Since being appointed in January 2024 as the Provostial Advisor on Civil Discourse, English professor and novelist Randy Boyagoda has chaired U of T’s Working Group on Civil Discourse and delivered a final report in May with eight recommendations — all of which have been accepted by Vice-President & Provost, Trevor Young. 

Even after a year of monthly group meetings, consultation with over 1,500 participants, and compiling action items for the University to develop the environment for civil discourse, Boyagoda’s term has been extended to the end of December to facilitate the implementation of the recommendations. 

The Varsity sat down with Boyagoda to discuss his past two years of experience in a unique position as U of T’s civil discourse advisor. 

The Varsity: Let’s start with how this position came to be. What was the process of how you were appointed as a civil discourse advisor? 

Randy Boyagoda: My position was created in January 2024 by the Provost. It is undeniable that the position was created following the conflicts, protests, and difficulties that our academic community experienced beginning with the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, and Israel’s subsequent and ongoing bombing of Gaza and elsewhere.

But the challenges with having productive disagreement over Israel-Palestine didn’t create the need for an advisor on civil discourse; it revealed it in a much fuller way. 

TV: Your working group’s final report provides six different working definitions of ‘civil discourse,’ such as that it engages with individuals who hold critical ideas respectfully and that it requires people to develop capacities for empathy and reason. 

Is there a central element to your definition of ‘civil discourse’ that has changed since the beginning of your term?

RB: That’s a really curiosity-driven question. I think of civil discourse as a commitment to thinking out loud together: our reckoning with disagreement and seeing these as good things to the degree that they increase shared understandings of an issue and aid in the pursuit of truth. That’s my working definition of civil discourse. What I have learned through this work is that my definition is not U of T’s definition, nor should it be.

I learned just how skeptical people are of the concept of civil discourse. To some people, ‘civil’ suggests a chill on conversation, certain rules that you have to follow. Rules that make sense in rooms like we’re in right now, rules that make sense for people who are undergraduates at elite universities. The criticism is that there’s a certain level of security and privilege associated with civil discourse. 

TV: The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) was very critical.

Note: In January, CAUT criticized Canadian universities adopting policies of “institutional neutrality” and alleged that methods to enforce “civility” undermined academic freedom. 

RB: Yes, and I think there was also an implication that I’m some sort of czar, ruling things in and out. 

To that, I have two answers. First, not everything that happens at the University should be understood through the filter of civil discourse. Because if that were the case, then I really am ruling things in and out, which strikes me as wrong. Or, the definition of civil discourse is bent and expanded until it’s meaningless. If everything has to be nothingness, the term doesn’t have the same value.

Second, I don’t care what we call it as long as people are having good conversations with each other, driven by curiosity and goodwill, in and outside classrooms. If we aren’t able to have curiosity-driven conversations in our teaching and research lives, I don’t see how this place advances its mission.

TV: The working group report’s third recommendation encourages U of T to create a common first-year curriculum for incoming students to learn about civil discourse and critical thought. How can the school be encouraged to teach about a topic when there is no established idea of it? Can civil discourse be taught? 

RB: I think civil discourse can be taught in very specific contexts where it’s related to introducing people to a profession or a set of professional practices. But I agree with you that an ‘Intro to Civil Discourse’ in the Faculty of Arts & Science (A&S) doesn’t really make sense.

I’m currently chairing an advisory committee with academic leaders from every division across the University that has been asked to implement components of the working group report. In settings such as Rotman Commerce or the U of T Faculty of Law, I’ve heard that difficult conversations and productive disagreements are pedagogically important, so they offer programming for them. 

But as an A&S citizen, you can imagine how difficult it would be to create a course like that when, in reality, what we want is rigorous, productive disagreement in any course when it makes sense. 

When a question comes up, you don’t want to be afraid of answering, in case you look bad to your peers or your professor doesn’t like your politics. You want to be able to answer that question across the programs. What I’ve heard is that colleagues and students want to see models of this, as opposed to taking a course and getting a credential that’s not the right model. 

TV: You earlier said your definition of civil discourse is and should be different from U of T’s definition. Do you see yourself and your role as a neutral advisor, and does civil discourse necessitate a neutral mediator or advisor?

RB: There are two versions of neutrality: neutrality that ratifies an unjust status quo, and neutrality that creates the conditions to engage with a disputed question on a level-enough playing field. 

In my work, I think I have a ‘both and’ function. As an academic administrator, I have a convening responsibility to bring people together and sustain a conversation. For that to be the case, a certain level of dispassion is needed. 

At the same time, I don’t understand myself as a bland technocrat just moving along a project. So it would seem absurd to me to not demonstrate that I have a view, because then I don’t have any skin in the game. I don’t have stakes in this the same way if I’m just technocratically moving something along, but I also still have to move things along. 

I understand myself as contributing as it makes sense in both ways. There is my definition, but the idea of having my definition is that someone disagrees with it. The answer is somewhere in between.

TV: On a realistic scale, how does civil discourse come into play with Israel-Palestine and engaging the activist groups from multiple political perspectives that have expressed concerns about being silenced by the University?

RB: To begin with, both sides have more in common with each other than they do with the great majority of people at the University. One of my insights in this work has been that faculty who find themselves invested in the question of Israel-Palestine will say variations of, ‘administration only listens to the other side.’ There’s always this sense of a deficit position. There’s always a reason why the other side seems to be getting power and results, right? 

In early 2024, I was in Sidney Smith when there was a pro-Palestine demonstration and a pro-Israel counter-demonstration in the main hall. Aside from the roughly 80 people involved, there were hundreds of people ignoring it and just walking by, not engaging. The question to my mind is, how do we first bridge the difference between the super-committed and the much larger under-engaged university population? Are they not engaged because they don’t like the models of protesting for pursuing a difficult geopolitical question? Or have they got a three-hour commute to Northern Markham to help out at home with their families, and engaging is a luxury good?

TV: Many of the ‘super-engaged’ have said that they feel like discourse has not led to their actual political aims, and do not feel heard by the University. Is it necessarily correct to look at these ‘super-engaged’ as people who should be part of the civil discourse and try to bridge that?  

RB: No, not necessarily. In other words, I don’t think civil discourse solves Israel-Palestine. It’s not built to do that. If your frustrations lead to an illegal approach or an activist approach, to use two examples, I don’t think the practices associated with our project and civil discourse are going to be satisfying because they’re not going to lead to divestment. They’re not going to lead to someone being fired for a divisive statement on social media.

Civil discourse isn’t a means to those ends. I think it is wrong to assume it is and then be frustrated that it’s not. Civil discourse shouldn’t be the hermeneutic for everything we’re trying to interpret at the University, because eventually it either proves itself so vague as to be pointless, or demonstrates that actually it’s ineffectual for these ends. It can’t be used for ends that it’s not meant for.

TV: So it’s a form of maintenance?

RB: ‘Maintenance’ is terrible — I see it as ‘sustaining’ rather than maintenance. 

TV: I ask this because Harvard Professor Archon Fung had distinguished ‘civility’ into two senses: the first being a superficial type of civility of just being nice, and the second being a behaviour necessary for spaces like schools and democratic societies to work well — the civility that drives civil discourse. So, is civil discourse a form of maintaining? 

RB: Speaking to you as a fellow English scholar, I like ‘sustaining’ because ‘maintaining’ suggests a kind of crappy status quo. Sustaining is keeping alive a willingness to ask a question without fear of consequence. You’re not asking the question to make a political point, you’re asking questions you generally aren’t sure of the answer to. 

I struggle at times with the encouragement of older generations for this project, from largely outside the University, saying, “Why can’t we go back to the way it used to be when you could freely say what you wanted?” 

In my mind, that kind of recovery project is at odds with what it means to be in a pluralist twenty-first-century university, because that model assumes everyone is culturally, racially, politically and religiously more or less the same. 

But intellectually, I get the argument. Even if we disagree with the sociopolitical conditions that sustained it, what they’re describing is a time where there were norms and shared unspoken understandings about what it means to engage each other on a question.

The civil discourse project at U of T intends to help recover those norms, but make sense for U of T in the twenty-first century. That strikes me as a worthwhile project. Finally — to go back to one of your core questions — it’s acknowledging when it makes sense and when it doesn’t.

Civil discourse doesn’t solve Israel-Palestine, but can we be unsure about those things, and then learn from scholars about how to understand these stakes? These questions seem to me like a good thing.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.