How to Reduce Cultural Conflict on Campus

This essay is excerpted from a recent Chronicle special report, “Fostering Students’ Free Expression,” available in the Chronicle Store.

Recent events on college campuses and Capitol Hill highlight a crisis in American higher education — the corrosive effect of political polarization on the intellectual and social life of our campus communities, including the attenuation of civil discourse and the abandonment of empathy.

Much of the current conversation has focused on policies and procedures — the codes of discipline colleges should create and enforce to ensure student safety and inclusivity. In that context, we’ve seen leaders tie themselves in knots regarding the legalities surrounding hate speech and bullying. But we are missing the larger issue and, with it, an opportunity to reinvent the college experience.

By intentionally designing environments where students from diverse backgrounds live and learn together in close proximity and giving them the tools for effective communication, civil discourse, and conflict resolution, we can cultivate a richer learning environment that promotes understanding, empathy, and acceptance. What would it look like to make those both central values and expected learning outcomes on a college campus?

Like many institutions in the United States, Minerva University, where I am president, is dealing with deep tensions and high emotions among students with strongly divergent views on the violence they are witnessing — in Israel and Gaza, and also in Ukraine, and sadly in many regions around the globe. Yet, in the composition of our student body as well as the structure of our academic program and residential experience, we have some unique advantages. We know some of our practices won’t translate to larger institutions, but there are lessons from our first decade that may be valuable to reducing social and cultural conflict and bridging differences.

The first practical lesson of our efforts is placing intercultural understanding at the heart of everything we do. Students begin their undergraduate journey in San Francisco, where our university is based, before traveling with a cohort of 200 others to live and study in cities around the world. At the start of each stay, they attend an in-depth seminar to learn about local values, communication styles, workplace culture, customs, and manners. It helps our students ensure they are mindful and respectful inhabitants of their new home, and brings broader awareness of the cultural differences in our student body.

Civil discourse is another of our key values. We’ve worked hard to instill the idea that each of us has a responsibility to see, to hear, and to attempt to understand our classmates, roommates, pupils, and friends. First-year students take four classes designed to build habits for interacting effectively. They learn how to negotiate, mediate, and resolve ethical dilemmas. Those skills are then built into our grading rubric. Class participation is graded on a scale of 1 to 5 based on students’ abilities to make connections in conversation and to recognize how their backgrounds affect their interpretation of the material at hand.

Our next lesson: Proximity matters. Our students live in close quarters across every conceivable line of difference during their entire time at Minerva. Residential life exists in the context of the overall values and mission of the university, and it is a learning environment every bit as vital as the classroom. Each week, select students organize a gathering to share the food and culture of their home countries with the rest of their cohort. From teaching samba to making dumplings, these events help students learn more about their friends and peers as well as the world at large. I recently spoke with a Pakistani alumna who described for me the profound and transformative experience of rooming with an Indian student, who became her best friend. Those opportunities allow students to engage with peers from different racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds with the goal of producing radical empathy and understanding as well as lifelong connections.

And beyond the residence halls, the city they are in is their campus. Anyone who has lived abroad knows that navigating a new city and learning a new language can complicate even the simplest of daily tasks. Our students don’t just make this transition once, but every couple of months. That productive struggle is by design.

Another integral component is our pedagogy. Whatever your major, there is only one kind of class: a small seminar of roughly 20 students. Our professors are limited to speaking for less than 10 minutes of a 90-minute class. For the rest of the session, students are responsible for listening and interacting, and are graded on how well they share their own perspectives and seek out those of their classmates. Institutions with much-larger classes could attempt to replicate that model by breaking students into groups and encouraging instructors to shift from a mind-set of talking to students to one of facilitating conversations among students.

That pedagogy and our students’ diversity also provide ample opportunities to develop a nuanced understanding of some of the world’s most complex issues. Imagine how this might play out in a course about constitutional law with classmates from Iran, Denmark, and Brazil, or in a class on climate change with students from South Korea, Ukraine, and South Africa. Learning is enhanced because students are able to share their perspectives on the cultural and economic contexts that underlie our most-pressing problems.

College leaders today have an obligation to provide inspiration, ethical guidance, and, above all, structure to young people hungry for community in an increasingly calamitous and alienating world. We must help them understand not only the sorrow but the joy experienced by people not like themselves. That understanding won’t come from treating cultural education as an add-on or something that would be nice to have. Instead, it needs to be central to everything we do. Increased political polarization is a blight on American campuses, but we have the tools to stop the damage and forge stronger connections between students than ever before.