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After tense protests last spring, many colleges and universities are getting help from outside organizations to help foster more civil dialogue.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Jason Redmond/AFP, Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis, Chip Somodevilla, Andrew Harnik/Getty Images | Kevin Malik/Pexels
The fallout from last spring’s campus unrest over the Israel-Hamas war, combined with anxieties about this fall’s presidential election, have pushed many colleges and universities to prioritize promoting civil discourse and civic engagement as they head into the new academic year.
Such programs have been available on many college campuses for years, but they’re often siloed, and experts say they aren’t as effective as they could be. Survey results have shown that students, particularly those who lean right politically or who belong to certain religious groups, feel like campus is no longer a place where they can speak freely.
“Students are just more cautious in talking about political issues. Even when they disagree, they don’t want to say it,” said Ashley Biser, an associate professor and co-director of the Arneson Institute for Practical Politics and Public Affairs at Ohio Wesleyan University. “They’re worried about what their peers are going to think of them if they hold an opinion that’s not part of the majority.”
This fall, in anticipation of those divisions deepening, campus leaders are looking to ramp up efforts, whether homegrown or guided by outside organizations, to create a more hospitable campus climate for all. At Ohio Wesleyan, that means implementing a new civil discourse certificate program in partnership with the Constructive Dialogue Institute (CDI).
Known as Perspectives, the CDI-developed program includes a three-hour, asynchronous online course, as well as several supplemental in-person workshops where participants get to put the skills they’ve learned into practice. It will be tuition-free, available first to a select group of about 150 student leaders—including residential assistants, orientation leaders and athletic team captains—as well as all faculty and staff who have a direct role in student affairs or teach courses related to the upcoming election.
Biser, who is overseeing the pilot, said the university hopes to expand the program to a group of about 450 first-year students by the end of the fall term and, eventually, to the entire campus.
“It’s not that an emphasis on being engaged in the world is new, but what we’re trying to do is adapt to the fact that students are more cautious about having some of these conversations,” she said. “We’re really focusing on students who are in positions of respect and authority and mentorship with the initial rollout to try to get them to buy in and see the utility and then leverage those students to help encourage others to engage in the process.”
Although the small liberal arts institution in Delaware, Ohio, has yet to experience the kind of tense campus protests and crackdowns that roiled large state flagships such as nearby Ohio State University or coastal privates like Columbia University, Biser said students at Ohio Wesleyan have been “actively engaged” in political issues.
“We’re trying to stave off [such destructive incidents] and make sure that as the world around us gets more divisive, our students are prepared,” she said.
She also hopes that providing such training as a “marketable” certificate that students and staff can flag on their résumés and discuss in job interviews will encourage more engagement.
“It’s a good start,” she said. “They’re not going to be experts in this by the end of it, but what they are going to have done is spent some concerted time thinking about these skills and how to put them into practice.”
‘Plan for It Now’
While involving the entire campus community in constructive dialogue initiatives is ideal, Mary Aviles, the insights and experience lead at CDI, acknowledged that it can be daunting because of all the coordination that’s required.
Since the upcoming face-off between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will be the first presidential election post-pandemic when campuses are fully up and running, Aviles has already heard from numerous college leaders concerned that this year will “feel like the aftermath of the 2016 election,” which put Trump in the White House and incited an emotional reaction among many students that caught some campus leaders off guard.
To help campuses prevent a repeat of 2016, CDI outlined a set of recommendations in its 2024 election guide published earlier this year, including that administrators clarify protest policies, repurpose existing programming to be election-specific and gather input from all pockets of the campus community.
Although each campus’s plan will look different based on its resources and culture, a proactive approach is key, Aviles said.
“Plan for it now,” she said. “Get people talking about [the possibility of civil unrest] and establish some norms the first day in preparation and revisit it a couple of times so it doesn’t just crop up and people are unprepared the day after.”
CDI is one of many third-party groups—others include the Greater Good Science Center, BridgeUSA and Interfaith America—helping colleges prepare for the possibility of election- and war-related protests as the fall semester gets underway. More than a dozen of those groups are listed in “A Guide for Bridging Campus Divides in Challenging Times,” which Campus Compact, a decades-old nonprofit focused on building civic and community engagement in higher education, published last month.
The guide—which includes prompts for self-reflection and tips on how a campus can leverage its own assets and details the tools, policies and evidence-based practices for fostering constructive discourse—doesn’t prescribe a specific approach to balancing free speech with campus safety but encourages institutions to consider how they can apply their existing resources either on their own or with direction from an outside group.
Although college campuses are rife with experts in a variety of fields—including Middle East history, political science and conflict resolution—who may already be promoting civic discourse, those efforts typically “happen in isolation,” said Matt Farley, chief strategy and operations officer for Campus Compact. “Sometimes you need an outside perspective to validate what’s already happening internally.”
Farley and his team, who spent the first half of the summer talking to leaders from a wide range of institutions, were surprised by how apprehensive they seemed.
“People feel more underprepared than we expected them to be. There’s a clear call for more training for faculty, staff, administrators and certainly students,” he said. “We also heard a lot about fear. People were more afraid than normal to engage in the conversations because of fear of losing their job or external critique.”
Creating a Ripple Effect
The drama over last year’s protests gave some politicians—including New York representative Elise Stefanik, who led the inquisition of multiple college presidents during congressional hearings on antisemitism—plenty of ammunition to advance the pre-existing narrative that higher education is an institution in crisis. Accusations that campus leaders haven’t done enough to curb antisemitism led to scores of federal complaints and the resignations of the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard and Columbia Universities since the Israel-Hamas war began last October.
That may be fueling a rise in higher education leaders seeking outside support for navigating the contentious campus climate.
For instance, Rajiv Vinnakota, president of the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (ICS), said that his organization’s College Presidents for Civic Preparedness consortium, grew from 15 members when it launched a year ago to 95 as of Tuesday, including Ohio Wesleyan.
“Presidents are taking this issue very seriously,” Vinnakota said. “The protests over the spring just heightened the focus and the need to make sure that people are seeing the free inquiry that, frankly, needs to be at the center of all of higher education.”
A progress report that ICS released last week, tracking the “civic revival” work of 77 member institutions from August 2023 to June 2024, showed that 88 percent already offered courses or seminars on constructive discourse, and 98 percent were in the process of developing a new civic research program, fellowship or initiative.
Hamilton College in upstate New York is one of them. The small liberal arts institution has boasted its Common Ground program—a series of seminars in which speakers demonstrate what it looks like to “disagree agreeably”—for nearly eight years. But this year, upon joining the consortium and welcoming a new staff member with a background in student orientation, the program’s directors decided to introduce a new, more hands-on experience.
The initiative, titled Civil Discourse and Local Politics, launched Wednesday as part of the off-campus freshman orientation programming. It connects 10 freshmen and two student leaders with the College Debates and Discourse Alliance, another third-party training program, as well as with local politicians in an effort to teach them about healthy civic engagement, explore local controversies over political districting and collect data at a community farmers market on residents’ voting habits.
“We do a lot of events on campus, but the events are more of a display. It’s having speakers come to campus and they’re disagreeing civilly, but we’re watching them onstage,” said Kaity Stewart, the assistant director of Common Ground. “Piloting these different initiatives is a really great opportunity to engage with students and help them build some of the skills that are needed to have discourse and to become thought leaders.”
College leaders like Ohio Wesleyan’s Biser admit that the new programs tend to be small and won’t likely ease or prevent all campus discord. But the goal is to create a ripple effect.
“If all we were doing was teaching students how to have respectful conversations, then that’s more of a Band-Aid,” she said. “But I don’t think that’s the only thing we’re doing … We’re equipping people so that they know how to engage in these conversations in the future, and hopefully so that they’ll be motivated to learn more.”
Hamilton’s leaders, for instance, hope the 12 students who participate in the orientation trip will be more likely to encourage their friends to enroll in a semester-long civil discourse class next spring.
“We’re going to experiment more and get bigger as we go along, but we need to do it in a way that isn’t seen as heavy-handed,” said Ty Seidule, director of Hamilton’s Common Ground program. “There’s not one thing that you can do to make students better on this. It’s got to be multiple things simultaneously, and we’re trying to do that.”
