“The foundation of national morality must be laid in private families. … In vain are schools, academies, and universities instituted, if loose principles and licentious habits are impressed upon children in their earliest years.” —John Adams (1778)

Like most of you, we traveled on flights with our children from their earliest ages — and sometimes infants and toddlers can be inconsolable. I was always sensitive to the impact on surrounding passengers, but most who are parents were understanding.

However, I was astounded by this recent headline: “Flight canceled after toddler refused to buckle seat belt, stranding passengers overnight.”

As the commercial flight was taxiing for an evening takeoff, a flight attendant noted a child standing in a seat next to her parents. The parents were asked to buckle their child in the seat but claimed, incredibly, they were incapable of doing so. Consequently, as the airline carrier’s rep said, “The aircraft could not take off in this unsafe condition, so the crew elected to return to the terminal,” where they were going to disembark the child and parents. However, once at the terminal it was determined that the flight could not make its next departure window before airport operations shut down for the night, so all the passengers were disembarked and stranded overnight.

I am thinking that headline should have more accurately read, “Flight canceled after parents fail to take control of toddler, stranding passengers overnight.”

Last month, an international flight was delayed because, according to one passenger, a child’s “incompetent parents” did not take control of their toddler and buckle him in. Another passenger observed, “That’s not a kid problem, that’s a parent problem.”

In these cases, there could have been extenuating circumstances, and debate will be split between the “incompetent parents” and “inconsolable child” factions.

However, as parents of adult children and now grandchildren, too often we are in public places where the contrast between how some parents handle their kids and how we handled ours reflects a very different ethic about behavior and discipline. In many cases, children whose behavior is not corrected, who are not disciplined, will become those young adults at campus protests entrenched in their self-centered adolescence.

Ahead of the coming fall academic semester, that brings me to my topic — the cadres of adolescents who are responsible for incivility on college and university campuses, and how some respectable administrations are endeavoring to instill values that parents failed to infuse.

The fear, hate, and division that underlie incivility were amplified over the four Biden/Harris years, when Joe Biden promised “unity” but called for battle, fomenting factions of hate and division, and baiting violence.

Hillary Clinton created the template for that division, declaring during Donald Trump’s first term, “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for,” adding, “The only thing that the Republicans seem to recognize and respect is strength.” And “strength,” in this case, was a euphemism for “protest and violence.”

Over the last decade, the Democrat Party has intentionally weaponized emotionally unstable young people between the ages of 18 and 25, and not only is the resulting fear and rage evident in violent urban protests, but it also exploded on college and university campuses. Arguably, that weaponization led to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, who had become one of our nation’s clearest voices of reason on campuses.

Amid the rise of antisemitic campus protests since 2024, parents began questioning the safety of their kids on high school and college campuses, though the data confirms that students are safer on campus than in the surrounding communities.

So, how to restore comity on campus?

The principles of civility are both timeless and essential to the future of our republic.

I wrote recently of “George Washington’s Enduring Advice for Americans Today,” and of his “Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation.” Those rules were evident throughout his life and would serve many young people today.

Washington wrote, “The influence of your personal character moderates the divisions of political parties,” and over the last decade we have certainly seen the failure of character and the acceleration of divisions among people of all ages, especially young people.

But as John Adams wrote almost 250 years ago, “The foundation of national morality must be laid in private families.”

Indeed, I would argue that the common denominator for almost every social and cultural degradation today is rooted in homes without fathers, and not just urban youth. Many uncivil campus adolescents come from affluent suburban “white privilege” homes, children of disgruntled “inheritance-welfare leftists.”

They are the rising adherents of the Democratic Socialists of America, which is the latest iteration of Marxism in America.

Adams also wrote: “It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage. … If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.”

So, what to do with those young people I categorize as “Gen N: The Narcissist Generation,” those who have not been stewarded in civility?

Are they lost to “grovel all their lives”?

A growing number of colleges and universities have launched focused and well-funded efforts to restore civility among students on their campuses. Their goal is to restore both comity and free speech, and reverse what Elon Musk calls the “Metastatic Woke Mind Virus.”

There have been a few brave beacons of light in the leftist academic wasteland, taking on Black Supremacist “academicians” like Ibram Xolani Kendi, who is now grifting at Howard University.

But institutionally, one of the leading civil discourse efforts is at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Last year, UNC students rose up against antisemitic campus protesters, and in one symbolic incident that became national news, those students took down a Hamas flag that protesters had raised on campus, and they restored our American flag to its rightful place.

They were backed by UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts, who declared: “This university doesn’t belong to a small group of protesters. It belongs to every citizen of North Carolina. Everybody in North Carolina, everybody who goes to school here, everybody who lives and works here. The flag represents all of us. Take down that flag, and put up another flag, no matter what flag it is — that’s antithetical to who we are, what this university stands for.”

He concluded that the American flag “will stand here as long as I’m chancellor.”

Among other great things that have happened at UNC since Lee Roberts took the helm in 2024 is the creation of its School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCLL), which he calls “the most important initiative” on UNC’s campus. Headed by Dean Jed Atkins, the SCLL’s mission is to “prepare students for the responsibilities of citizenship and civic leadership by fostering a free-speech culture and providing an education grounded in encouraging the human search for meaning and developing the capacities for civil discourse and wise decision-making.”

And the effort to foster civil discourse on campus is spreading.

According to The Wall Street Journal, “Creating schools-within-schools at public universities like the one at UNC has been one of the more ambitious strategies.”

The WSJ notes: “Among these, the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University was the first to open in 2017. Similar programs have been established by Republican-led legislatures at roughly a dozen universities including Ohio State, University of Florida and at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Their budgets range from $1.5 million for the University of Iowa to $100 million at the University of Texas at Austin.”

The WSJ notes further that schools share common goals: “To recommit to ideals that have made a strong liberal arts education foundational to American democracy: critical thinking, dialogue, pluralism, the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. The hope is that once students understand what binds a community together, they might develop a campus culture that respects and encourages differences of opinion.”

Even Harvard University, a bastion for campus hate protests, ostensibly in keeping with its leftist “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” agenda, has considered launching a Center for Conservative Leadership to restore some balance on campus. I am certain this is a political feint, but some larger donors are pressing the university after the rise of high-profile Jew-hating groups on campus, and Harvard is pitching the idea to donors.

Predictably, institutions such as UNC advocating for civility and free speech have come under fire. As WSJ notes, “Critics on campus say that Atkins, who’d run a similar program at Duke, has overwhelmingly hired political conservatives and religious Christians.” But Atkins responded, “The SCLL faculty do not apply political or religious litmus tests to faculty or staff hiring — we are removing litmus tests, not adding them.”

Of course, turning the leftist tide at universities is a monumental task.

This week, the American Association of University Professors, which claims a membership of 57,000 of the 190,000 university professors nationwide, broke its century-old practice of not endorsing candidates. It did not even endorse Barack Obama, but it has decided to make its first-ever national political endorsement of Michigan’s Democrat Socialist Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed.

That notwithstanding, there is a growing effort to reach students still in high school and fortify their values so they can join others standing for what is good and right on college campuses, instead of falling into the leftist abyss.

One such effort, Virtue Advising and Mentorship, has been launched by my friend Brian Beckley with the objective of providing faith-based mentorship to help students pursue their God-given purpose with wisdom, character, and courage. He has written a student “field guide” for developing wisdom, character, and courage: The Virtue Habit.

The current tenor of campus protests is a mere shadow of the violent protests during the 1960s and ‘70s, and efforts to restore civility now are critical to avoid a resurgence of the violence from that era.

Moreover, it is past time that our national leaders, especially those in the Democrat Party whose rhetoric is intentionally divisive, restore civility to our national political discourse.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

Follow Mark Alexander on X/Twitter.

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