The dark side of teachers' behavior and its impact on students' reactions: A comprehensive framework to assess college students' reactions to faculty incivility

This chapter develops a comprehensive framework for understanding and assessing college students' reactions to faculty incivility, focusing on the dark side of teacher behavior and its downstream consequences for students. While faculty incivility has been increasingly recognized as a problem in higher education, prior work has largely examined isolated behaviors and outcomes rather than offering an integrative conceptualization. Drawing on the authors' program of research on faculty incivility and on the broader literature on organizational mistreatment, we organize faculty incivility into active and passive forms and connect these to a structured typology of student reactions based on the Exit, Voice, Loyalty, and Neglect (EVLN) model. The chapter then situates these reactions along two additional dimensions—destructiveness–constructiveness and activeness–passiveness—to capture the full range of student responses, from constructive voice to destructive exit. We draw on empirical findings to illustrate how active versus passive incivility map onto specific student reactions, and we highlight how institutional context, individual differences, and power asymmetries shape these trajectories. The framework provides a common language for researchers and administrators and a basis for developing interventions that address not just isolated uncivil acts, but the climate and relational dynamics that give rise to them.