Critical discourse was in critical condition on American campuses even before reactions to the war between Israel and Hamas left it with no discernible pulse.
At Stanford Law School, where I have taught for many years, students across the spectrum of beliefs and identities have become increasingly reluctant to engage each other productively on controversial issues. As the College Pulse/FIRE 2024 College Free Speech Rankings and the 2021 Stanford IDEAL survey reveal, many students feel excluded from classroom discussions and fear ostracism should they say the wrong thing. Far from being unique, Stanford sadly turns out to be typical.
As universities have considered how to handle the deterioration of student discourse, two clashing schools of thought have dominated the debate. We might call them the tough-it-out school and the comfort-the-afflicted school.
Proponents of the tough-it-out approach view the classroom as a venue for no-holds-barred, uninhibited debate. They cite the incisive comment by former University of Chicago President Hannah Gray that “education should not be intended to make people comfortable,” but “to make them think.” The libertarian-oriented champions of this approach resist efforts to make students feel included in discourse or to reduce the hazards of ostracism, fearing that any interventions would inhibit academic freedom and free expression.
Often, these faculty members talk as if the only alternative to their position is the comfort-the-afflicted approach, which has both right- and left-wing variants. For example, Florida’s “Stop WOKE” Act forbids teaching liberal views of racial justice, reflecting the legislature’s belief that “an individual should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” At the other end of the spectrum lies the California Community Colleges’ demand that courses acknowledge “the inequities of historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups.” Whereas the Florida law is intended to comfort white students, the California regulation is meant to comfort students of color.
It’s not only formal laws and regulations that create institutional orthodoxies. As Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder have observed, many DEI-sponsored “trainings” have the same effect by inculcating particular theories of social justice and privileging the “oppression” of some groups to the exclusion of others.
If the choice were only between toughing it out and comforting the afflicted, inclusive discourse would create a paradox: One can either promote open discourse among the willing at the cost of other students’ exclusion, or remove barriers to inclusion at the cost of drastically narrowing the range of permissible discourse.
Fortunately, there’s a third option available, which I’ll call everyone belongs. The idea is to facilitate critical discourse while creating the conditions for inclusive participation. This approach promotes interactive discussions designed to make students with many different identities and viewpoints grapple with difficult issues, even when the process makes them uncomfortable. For this to succeed, however, students must feel that they are genuinely included in those discussions — that they belong at the table.
Belonging, in this context, does not imply the cozy feeling of being with like-minded people. Rather, as the social psychologist Geoffrey Cohen defines the term in his 2022 book Belonging, it refers to “the feeling that we’re part of a larger group that values, respects, and cares for us — and to which we have something to contribute.”
DEI programs could ditch their emphasis on oppression and be reconstituted with a universalist ethos that embraces students with a broad range of identities and beliefs.
Cohen and his colleague Gregory M. Walton coined the term “belonging uncertainty” to refer to the “state of mind in which one suffers from doubts about whether one is fully accepted in a particular environment or ever could be.” Belonging uncertainty inhibits students’ full participation in discourse and is a pervasive problem on American campuses. While students of color and LGBTQ+ students in particular often experience belonging uncertainty, no one is immune. First-generation and low-income students, as well as religiously, socially, and politically conservative students at predominantly liberal universities also question whether they are full and welcomed participants in their institutions. Recent events have exacerbated belonging uncertainty among Jewish and Muslim students. More broadly, the phenomenon contributes to an epidemic of loneliness among young people.
Unfortunately, the very process of engaging in critical discourse may lessen students’ sense of belonging. For better or worse, most of us do not possess what the playwright Robert Bolt described as Sir Thomas More’s “adamantine sense of his own self.” Participants in critical discourse make themselves vulnerable when they expose their beliefs about controversial issues or even openly explore alternative views. They are also vulnerable to making mistakes — for example saying things that inadvertently offend others. Thus, venues for critical discourse cannot be safe spaces; they are inevitably spaces that require courage. Brave participation requires motivation and support. A strong sense of belonging enables students to cope with these vulnerabilities.
There are many ways to foster belonging that do not clash with free expression and academic freedom. Universities can inculcate active-listening skills and what Julia Galef has termed a “scout mind-set,” which emphasizes curiosity, the avoidance of strawman arguments, and openness to questioning one’s own assumptions. Instructors have great power to make their classrooms welcoming places for students of varied beliefs and identities by establishing and modeling norms of discourse that treat all plausible points of view both generously and critically, while rejecting arguments that are beyond the pale.
Beyond the classroom, faculty can mentor those who are hesitant to participate in the academic enterprise. And social psychologists have experimented with interventions, such as self-affirmation, that can improve students’ confidence in their own identities and beliefs so they can be more open to others. Most ambitiously, DEI programs could ditch their emphasis on oppression and be reconstituted with a universalist ethos that embraces students with a broad range of identities and beliefs.
One need not look far to find nascent examples of the everyone belongs model at work. At Stanford Law School, I am privileged to co-lead the ePluribus Project, which provides a venue for students with different beliefs to discuss controversial issues in a constructive manner. On the other coast, Duke University offers a course on “How to Think in an Age of Political Polarization,” built around the discussion of controversial topics ranging from abolishing Greek life to abortion. But a course need not bear such a title to facilitate critical thinking about difficult issues.
As long as the discussions around the impoverished state of campus discourse remain mired in competition between the flawed approaches of tough-it-out and comfort-the-afflicted, we will not make headway in solving the problem. Ironically, these discussions are often conducted by trading shrill accusations that contradict the very concept of critical discourse. The everybody-belongs approach allows all perspectives to be heard — and questioned.
I have no illusions that everybody belongs will suffice to address the unprecedented polarization of students and faculty in response to the current Mideast crisis. But without it, there’s not a chance.