The Real Crisis on Campus Isn’t Civility, It’s Meaning

We are living through a period of profound polarization.

Trust is low. Civic friendship is frayed. Many Americans increasingly see one another not as fellow citizens, but as adversaries. By some measures, the United States is polarizing faster than any other major democracy.

This is often described as a crisis of civility. That is true—but it is not the whole story. Beneath the civility crisis lies something deeper: a crisis of meaning.

The data are striking. Nearly all incoming college students say they want meaningful work and a sense of purpose. But far fewer graduates report that they have actually found it. When young people are not given the tools to seek lasting meaning, they often gravitate toward narrower forms of identity and belonging—including political ones—that cannot sustain them over time.

The result is a kind of shallow civic activism: intense, often adversarial, but brittle. Mobs can provide a fleeting sense of belonging, but they cannot form citizens. What looks like a breakdown in civility is, in many ways, downstream of a failure to educate citizens capable of living lives of purpose in a pluralistic democracy.

To address this deeper crisis, universities should ground civil discourse and civic education in the Western tradition of liberal inquiry—one that invites students to reflectively transcend their immediate identities in the shared pursuit of truth. Civic education equips students to consider the many competing accounts of a meaningful life and a good community, and to navigate them with wisdom. In doing so, it prepares them for life in a pluralistic democratic society.

This tradition stretches back at least to Plato and The Republic. To engage in reasoned argument about the choices available in democratic life is to participate in a tradition of thought, nourished by classical and biblical sources, that has shaped the Western and American political traditions. Students educated in this way develop commitments to such key democratic values as toleration, freedom of thought, and ordered liberty.

Liberal arts–based civic education does not close minds; it expands them. It challenges students to ask foundational questions: What is a good life? What makes a just society? What are the best economic and political orders? What are the promises and perils of technological advancement? What are the founding principles of the American political order—and can they sustain our nation for another 250 years?

A democratic society will never settle these questions once and for all. Nor should it. But it does depend on citizens who can engage them seriously—who can reason, listen, disagree, and still recognize one another as partners in a shared enterprise. This is the purview of the liberal arts, and especially the humanities.

For centuries, the study of history, literature, philosophy, and political thought has introduced students to the deepest reflections on meaning, purpose, and community. Just as important, it has trained them in the habits of mind and character that democratic life requires: intellectual humility, moral imagination, and the capacity for reasoned disagreement.

Yet at the very moment we most need this formation, the humanities are under strain. Majors are declining. Faculty lines are shrinking. Too often, these disciplines are treated as optional—valuable if possible, but secondary to more “practical” pursuits.

If the crisis of meaning is real, this instinct is backwards. The humanities are not ornamental. They are foundational. They are not adjacent to the challenges of democratic life—they are central to meeting them.

At the School of Civic Life and Leadership at UNC–Chapel Hill, we have tried to take this seriously by placing the humanities at the core of our curriculum and community. Students engage in enduring questions in the classroom and continue those conversations in a residential setting organized around civil discourse. They form friendships across disagreement and learn, through sustained conversation, how to seek truth with others who do not all think alike.

What we are seeing is not disengagement, but hunger. Students are eager for serious inquiry, for conversations that move beyond slogans, and for an education that connects knowledge to purpose.

This hunger is not limited to students. In a recent session with a bipartisan group of congressional chiefs of staff, we began not with policy but with a poem, then worked through the difficult tradeoffs of budgeting and governance. At the center was an ancient concept: prudence—the ability to weigh competing goods and act wisely under constraint. It is a capacity that cannot be produced by technical training alone. It must be cultivated.

If we are serious about addressing polarization, we cannot limit ourselves to procedural fixes or institutional reforms. We must also renew the educative work that forms citizens capable of judgment, purpose, and common life.

That means taking the humanities seriously—not as a luxury, but as a necessity.

Thomas Jefferson once warned that “if a nation expects to be ignorant and free… it expects what never was and never will be.” The challenge before us is not only to preserve our institutions, but to form the kind of citizens those institutions require.

An education shaped by the liberal arts remains one of our best hopes for doing so.