AT A GLANCE

Civility Project
The Launch Event
Thursday, Oct. 27

• Paper Takes: The Power of Uncivil Words — exhibition opening and reception, 5-6:30 p.m., Buehler Alumni and Visitors Center

• (Un)Civil (Dis)Obedience — an original theatre production, premiere performance, 7 p.m., Vanderhoef Studio Theatre, Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts

All events are free and open to the public; however, because space is limited, the organizers are asking people to register in advance — and you can do this by clicking here.

Encore Performance

An encore performance, also free and open to the public, is scheduled for 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 28, in the Vanderhoef Studio Theatre. As with the premiere performance the night before, the orgnizers are asking people to register in advance.

In addition, the organizers said, MediaWorks will videotape the premiere performance, and it will be available for viewing on the UC Davis iTunes U and You Tube channels. Update Nov. 7, 2011: Rather than videotape the premiere performance, MediaWorks videotaped the Oct. 26 dress rehearsal, instead of the premiere performance; the video is available here, on You Tube.

The real impact of any hate crime is the fact that it started with hate; it didn’t start with the crime. It started with those name-calling things that we thought were funny to our friends or a joke that made somebody laugh or things like that.

— from (Un)Civil (Dis)Obedience

Students, staff and faculty are preparing for the public launch of the Civility Project, featuring the premiere performance of (Un)Civil (Dis)Obedience — documenting the Davis campus community’s response to the hate-based incidents of the 2009-10 academic year.

Those incidents led to a hate-free campus movement now officially called Building a More Inclusive Community.

And now comes the Civility Project. “We were motivated by questions about how the university might use its own best tool — expertise in scholarly inquiry — to better understand the notions of community and civility in the context of a campus environment,” said Jessica Loudermilk, a doctoral student in linguistics and the project’s co-director.

The inquiry has now produced a website, an exhibition and the theatre performance, all debuting Thursday, Oct. 27, to add historical context and stimulate the campus’s continued growth as a welcoming place.

Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi engaged the campus community early on, writing in her March 2010 response to the carving of a swastika on a dorm room door, and a graffiti attack on the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center: “Our university and campus community must confront this type of behavior not only with words but with action as well.”

In short order, the chancellor spoke at a town hall, led an administrative and student delegation to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, and invited Jim Leach, chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, to bring his Civility Tour to UC Davis.

Read Dateline UC Davis' coverage of Leach’s visit.

Read excerpts of his remarks as prepared for delivery.

•••

We’re all entitled and have the right to free speech, but there’s a certain line, obviously. Albeit a very fine line.

— from (Un)Civil (Dis)Obedience

Loudermilk said Leach’s visit certainly inspired the Civility Project, but noted that “it has grown far broader in scope than it was in its original conception, which didn’t include the performance or the exhibition.”

“I think the growth of the Civility Project into this much expanded form is a reflection of how civility issues loom large here on campus.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a $30,000 grant to help finance the project, with Loudermilk and Carolyn de la Pena, professor of American studies and director of the humanities institute, as the co-directors.

Additional support came from the chancellor’s office and the first-ever Shields Fellowship, funded by the Shields Library, the Office of Campus Community Relations and the Department of History

The university, as a place where many different demographic groups come together, “has vast potential for the exchange of ideas and the exercise of tolerance and civility,” Loudermilk said in a Web post explaining the project.

“However, the potential for uncivil disagreement and discord is also great, and, unfortunately, frequently realized.”

She said the Civility Project draws upon UC Davis’s particular strength in interdisciplinary inquiry to engage members of the university community in an examination of how incivility has been and continues to be manifested on campus, and to suggest alternative engagements in the future.

•••

I don’t know what’s scarier, that people think this is a funny joke or that there are people that actually believe this.

— from (Un)Civil (Dis)Obedience

The Civility Project exhibition, Paper Takes: The Power of Uncivil Words, is drawn from documents in the Shields Library’s Walter Goldwater Radical Pamphlets collection, described as the nation’s leading collection of “extreme” pamphlets.

Loudermilk said the exhibition “transforms these pamphlets into immersive environments within which we can discern what has motivated intolerant points of view, how these ideas gain credibility and what tactics draw readers in and enable further dissemination.”

Further, the exhibition draws connections to 21st-century “pamphlets” — blogs, YouTube, Facebook and the like — and suggests that the words and techniques of old remain potent today.

The exhibition is the work of Jessica Mayhew, a doctoral student in history, as the Shields Fellow; history professor Kathy Olmsted, faculty adviser; and a three-person team from the Design Program: Tim McNeil, associate professor; Beth August, a recent graduate; and Sarah Marrone, a senior.

A reception is planned with the exhibition’s opening from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at the Buehler Alumni and Visitors Center. From there the Civility Project moves across the street to the Vanderhoef Studio Theatre (in the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts) for the 7 p.m. presentation of (Un)Civil (Dis)Obedience.

•••

I remember when the LGBTRC was graffitied up with a lot of hateful words, and, I don’t know, just, it was violated. I remember seeing that and just thinking, wow, I can’t believe this happened. Like, I’ve been in that room and I’ve been with the people in that room and they’re wonderful people. And that space, specifically, is very safe — is like a safe space for all the queer people on campus. And for that not be safe anymore is really disturbing to me.

— from (Un)Civil (Dis)Obedience

Student researchers and performers interviewed students and others in the wake of the 2009-10 incidents — and then turned the transcripts into (Un)Civil (Dis)Obedience.

“The piece aims to provide us with a reflection of ourselves as individuals reacting to moments which — at least temporarily — erupt the notion of community, by presenting difference as both essential and intolerable,” Loudermilk said.

“Rather than focusing on the campus community as part of a system or institution, (Un)Civil (Dis)Obedience gives voice to the interior, emotional experience of incivility on campus and insists that we listen to these voices which are rarely part of our official record of the events, but that drive our responses to moments of incivility and, in turn, shape our definitions of what civility is and the conditions necessary to achieve it.”

The theatre team includes Chris McCoy, graduate fellow, a second-year student working for his doctorate in performance studies; and theatre professor Peter Lichtenfels, faculty adviser. The student ensemble comprises interviewers, performers and crew, all undergraduates: Kevin Adamski, Christopher Boyle,
Mironda Burch, Brendan Crotty, Marisel Gabourel, Bijan Ghiasi, Ori Gold, Jacklyn Joanino, Erica Kalingking, Anna Kritikos, Shelby Maples, Austin Martin, Brenda Marin Rodriguez, Michelle Rossi, Alexander Scott, Sara Soto, Sam Temming and Johnathan Yu.

Read about the creative process behind (Un)Civil (Dis)Obedience.

•••

My friend goes to San Diego and when she sent me a text about the noose in the library, I just got a chill down my spine.

— from (Un)Civil (Dis)Obedience

The website civilityproject.ucdavis.edu explores the history of incivility on UC campuses in the context of the public university as an environment that is characterized by goals that are often in tension: free expression and the exchange of ideas, and facilitating inclusion and tolerance in an increasingly diverse population.

Tracing this tension from the Berkeley-based Free Speech Movement in the 1960s to the recent troubling incidents of hate and incivility at several UC campuses, civilityproject.ucdavis.edu synthesizes journalistic evidence of key events, records of official responses to those events, and documentation of the rapidly shifting demographics of the UC system from the 1960s forward — demographics that constitute that backdrop against which these events occur.

“By compiling a history that pays equal attention to the moments that follow — those moments in which the university and the community react — we hope to better assess what is expected from and what is possible for the public university in resolving the tensions made evident in eruptions of incivility on campus,” Loudermilk said.

The site also takes a closer look at the UC Davis community to see how contemporary moments of incivility have impacted the campus. Based on conversations with administrators, students and faculty, this investigation uses tools of sociological analysis to understand how the university’s structures determine what becomes “uncivil” on campus and frame the range of responses that can take place to these incidents.

The website team includes three graduate fellows, all of whom are pursuing their doctorates: Josef Nguyen, English; Julie Setele, sociology; and Lia Winfield, history. Professor Olmsted and Laura Grindstaff, associate professor of sociology, are the faculty advisers.

Marrone, a member of the exhibition design team, doubles as graphic designer for the website.

We think we’ve come so far with all of our equal rights, but there’s still a long way to go. It’s going to take as long as we have on this Earth to figure it out.

— from (Un)Civil (Dis)Obedience

On the Web

More about the Civility Project’s development.

More about the project’s components.