uncivil, and I think that’s a conversation we need to be having.

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What about the second part of the course?

The second part of the course examined the origins of incivility and disagreements through the lens of psychological- and political-science literature. We started with Jonathan Haidt’s work on moral foundations theory, which examines how we have a shared set of moral values, regardless of where we are on the ideological spectrum.

Generally, there are core things that people think are important when it comes to morality, and those are that we don’t harm people, that we don’t cheat, that we don’t betray, that we follow the rules, that we don’t degrade ourselves or others, and that we don’t oppress one another. Part of the problem we have in understanding one another is even though we all have these core shared moral values, different parts of the ideological spectrum emphasize certain values more than others.

Liberals, for example, tend to emphasize care, fairness, and not doing harm. Conservatives have a broader set of moral values that emphasize authority, loyalty, and patriotism. Haidt argues that we talk past each other, because we don’t take the opportunity to think about the value roots of someone’s opinions.

We talked a lot about motivated reasoning. As information processors and as human beings, it’s just how we work—we look for stuff that confirms what we already believe, and it’s very hard to persuade people of something they don’t believe. When we disagree with someone, most of us will try to feed our interlocutor a ton of facts and information to persuade them.

But people resist these counterpressures because, as research shows, what we believe is really central to our understanding of ourselves. We even resist listening to different ideas. We need to think about our own reaction to people we disagree with, knowing that we’re motivated reasoners, and try to overcome that problem in our thinking.

We also talked about the rise of partisan and social media. Contextually speaking, incivility is not uncommon in democracies, but things get significantly worse when modern social media, partisan media, and media accessibility combine with our motivated reasoning.

It’s really easy to cocoon ourselves, because it feels really good to find your team. Politics is a little bit like sports in that way. People get a sense of belonging, and that group identity makes it easy to stereotype or diminish the other side. We really have to pay attention to the effects of partisan social media.

And what about the third part of the class?

The third goal was to get students to practice engaging in civil discourse. We have to learn how to be citizens and we have to be socialized into democratic norms. The students did this on a lot of different levels all throughout the course. We explored many organizations on the left, right, and middle that are trying to bridge differences and give people opportunities to practice the art of civil discourse, including My Neighbor’s Voice here in Greenville.

We talked a lot about learning to listen, which is one of the really significant first steps to engaging in civil discourse and can help us overcome motivated reasoning. We also talked about listening to understand and not just to respond. When you listen attentively, the speaker does a better job of presenting their ideas than they do when you aren’t listening.

When I teach, if I have students who are nodding along and engaged, I become a better teacher than if they’re looking at their phones or spacing out. Same thing with conversation—if somebody’s really listening to you, you become a better conveyor of what you believe. They then understand you better, and you build trust. And the research shows that this sort of listening helps folks moderate their opinions instead of doubling down.

We also talked about the role of debates. There’s a very healthy way to debate that Braver Angels utilizes that isn’t like a high-school debate format, but does allow people to take a side. There’s a moderator who restates what one person says and then tips it to another person who has the opportunity to respond. That method was very effective with the students. They chose the topic of America’s role in the world, and it was a very good conversation.

The students also led a deliberation with OLLI, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, which serves older adults. They led a discussion on the issue of immigration, and it was a really interesting, cross-generational conversation. We did not all agree, and it was a really great way of learning about other people, what they believe, and why they believe it.

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Ideologically, what sorts of students were drawn to the class? What kind of personalities did you have?

There were a lot of politics students, but not exclusively. The class was small—around 15 students. It was also a three-hour seminar, so that already takes a special kind of student. I had freshmen through seniors in the class, which worked out well.

This group—like almost all Furman students I’ve ever interacted with—were really thoughtful. They were critical thinkers who really wanted to have deep conversations. We never deliberately asked people about their ideology or partisanship. Every once in a while, somebody might reveal it, but we didn’t ask.

There was serious disagreement though, which was great. That’s what I’d hoped for. It’s hard, because you can’t really say, “Okay, I need five Republicans in this class and five Democrats,” so I just had to take what I got in terms of who was attracted. But most importantly, they were really curious, and yearned for deep, good conversations.

What trends are you observing regarding civic discourse among the larger student body?

My main sense of this comes from what I experience in the classroom and what the students tell me. It’s anecdotal, and it can be hard to fully grasp what’s going on. But what I hear from students is that many self-censor, especially in their personal lives.

I’ve heard them say things along these lines: they came to college anticipating having really cool, deep conversations with people they disagree with, and learning new things. But what they end up facing is a nervousness around conversations about politics because of the possibility of fraying a relationship that they didn’t want to fray. They have to live with the people they disagree with. They’re in your dorm room or across the hall, and students feel like they can’t risk damaging a relationship that they need to be good.

I think it’s that fear of partisanship that is more problematic than actual partisanship. I have a friend who’s been in a retirement community for six months. She’s very active and does all the activities. She told me no one has brought up politics once in six months.

So this phenomenon apparently replicates itself in other venues, where people have to live together and get along. It’s really too bad—it’s not helpful for a functioning democracy. I also think social media provides ways to take people down that didn’t exist in the past, and people are just on pins and needles about that.

There are really bright spots though. We do “Pizza and Politics” in the politics department, which is an optional, informal conversation about politics over pizza. The room is packed. We end up pulling in chairs from the seminar rooms and out of people’s offices. And we have diverse conversations and disagreements that for the most part—99% of the time from my perspective—have been very civil.

Now, these are people who’ve come together specifically to talk about politics. It’s not the dorm room and it’s not a classroom. I think students do report self-censoring in classrooms because they’re afraid of their peers, or they have a perception that the professor will hold it against them if they articulate another point of view.

It makes me very sad to think that students don’t feel like they can say what they want to say. I guess there might be a professor who could make you feel unwelcome, but mostly I think faculty really want interesting conversations. We really want you to bring in diverse perspectives.

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From your perspective, how is On Discourse going?

I think On Discourse is a great initiative. It’s always nice to have more opportunities to get students engaging in conversation. I like the dialogue format; I led one on the issue of partisanship on campus, and we’ve also had ones on patriotism, America’s role in the world, etc.

It’s an excellent educational opportunity where you have a little bit of setup by experts or scholars about the various perspectives on an issue, and then you allow students the opportunity to talk at tables with a moderator. So there are rules, and people come to it with purpose.

But you know, the obstacle that comes with things like On Discourse, my class, or Pizza and Politics, is that they’re not the real world. In the real world, we have to function in places where there isn’t a moderator and there aren’t rules, and so we also need to recover a sense of civic life and morality—a sense of our responsibility as citizens in a democracy.

Democracy is the hardest form of government you can have, and we have to socialize people into democratic norms and accustom them to the idea that we’re not always going to agree, and that we must value and respect the opportunities for people to disagree.

Ultimately, I am a very strong believer in free speech and the marketplace of ideas. I really do agree with John Stuart Mill that the way to get to the best ideas is to entertain them all, and that through conversation the bad ones will be revealed.

I think when you suppress speech, you give that suppressed speech more power than it might deserve, and you also divert the conversation to focusing on the suppression of speech rather than talking about the issue itself.

Should any speech on campus be restricted? If so, where should the lines be drawn?

That’s a really, really hard question. It goes back to what I talked about at the very beginning—about what is civil and what is uncivil. I think the Supreme Court has gotten it right generally, in terms of how we understand free speech in American politics and what it means in our democracy.

The incitement test is where they draw the line—along with obscenity and threatening talk. They also do allow time, place, and manner restrictions on speech, and the court has ruled—I think rightly—that educational institutions are somewhat different than the real world. In the real world, when someone is saying something threatening or that denies your right to exist, you can walk away.

In an educational institution on the other hand, you have to interact with those people. And people shouldn’t have the right to speak in a way that threatens you so much that you can’t learn. Now, there’s a judgment call there.

One has to establish what is so problematic that a student couldn’t come into class and learn because his or her brain is so tied up and stressed about something another student said. I think we should deal with that by erring on the side of allowing people to try out their ideas and say what they want to say. I always try to tell my students that sometimes we speak “in draft,” and as a result, we will make mistakes.

We need to come up with community norms—like we did in the civil discourse class, for example—where you recognize that sometimes people are speaking in draft or trying out new ideas, and that they’ll make mistakes or say something that comes across in a way they didn’t mean, even though they had good intentions.

In a classroom, if you can facilitate a willingness to forgive honest mistakes, that can help mitigate conflict and maybe widen the scope of things people feel are okay to say in a classroom. But there certainly have to be some limits. You can’t have a good educational environment when some people are denying other people’s right to exist. So it’s a little bit different than the real world, and the courts have recognized that.

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What are the most significant threats to free speech and civil discourse at Furman going forward?

Self-censorship. I think a thriving educational community is one where people feel like they can talk to one another, not just in the classroom, but also in their personal lives. Students spend more time out of the classroom than they spend in the classroom, and they’re learning in those external environments. You should be sitting in the hallways talking about interesting ideas and new things that you’re learning. That hesitancy—that concern that you’re going to damage your relationship just by sharing your opinions—is very worrisome to me.