Better Discourse: A Guide for Bridging Campus Divides in Challenging Times

Better Discourse: A Guide for Bridging Campus Divides in Challenging Times

The 2023–2024 academic year was rife with polarization and division across higher education. Encampments, protests, and free speech controversies garnered lots of attention while illuminating a fundamental challenge to the core enterprise of higher learning: a breakdown of dialogue across lines of differences.

Colleges and universities are vital to educating the next generation to be active and effective participants in our democracy—where they can learn to talk across differences, bridge divides, and, ultimately, address public problems. The disconnect between our aspirations as beacons for democracy and the reality of our experiences as students, faculty, staff, and administrators raises the stakes for our work. As the wider society struggles with division and polarization, colleges and universities must do better. This challenging moment, however, is an invitation to find new ways forward—to reject cynicism and polarization by intentionally creating space for better discourse.

Auspiciously, higher education is prepared to take on this task. Since our founding four decades ago, Campus Compact has seen higher education significantly deepen its commitment and focus to its public mission. Many colleges and universities today are equipped with the robust infrastructures, resources, and diversity of knowledge that can support inclusive, constructive dialogue—better discourse—that serves as the foundation for healthy communities.

What we mean by "better discourse"

Respectful, informed, and purposeful conversation across lines of difference. By engaging in this kind of dialogue, people discuss various viewpoints with the intent to learn, understand, and, sometimes, collectively decide.
 

About the campus guide

This guide was created in an effort to quickly respond to campus needs to engage in better discourse for what many expect to be an uncertain and potentially tumultuous 2024–2025 academic year. With support from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, a summer work group assessed current campus needs and priorities by conducting a survey and focus groups of diverse campus stakeholders and interviewing leaders from national civil discourse organizations. This guide is meant to encourage campus leaders to engage in reflective inquiry, find allies, and advance better discourse on campus and in society. This guide is not designed to be a comprehensive list of resources and examples. 

This is produced as part of the larger Scaling Discourse in Higher Education Project, supported by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. The longer-term project will build upon the data and work this summer to build, curate, and share resources that will assist campuses in assessing and accessing evidence-based practices and resources for better discourse.

Where to begin

As you pick up this guide, you might be looking to create spaces for conversations on really contentious issues, such as the 2024 election or the war in Gaza, or find ways to celebrate inspiring work already happening on your campus that seems overlooked in the larger narrative of doom and despair. Regardless of where you are at this moment, this guide is meant to meet you in the moment and help you create better discourse.

This guide is a back-to-campus starter kit for everyone in higher education—no matter your role or experience practicing better discourse. It includes invitations for self-reflection and a corresponding guide for mapping your campus. It also directs you to tools, policies, and evidence-based practices for better discourse that are already available—and that can work for all campus leaders.

Values of Better Discourse

Better discourse requires sharing stories, listening, asking questions, and finding common ground. We must create spaces that are safe and courageous, where multiple voices, perspectives, and experiences are valued. It relies on a foundation of these values:

• Being aware of your own power and positionality
• Practicing intellectual humility
• Naming and framing issues so that various perspectives feel included
• Recognizing people’s gifts, assets, and potential
• Fostering respectful and authentic relationships
• Engaging in purposeful action and reflection
   

Where are you starting from? Self-reflection & guiding questions

To begin work that responds to crises, we must first understand where we are beginning, what resources we have at our disposal, and what we hope to achieve. These guiding questions offer an inquiry-based approach to help us examine ourselves and our contexts, discern paths, and find allies to advance better discourse on campus and in society. Before diving into better discourse practices, we encourage you to engage in this exercise of intellectual humility—to spark innovation and creativity by seeking ideas, insights, and perspectives that might not otherwise emerge.

How to begin

• Reference the framing questions below or in the full inquiry guide to begin the reflection that is key to moving forward. If you are struggling with definitions, overwhelmed by challenges on campuses, or experiencing feelings of isolation, these questions will explore these issues and unearth potential solutions.
• Create a community for these conversations. Try to create a group of 5-8 individuals that represent different units on your campus. It could include people from student life, diversity offices, academic affairs, community engagement, alumni relations, marketing, or other areas. 
• Slow down and reflect. We are asking for courage in moments of extraordinary and real fear. You will likely feel challenged and uncomfortable at times, but slowing down and reflecting are key components found to be effective in de-escalation and reducing polarization.

Source & inspiration

The questions have been largely inspired by our own experiences as practitioners and by the struggles, needs, and hopes articulated by participants in our field survey and focus groups. These questions are also informed by the National Public Housing Museum’s 36 Questions of Civic Love, Arthur Kleinman’s explanatory questions and Magaret Wheatley’s Eight Fearless Questions.
 

Reflective inquiry

• What does better discourse mean? What does civil discourse mean to you? To your campus? Who is doing civil discourse work on your campus? How can you find out? Who could you ask to find out?
• What are the most pressing needs on campus? What do you see as the “problem” in terms of discourse? What do you think others on campus think the problem or crisis is about? What do you fear most about this problem?
• What’s the campus climate like? How has your campus managed conflict and discourse before? What has been successful? Who could you ask to find out? What can you learn from situations that have been unsuccessful?
• How can we center relationships to promote better discourse? Who do you turn to for support? Who is an unsung hero on your campus doing work that inspires you? How can you learn from them? Collaborate with them?
• How do we move forward & resource our community? What has been most helpful to you in challenging times? What is your superpower? What are your community’s superpowers? What is your kryptonite? What support do you need?

Now what

By reflecting on these questions, we hope you emerge with a clearer understanding of where you are, what assets you already have, and ways to identify the help you might need. It is possible that you simply don’t know the answers to many of these questions, where the policies are, who is doing this work, or how different problems are framed. Please know that this is understandable and you are not alone in this realization. This is an important diagnostic step to identify how you might proceed next and how to make sense of the resources available.

Activating your campus community

After spending time reflecting on your context, you probably have a sense of what you need to move forward—but you might not yet know how to get started. This can feel overwhelming, but the good news is there are people on your campus and across higher education who can assist.

Taking an asset-based approach

When engaging with better discourse practices, we recommend bringing an asset-based approach. Many of the activities during the 2023-2024 academic year were reactive, risk management-oriented, prioritized minimizing media backlash, and lacked inclusive campus deliberation, which led to higher levels of disconnection and disagreement.

Understand your assets

The decentralized nature of higher education makes it difficult for institutions to fully understand the expertise within their campus, as most colleges and universities have people, disciplines, and departments with formal expertise in debate, dialogue, and deliberation.

Asset mapping is a tool that can be used to begin the process of identifying expertise, but it can also illuminate gaps or opportunities to scale discourse practices. There are numerous thematic mapping frameworks, and your institution likely has experts in various approaches. Two that can be helpful are Colorado College’s community engagement approach and the AAC&U Institute for Democracy in Higher Education Democracy Re-Designed Toolkit, which applies a student engagement and leadership lens. 

Build upon your assets. 

While programs, practices, and policies are all critical to the institution and community’s culture building, the campus’s primary asset is its people. People need supportive spaces to learn and practice deliberation skills and facilitation. 64.8% of respondents to our field survey agreed or strongly agreed that their institution needs external service providers to facilitate civil discourse workshops or training and discussion-based events on campus.

Leveraging external service providers

While an asset mapping approach may reveal your campus has more resources than realized, some institutions may also seek external service providers. You can use this list of external service providers as a way to open up deeper conversations about what might be most useful to meet your specific campus needs. Ultimately institutions can’t outsource the solutions, but they can leverage the expertise of outside providers that can lend additional perspective, resources, and support. 

Investing in collaboration & communication

To combat the siloed nature of higher education, campus leadership should make efforts to connect their identified assets and help expand program offerings, reach, and impact.  Knowledge of efforts, and the policies and procedures that impact these efforts, need to be prioritized. Approximately 35% of respondents to Campus Compact's 2024 summer survey noted that they were unsure of their own institutional policies related to hosting campus events, holding student or public protests on campus, or the creation of public spaces for civil discourse. 

Approaches to better discourse

Here, you’ll find practices, projects, and programs—many grounded in evidence-based approaches—that you can implement on your campus. You will also find stories of inspiration from our data collection, interviews and focus groups that illustrate successful civil discourse work-in-action that we rarely hear about.

This is not a comprehensive list, but rather a starting point. This document surely misses valuable resources (we’ve heard about many resources and others that are likely being developed as we write). Our intention is to meet the current moment and provide supportive resources to aid you in moving toward better discourse.

If you want to get started, then...

Check out these low-barrier-to-entry guides and programs to learn how to talk across differences 

• National Issues Forum Institute guides on a variety of topics, including the election, free speech, and inclusive campuses
• Living Room Conversations guides for small groups on a range of topics, including conversations in troubled times, elections, cancel culture, belonging, and empathy
• Unify Challenge College Bowl opportunities for one hour, intercollegiate, one-on-one conversation across differences
• Constructive Dialogue Institute Perspectives online learning program for students focused on listening across differences and navigating hard conversations

Learn about some of the methods of dialogue and deliberation from providers like National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation’s Streams of Engagement, or access free training resources in bridge-building and better conversations 

• Interactivity Foundation's Collaborative Discussion Toolkit
• Bridging Differences’ EdX course
• Interfaith America’s We Can Build Bridges course
• Greater Good Science Cecnter’s Building Bridges on Campus

Start a book group around a recent book, like We Need to Build: Fieldnotes for Diverse Democracy by Eboo Patel, I Never Thought of It That Way by Mónica Guzmán, or Try to Love the Questions by Lara Hope Schwarz

Successful civil discourse work in action

At Miami Dade College, a large community college in Florida, faculty and staff have created opportunities for students across their eight campuses to be a part of the Unify Challenge College Bowl. Students are put into pairs for a one-hour online experience to connect across differences. Students from Miami Dade said they were nervous before the conversation, but after, they shared in videos that the experience “open[ed] perceptions,” made them feel “more comfortable to open up in the future,” and helped them “hear from different perspectives.”
 

If you want to integrate civil discourse into the curriculum, then...

Offer dialogue assignments into courses. Consider the following resources: 

• Unify America’s Unify Challenge College Bowl
• College Debate and Discourse Alliance
• Moral Courage’s short resources to engage students
• Braver Angels’ Curricular Toolkit 
• Practicing Democracy: A Toolkit for Educating Civic Professionals

Host a learning community for faculty, students, staff, or administrators on civil discourse that integrates with existing professional development opportunities, such as new hire orientations, workshops, and summer training, like Providence College’s Conversations for Change.

Create a certificate program or minor with civil discourse as its foundation like this one at Indiana University. Or, develop a new first-year seminar on civil discourse.

Provide mini-grants for faculty to revise courses or develop assignments related to civil discourse.

Successful civil discourse work in action

The Davidson College Deliberative Citizenship Initiative’s Deliberation Across the Curriculum program offers training for faculty from different disciplines to develop and offer deliberations in their courses. They suggest 3 ways faculty can integrate deliberation: one-time modules, embedding deliberation throughout the course, and deliberation-focused courses. Davidson has offered a deliberative pedagogy training program for faculty from other colleges and universities through the Deliberative Pedagogy Collaborative project.
 

If you want to integrate civil discourse into co-curricular student life, then...

Consider building civil discourse skills into orientation programming using these resources

• Constructive Dialogue Institute Perspectives
• Othering & Belonging University from the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley

Offer train-the-trainer model to your campus community with support from these providers and resources

• Collaborative Discussion Project
• Greater Good Science Center’s “Bridging Differences” Playbook
• Sustained Dialogue Institute’s Campus Network
• Essential Partners’ Dialogue in Higher Education
• Resetting the Table’s Campus Programs
• Interactivity Foundation’s Collaborative Discussion Coach Training and Toolkit 

Create student organization chapters and programs focused on civil discourse by partnering with 

• BridgeUSA
• Heterodox Academy’s HxA Campus Community Network

Create a “Living/Learning” program focused on bridging divides, such as the experiential living-learning community at Carleton College

Successful civil discourse work in action

Emory University’s  Emory Conversation Project shows how building collaborative discussion skills don’t just happen in the classroom or with highly funded programs. For the past three years, the Project, sponsored by Campus Life, has fostered safe spaces for students to have conversations with those who hold different perspectives. These simple face-to-face encounters have trained students to ask better questions, build curiosity, and value difference
 

If you are addressing protests, free speech controversies, political scrutiny, or other campus crises, then...

Identify policies, procedures, and point people responsible for the creation and dissemination of those documents. Some resources include:

• Divided Community Project’s Leading a Divided Campus
• PEN America’s Campus Free Speech Guide 
• Host a forum with campus legal council regarding policies
• Review policies around speech in light of the coming election

Cultivate the practices of community-wide dialogue. Examples include:

• Integrate civil discourse into existing programs, events, and projects. For instance, add small group conversations following Convocation and other public lectures.
• Host a panel with experts who disagree. See the Heterodox Academy speaker list and Braver Angels speaker list for support.
• Check out the Sustained Dialogue Institute’s campus-wide approach to understanding the “problem behind the problem.”
• Use issue guides from Essential Partners, Living Room Conversations, and National Issues Forum Institute.

Have a collaboratively created and well-communicated plan for supporting the challenges of doing better discourse on campus. Possible steps include:

• Work through the tabletop exercises in the Bipartisan Policy Center’s guide
• Connect resources, like campus safety, student life & engagement offices, and conduct codes, in the context of contentious issues and activism
• Design and use an internal communications tree to disseminate information about the status (emotional, physical, etc.) and situation for campus members
• Resources and training available through the Crisis Prevention Institute’s nonviolent crisis management training

Successful civil discourse work in action

After making national headlines for a contentious discussion on free speech, one campus turned to dialogue experts at Essential Partners to help. Over five years, they launched a program to train faculty and students to speak and listen differently. And they saw the value of such an investment after October 7. As other campuses struggled with emergency responses, this university offered vigils, conversations, and campus events that reflected their dialogue training. An op-ed in the student newspaper celebrated the campus’ ability to disagree better.

If you aim to make civil discourse an instiutional priority, then...

Host an institutional discussion around best practices for promoting better discourse.

• Bipartisan Policy Center’s Campus Free Expression: A New Roadmap guide
• “Pluralistic campuses will foster the bridge-building our divided nations need,” by Eboo Patel and Rebecca Russo
• Revisit your campus policies for free speech. Check out the policy, procedures, and community training from the University of California System Free Speech and Civic Engagement Center

Join a Community of Practice 

• For senior leaders: Constructive Dialogue Institute’s Leadership Institute or Institute for Citizens and Scholars’ College Presidents for Civic Preparedness
• For faculty: National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation’s Higher Ed Learning Exchange
• For students: BridgeUSA Leadership Development
• For staff: Greater Good Science Center’s Bridging Differences in Higher Education Learning Fellowship

Create a “democracy wall” for free expression and community conversation

Successful civil discourse work in action

At North Carolina State, what started as a simple student facilitator training blossomed into widespread campus change. Students used materials from Living Room Conversations to train those in the Service Fellows program. It then expanded to the Honors Village, where students leaned into having better conversations around disagreements. The efforts were so meaningful that the North Carolina State Campus Conversations Project team built a learning community with Winston Salem Community College to begin a regional collegiate culture committed to better conversations.
 

If you aim to advance dialogue between higher education and the public, then...

• Engage the local community in campus-community dialogues or joint problem-solving. This can be done through a campus center, such as the CSU Center for Public Deliberation.
• Meet and talk with community leaders, such as city and council leaders, to better understand issues and to educate on strategies for better discourse. Invite key stakeholders for well-rounded representation and promote the event through a wide range of media and organizational outlets.
• Use an issue guide, like those mentioned earlier, or other related document to spark a constructive conversation that can move the participants beyond binary thinking.
• Create opportunities for alumni to connect with students, faculty, and staff.

Supplemental materials

• Better Discourse: Reflective Inquiry Guide
• Better Discourse: Resources for Addressing Current Issues
• Better Discourse: Listing of Bridge-Building and Civil Discourse Service Providers