Eboo Patel has a vision for colleges and universities embroiled in fights over race, gender, sexuality, and, more recently, the war in Gaza.
The founder and president of Interfaith America, which tries to help institutions, groups, and people find common ground, wants to make “pluralism” central to a liberal-arts education at colleges across the country.
Instead of escalating their conflicts into conflagration, Patel believes that students can be taught to engage with different viewpoints and transform their disagreements into learning experiences. Earlier this week, he came to Washington to present those ideas to higher-education administrators at a convening titled “Advancing Campus Pluralism: Bridgebuilding Across Difference.”
“A college is a place where students are initiated into the conflict inherent to a diverse democracy,” Patel told the audience.
Many students have demanded that their campuses not serve as a platform for people who promote racist ideas and tropes. Patel is leading a movement that is calling for engagement in those conversations no matter how tough.
“Did you not think there were going to be conflicts?” Patel asked.
He is suggesting a return to the ideals of a classical liberal-arts education, one where rigorous debate between contrasting viewpoints is an essential part of learning. When set against the current backdrop of campus clashes over race and identity, the premise can seem quaint.
The convening comes as protests on campuses have run red hot since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the bombing campaign that followed in Gaza. Some students began demanding colleges openly condemn Israel, while some Jewish students said they felt unsafe in an environment where the critiques of Israel took on what they believed were antisemitic undertones. Institutions also found themselves under siege by major donors and wealthy alumni who felt the colleges were not doing enough to tamp down the anti-Israel protests.
Meanwhile, Patel’s strategy of training colleges to equip their students with the tools for debate and an open embrace of pluralism might be harder to sell to the hundreds of state lawmakers across the country who are keeping a watchful eye on diversity training on college campuses, part of a broader attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in 28 states.
A Toolkit to Promote Discussion
Patel believes many students don’t know how to engage with someone they disagree with. On campus visits, he hears a common refrain from students: “When I encounter someone I disagree with, I don’t know how to ask them questions about things that I don’t know about.”
Interfaith America has built a toolkit, the Bridging the Gap curriculum, to help colleges, universities, and even businesses improve at fostering pluralism and open discussions. Across four modules the curriculum teaches people how to be more effective listeners, become more comfortable in contentious conversations, and use stories to build connections to people from different backgrounds.
This week’s event was sponsored by Interfaith America and the American Association of Colleges and Universities.
The crowd was sprinkled with college presidents and diversity officers.
Many of the featured speakers described being squeezed by demands from two sides: students who want to curb speech they deem racist, misogynist, homophobic, or transphobic, and conservatives who are suspicious of any training that has the word diversity in the curriculum.
Daniel Diermeier became chancellor of Vanderbilt University in 2020 at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
Under his leadership the university baked civility into its community standards, a set of policies that is signed by the students and that includes the honor code and Vanderbilt’s community creed, which is drafted by students. The creed calls for students to foster a “culture of civility grounded in equity, inclusivity, and respect.” The students are responsible for holding one another accountable for violating the community standards.
Despite the effort, the university has not avoided all controversy.
In March a small but vocal set of students demanded that Vanderbilt stop spending student-government money at businesses that have ties to Israel or support that country’s military actions in Gaza. Their demand, Diermeier said, would have contradicted the university’s longstanding policy of political neutrality, so when campus officials declined to act, the students took over an administration hall and held a sit-in. The police broke up the demonstration and arrested several students.
“There are students on campus that have zero interest in civil discourse. And in our case they have made it very clear,” Diermeier said.
“It’s a radical agenda,” he added, “and the tools they use are the tools of radicalism.”
Another panelist, Laurie L. Patton, president of Middlebury College, reminded the audience of just how toxic her campus was in 2017 after dozens of demonstrators interrupted, heckled, and shouted over Charles Murray, the political scientist best known as one of the authors of The Bell Curve, which suggests genetics explains the gap between Black and white people on intelligence tests. That event left a Middlebury professor injured and wearing a neck brace.
“We were broken,” Patton recalled at this week’s event.
Since then, Middlebury College has been in the midst of turning these conflicts into teaching moments.
“We are trying to teach conflict transformation as a liberal art,” Patton said.
Professors receive training that mirrors the Bridging the Gap curriculum and are asked to employ it when they engage students in classroom debates.
Despite these efforts, Middlebury is back under fire. In February a Title VI complaint was filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, claiming Jewish students have been discriminated against and have not been sufficiently protected from harassment and antisemitic rhetoric during campus antiwar protests.
A Target of Conservative Lawmakers
Patel said it’s the college’s job to teach people how to think outside of their own identity and beyond the frameworks they were equipped with prior to arriving on campus.
“I have the ability and the skills to inhabit someone’s mind-set for a while,” said Diermeier, of Vanderbilt. “You don’t have to adopt the mind-set, but can you inhabit it for a while.”
As Danielle Allen, a Harvard University professor who participated in the panel discussion put it, “When one makes the case for pluralism, one sees pathways [for DEI] that were not apparent before.”
But if pluralism is the new version of DEI, will it become a target of conservative lawmakers who have little to no tolerance for administrators’ meddling in political issues, especially anything regarding race and sexuality? All the speakers at the opening session were from private institutions that don’t face the same legal threats as public colleges in the 18 states where mandatory training is either banned or laws to prohibit training are being considered.
When one makes the case for pluralism, one sees pathways [for DEI] that were not apparent before.
Patel said a lot of the DEI training focuses on the division between oppressors, who are identified primarily as heterosexual cisgender white males, and the oppressed class, which includes women, LGBTQ people, and racial minorities.
“What can the public expect from someone who spent a lot of time at a university, who has gone through a set of diversity programs?” Patel asked. “What that graduate is good at is calling out the oppressors in your organization.”
Patel, like many critics of DEI, find this preoccupation with oppressor and oppressed divisive and antithetical to discourse that should bridge divides.
None of the speakers had a specific answer on how to work around legal attacks against DEI.
But, they said, if colleges can fix their conflict problem, they could serve as a model for bridging the political divergence that divides the country, be a resource for corporations or municipal bodies that find themselves deeply divided, and send graduates into the world with a better understanding of difference, one that does not engender hostility and contention.
“As I like to tell college presidents, students don’t pay $80,000 a year to meet people they disagree with and scream at each other,” Patel said.
