(Un)civil discourse Troy Heffernan and Lynn Bosetti’s ‘Incivility: the new type of bullying in higher education’ in the Cambridge Journal of Education (2021) is an excellent example of bad scholarship. For this self-serving article to have progressed through peer-review is not just disappointing but dangerous to higher education. More frustrating is the fact that Anna Patty of the Confusion lies at the heart of Heffernan and Bosetti’s article. The authors open with the false equivalence that ‘incivility is bullying’. Confusingly, however, the authors and interviewees move on later in the article to discuss bullying and incivility as separate behaviours. This conceptual confusion is never resolved, and the authors’ contention seems to be that bullying and incivility could be considered the same because they make recipients feel bad. The key difference is intent. Bullying is intended to cause harm. Incivility is behaviour that does not conform to certain norms.