In Time of Campus Turmoil, More Colleges Try Teaching Civil Discourse

While it’s not yet clear how much difference a few training sessions or discussion events can make, organizers hope they will leave students better prepared to enter a world that has only become more polarized.

What Does Good Dialogue Look Like?

Colleges have gradually increased their efforts to promote civic dialogue in the past several years, as partisanship has grown. But a new push has happened in higher ed after conflict erupted in the Middle East on October 7, 2023, along with campus protests — college administrators have realized that they can’t provide a quality education in a chaotic environment, says Michael Murray, the president and chief executive officer of the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, which has funded several campus dialogue projects. Students need stability and a way to handle tense situations in order to succeed in and outside of the classroom, he says.

Many colleges have sought that help from nonprofit organizations, such as Interfaith America or Braver Angels, he says. They provide toolkits, strategies and training to help administrators grow their programs. They also offer colleges resources on the best practices in constructive dialogue or suggest specific types of events, such as the round table strategy at Providence.

The Constructive Dialogue Institute, for instance, offers a series of videos and online lessons for students to work through at their own pace, training for faculty and staff and a yearly program to help campus administrators learn more about constructive dialogue. Last year, the organization worked with 30 colleges. This year, that number has grown to 122 campuses, says Mylien Duong, senior director of research at the institute.

In the past, encouraging productive dialogue “didn’t feel urgent,” Duong says, “people understood that those are important skills to have, they could see that our national discourse was deteriorating and that that was showing up on college campuses, but it felt like there was always something that was more important than investing in this wholesale.”

Now, Murray says, some colleges even see constructive dialogue as a way to help students entering the workforce after graduation. Companies will look for students who have problem solving and conversation skills, he says, especially after seeing the turmoil that erupted last year. Murray points to Spring Arbor University, a small private methodist college in Michigan, that is rolling out a certificate program in constructive dialogue.

Employers “are reporting that one thing they’re looking for in new hires is graduates who internalize these skills,” Murray says. “They know how to get along with people that they disagree with.”

Encouraging students to transfer those skills out of the classroom or a campus event can be tough, though, says Nicholas Longo, co-director of Providence’s DID Lab. Classrooms or workshops are often safe spaces, Longo says, but students need to bring their skills to conversations with friends, social media or the workplace.

Posie Millet, a senior at Dartmouth College, has noticed that students mainly have conversations about politics in structured settings, such as at a speaker event. They rarely talk about politics over lunch or during a random conversation with friends, she says.

Millet is involved in the Dartmouth Dialogue Project, a program the college launched earlier this year that offers workshops and uses the Constructive Dialogue Institute’s online materials to help students learn to have productive conversations. Creating a safe space where students can learn conversation skills and talk about sensitive topics will help them navigate difficult situations day-to-day, Millet says. They can use those strategies to talk about mental health or conflicts between friends, she says.

“The ways in which you learn how to confidently and also respectfully express yourself and your opinion I think aids in a lot of different aspects of life,” she says.

Many colleges have also begun offering faculty workshops so instructors can learn to model constructive dialogue in the classroom, Longo says. Faculty will participate in simulation exercises so they’ll be better prepared during the school year when something comes up, he says. Through the DID Lab, Longo also brings a group of faculty together each month to discuss having conversations in the classroom that are out of their expertise.

“If you’re a chemist or if you’re a biology professor, you have disciplinary expertise,” Longo says, “but you might not have much experience or feel comfortable having a conversation about climate change with folks who might not believe in climate change.”

How Effective Is It?

People in the civil dialogue space are still looking for ways to measure how successful these programs have been.

At Dartmouth, staff in the Dialogue Project have been conducting individual assessments of the impact each event has on students, says Kristi Clemens, executive director of the program. The goal is for students to have less of what is called high conflict with one another, Clemens says, and engage in more productive ways. The group is also looking to lower the amount of cancel culture on campus, such as students attacking one another online, she says.

To do that, though, students need to practice civil discourse skills and experience them on a daily basis, says Elizabeth Smith, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Dartmouth.

“It’s really about thinking about how it just becomes part of the culture,” Smith says. Engaging in civil dialogue should feel “natural, it’s not a ‘oh my gosh, one more thing I have to do,’ but it becomes a natural part of our community life here at Dartmouth.”

Delano has been working on ways to assess the impact of the DID Lab as well. Anecdotally, she says she’s heard from students after certain events that they feel like they can apply what they’ve learned later on, which is encouraging. Still, she says it can be difficult to persuade students to get involved and really engage when many don’t even know what constructive dialogue means.

“A lot of people seem to be turned off by the idea of civil discourse in a lot of different ways,” she says, “whether it’s that they don’t know what it is or they’ve never really had an experience with it.”

It can be especially challenging to engage students who may not be eager to sign up for a dialogue session, says Timothy Shaffer, the director of the SNF Ithaca Initiative, a civil dialogue program at the University of Delaware.

Some colleges have found ways to build incentives into learning about dialogue. At Dartmouth, students can receive a wellness credit for attending campus dialogue workshops. Many faculty at Providence offered students extra credit to attend the DID Lab’s election event.

Still, colleges need to integrate the skills into everyday life on campus so, say, a student athlete or a person in the business school can benefit, Shaffer says. Dialogue skills could be embedded into orientation programs or through residence life, he suggests. Resident advisors can host fun events, like pumpkin carving, but they should also be responsible for teaching incoming students how to have constructive conversations, Shaffer says.

As a biology student hoping to become a pediatric oncologist, Delano plans to use the skills she’s learned from the DID Lab to connect with patients who may not have the same background or opinions as her. Last year, she worked on encouraging science students to get involved in the DID Lab. She helped incorporate dialogue skills into a physics course curriculum and created a “DID Wall” for the science building, which asked students insightful questions, such as “how can you be a better ally to the LGBTQ community?” Students were encouraged to leave their responses on the wall as a way to spark conversation.

“Students might not come with the skills equipped to take on these hard conversations per se, but the second they sit down at one of our events or they have a conversation with one of the fellows, they see that it’s not rocket science,” Delano says. “It’s more so just being open to ways of looking at different viewpoints and figuring out based on our community agreement how they can be the best version of themselves in that moment.”

To Delano, students are often the most effective in getting their own peers to engage. During the election event, she says she felt the room relax when she acknowledged how tense the space might become.

Once students began their discussions, she watched as they talked about topics like how to detect when an image is generated by artificial intelligence. Students were respectful, Delano says, and were able to talk through their disagreements.

Many students left feeling calmer about the election, she adds. The event helped people realize how important it will be to lean on each other regardless of the outcome or how one may feel about it, Delano says.

“It’s ok to not have all the answers right in front of you,” Delano says. “Knowing that there’s people in your corner, even if they don’t believe the same things as you politically, you do have those core shared values that can help you see that there is someone who can still support you.”