On NiceNess

Over the past decade, I’ve noticed what feels like an over-indexing toward niceness in certain spheres I normally inhabit—liberal-arts academics, politically left-of-center circles, and in popular media. By niceness I mean a posture primarily concerned with appearing morally or philosophically agreeable, especially in front of those with influence. It is a social aesthetic, not a virtue.You can see it in small moments: withholding a counterpoint to “keep the peace,” even when something clearly incorrect has been said. Or worse, when people nod along and pretend to understand or care about what’s being discussed. Harmony is what the group rewards, and niceness becomes a passive posture—low personal cost, high social return.

Nowhere did I see the consequences of this more vividly than in the American university.

During my years as a professor, I watched the landscape of educational service to students shift toward an overemphasis on belonging, safety, inclusion, and accommodation—often at the expense of the risky business of learning. Education requires friction: the discomfort of having one’s worldview, technique, or assumptions challenged, interrogated, and reshaped by professors, institutions, and peers alike. Yet niceness increasingly became the primary currency of the institution. This was not, in my experience, a moral failure or a lack of standards among individual professors. It was structural. Incentives matter. When professional security depends heavily on student evaluations and administrative risk management, friction becomes costly. Even principled, demanding educators learn—often reluctantly—where not to press. Niceness, under these conditions, isn’t chosen because it’s best for learning, but because it’s safest for survival. The result is an institution that quietly rewards harmony over challenge, comfort over growth.

The outcome is an institution increasingly optimized for student comfort rather than student capability. Harmony over friction. Optics over rigor. Feeling good over becoming competent. Not universally, and not in every department—but particularly in disciplines that trade in nuance, abstraction, and qualitative judgment. Ironically, the very fields most dependent on intellectual risk became the most vulnerable to its avoidance.

I want to be clear: I am not advocating for crude “objective metrics” in art, philosophy, or poetry. The absence of rigid quantification is precisely what allows these disciplines to generate rich, challenging ideas. But that same openness is easily exploited when safety and niceness become political imperatives rather than human concerns. Downstream, you get rhetoric of inclusion untethered from standards of craft, logical coherence, or follow-through. To illustrate, I remember a superior telling me, early in my teaching career, that the goal was to make failure almost impossible. No fruit of any note would grow in that soil, I thought. I understood then that the game was not simply to teach, but to placate—to affirm every real or imagined obstacle a student might present, while quietly lowering the stakes of the work itself.

I saw this most clearly in how niceness reshaped our relationship to students themselves. Wanting to be nice, we often confused affirmation with service. Feedback was softened, expectations lowered, friction avoided. Affirming a student’s work based primarily on how it intersected with personal identity or hardship often became the gold standard, with quality and effort taking a secondary role. With good intentions, students were protected from embarrassment, from failure, from the sharp edges of critique—but also from the very conditions that make real growth possible.

Mastery requires exposure to error.
Confidence is earned through surviving correction.

When educators prioritize being liked over being honest, students may feel supported in the moment, but they leave less capable of standing on their own.

These postures do not remain confined to the academy. The art world and broader popular media, which often drift downstream from it, absorb them as well. Aesthetic virtue replaces craft. Symbolic gestures outweigh the patient acquisition of skill. Performance eclipses practice.

My impulse toward taking an active stance—teaching, building, intervening when I can—comes from a deeply held belief that care is expressed through action, and that responsibility is something we practice, not merely profess. It springs from an understanding that we are all fragile, finite creatures navigating a rugged landscape of suffering, and that the only future worth inhabiting is one built through care, effort, and responsibility. My way is not the only way. But a culture that excuses chronic unreliability, avoidance, or inaction under the banner of niceness does not produce worlds people want to live in.

It may produce agreeable people.
It will not produce builders.

Consider my favorite academic yoga pose: the land acknowledgment. At its worst, it is the purest expression of performative niceness—a ritual of moral positioning without material consequence, follow-through, or cost. During a two-hour faculty meeting, it was once suggested—earnestly—that every class, regardless of subject, should begin with a land acknowledgment accompanied by a pre-made educational video.

As a newly hired junior professor, I played nice—to my lasting embarrassment—and nodded along.

Nothing came of it. No video. No policy. No action. The gesture evaporated the moment the moral performance concluded.

Again, let me be clear: I am not opposed to social reparations, nor to serious efforts toward restoring land rights or material justice. I am opposed to rhetoric that signals virtue without any intention of sweating toward the task. Meanwhile, practical concerns—clearer language, stronger technical training, preparing students for meaningful work—were politely deferred. Symbolic inclusion displaced substantive capability.

What mattered to me was not that students felt affirmed, but that they felt safe attempting difficult things with their hands and minds—and that they left capable of building lives, practices, and communities with some degree of independence and dignity.

Niceness itself is not the enemy. It is a necessary social lubricant. Small courtesies and pleasantries keep the fabric of daily life intact. But niceness cannot be the only thread holding that fabric together.

If you were to ask many of my students, they might describe me as nice. I was agreeable, approachable, and at times even a little lax about grading. But I tried to be kind to them in a different way—by reminding them that they could do better if they chose to. If they applied themselves. If they managed their time more seriously. If they treated their education as something worth the effort.

Some of my favorite moments involved giving a student an “A” on something moderately impressive and then asking, Now imagine if you took this seriously. What if you hadn’t done this all last night? You’d be a force to be reckoned with. I reminded them regularly that an “A” in this class means very little in the real world. Some students told me they appreciated that I didn’t speak to them the way other professors did—that I was honest, occasionally off-color, and willing to name what I saw. They never felt condescended to. Whatever value that had came from my attempt—however imperfect—to aim toward another posture entirely: kindness.

Where niceness is passive and appearance-oriented, kindness is active and sincere. It aims at the real betterment of others—even when it carries cost in time, effort, discomfort, or attention.

A nice father pays for karate classes and occasionally asks how they’re going.
A kind father shows up, spars with his child, and cheers at tournaments.
A mediocre parent does the first; a good parent does both.

This distinction matters because building anything—families, institutions, communities—is nearly impossible with people who are merely nice. Nice people preserve harmony. They rarely generate momentum. They depend on others to absorb conflict, make decisions, and shoulder responsibility—tasks niceness avoids.

You see this in workplaces stalled by polite consensus. In families where optimism must eventually yield to sacrifice. And at the societal level, where aesthetic virtue too often substitutes for civic labor.

What I want to argue for is a different figure: the kind and effective individual. Someone capable of niceness when appropriate, but also firmness, clarity, and resolve when circumstances demand it. Kindness does not preclude strength of character; it requires it. Niceness avoids friction. Kindness accepts friction as the cost of caring. In moments of extremis—personal or public—it is not the nice who hold the line. It is the kind. Those willing to bear cost, to act, to protect, to show up.

Niceness is a posture.
Kindness is a discipline.

And any future worth building depends on the latter.

This trend toward the primacy of niceness—among other pressures—was part of what pushed me to leave academia and become an art entrepreneur. I still love the idea of the university. But in its current form, it too often resembles a studio for feel-good poses rather than a dojo for mental or artistic training.

Someday, I may return.

If I do, I hope it will be from a position of having become more capable, more effective, and wiser through difficult contact with the world as it is—rather than how I wish it to be.

So I remind myself:

Stop talking about it.
Be about it.
Stop the pose.

Be a difference in kind.
Make a difference.
Be kind.