Biggest Loss of 2016? Civility

Two years ago, Chancellor Phyllis Wise took a stand against a Twitter-crazed academic whose tweets were more than polemical— they personally degraded American Jewish students, connecting all of them with what he described as a murderous regime. 

The media often characterized his tweets as “political” and “anti-Israel,” and they were that. But the media often missed the point that his tweets also degraded students simply by connecting their faith to a far-away war in Gaza and Israel. Salaita understood that Netanyahu was raised and educated in the U.S. (he holds two degrees from MIT)—and he blindly accused current American Jewish students of being indoctrinated to follow the current prime minister’s path. In Salaita’s awful words, these students were future IDF (Israel Defense Force) “murderers.”

In the winter that preceded the Salaita affair, Chancellor Wise was subjected to vicious tweets by UIUC students who compared her to North Korea’s despot, Kim Jun Eun, because she ordered the campus to remain open in the midst of a severe “polar vortex” event. She had no choice but to make this decision. She did not order students or faculty to go to class—only that the campus could not shut down and stop vital services.

In 2016, we learned that these campus Twitter-storms were really the tip of a growing iceberg.

We— America, and the rest of the Internet-connected world— have entered the age of personal degradation; vicious stereotyping; “debates” that deeply insult war heroes, women, the disabled, Mexicans, Muslims … the list is too long and familiar to recount; extreme and existential threats; intolerance; racial superiority; and so on.

Chancellor Wise was derided by some for clinging to what her detractors said was an outdated and repressive code of civility.

I wonder how many of her critics realize in 2016— now that they (we) have been verbally brutalized by a dangerous American autocrat and intolerant followers— that Chancellor Wise was right about civility: If we cannot set a baseline for civil discourse, we cannot maintain our democratic society.  
This is not "PC"-- it is the tone and vocabulary of a democracy.

Today, the loudest, meanest, nastiest, outrageously deceitful, cutting voices drown out reason, facts, analysis, ambiguity, introspection.

We lost much in 2016-- much more than an election.