These Professors Help Students See Why Others Think Differently

College classrooms have long been spaces where students are exposed to a spectrum of ideas and debate controversial issues. But civil discussion in those classrooms has been threatened in recent years by the tensions and raw emotions that have emerged from the nation’s widening political divides.

Some professors have become so concerned about the state of discourse, on campuses and elsewhere, that they’ve designed entire courses in response.

Whether it’s examining books by inflammatory authors, diving into the debate around immigration, or asking students on opposite sides of the gun-control debate to craft public policy, these professors teach undergraduates how to think critically about divisive topics, examine their own biases, and better understand why some people think differently than they do.

These courses are increasingly important, advocates say, given that the spaces in which people can deliberate are shrinking. Thanksgiving dinners are no longer neutral zones. Workplaces, living rooms, and even some places of worship are so polarized that the classroom has become one of the few remaining places where a diversity of views can be examined.

“There’s a lot of evidence that people are realizing our democracy is not functioning the way it should. And one of the many ways to fix it is our ability to talk to each other across differences,” says Nancy Thomas, director of the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education at Tufts University.

These discussions also have implications beyond the classroom. Thomas, whose institute helps colleges encourage students to become more civically engaged, has found a correlation between active political discourse on campuses and high voting rates among students.

“They knew what they were doing because they embedded training across campus,” Thomas says of these engaged colleges. “They required courses that taught students the art of discussion. They taught how to frame an issue, how to identify multiple perspectives, how to advocate for a side, and how to facilitate discussions.”

Here are four examples of courses designed to help students do just that, in an era when productive debates appear to be happening less often.

The University Blacklist

Jon Shields was inspired to create a course around “blacklisted” authors after a talk by Heather Mac Donald, a conservative political commentator, was disrupted by students at Claremont McKenna College in 2017. Shields, a professor of government there, was disturbed that some students had tried to shut Mac Donald down rather than engage with her.

So he contacted Phil Zuckerman, a professor of sociology and secular studies at neighboring Pitzer College, to see if he was interested in co-teaching a course. The two professors, one conservative and one liberal, would debate with each other and with students from across the Claremont Colleges Consortium. “The University Blacklist” was first offered in 2018 — with a wait list — and is being taught again this fall.

Shields and Zuckerman didn’t necessarily want to have students read the most reasoned or nuanced arguments on topics such as Islamic fundamentalism and prison reform. Rather, they highlighted authors who had been, at some point, disinvited from or disrupted on a campus. They used a database compiled by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, a free-speech advocacy group.

Among the authors: Laura Kipnis, a Northwestern University professor who has decried the present state of sexual politics on campus. Charles Murray, a scholar whose positions on genetics and race have been widely panned. Even Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing firebrand who seldom, if ever, appears on academic syllabi.

“We didn’t want to stack the deck in favor of free speech by assigning [only] people who were more cerebral and serious,” says Shields. “We also wanted to assign some of the bomb throwers.” (Read their syllabus here.)

Each week is devoted to a pair of books, under headings like “Apostates” and “Provocateurs.” Last year, for example, the professors paired Chris Hedges’s American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, with Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.

“One thing about reading people is that it forces you to take them more seriously,” says Shields. “Maybe Heather Mac Donald is wrong, even dangerously wrong, but it’s hard to walk away from a book and think, This is an utterly unserious person or a malicious person.”

In the first of two classes each week, the professors debate each other. They do this, they say, in order to help students feel comfortable sharing their own views during the second class. While students at the Claremont Colleges tend to skew liberal, the two professors have recruited students from across the political spectrum.

Such a course doesn’t require team teaching, the professors say, but they like what it brings to the discussion. “I knew I had to be at my best rhetorically and intellectually,” says Zuckerman, “because I was going to have a colleague who was going to challenge me. And I was going to have students who were going to challenge me.”

Some students in last fall’s course say it was an opportunity to encounter arguments they wouldn’t have experienced otherwise, and to determine for themselves which ones had merit and which were rhetorically and factually weak.

Brendan Schultz, who took the course as a senior last year, said it was particularly helpful to hear the two professors debate, and to have one-on-one discussions with Shields, who is more conservative than he is. “I realized, Oh, we don’t have different values,” Schultz says. “We just have different ways of looking at the issues and different ways to solve problems.”

Most Professors Feel They Have a Civic Duty

Professors were asked whether they “strongly agreed” or “agreed” that it was their role to do the following things.

SOURCE: UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute.

Controversies in U.S. Politics

Elizabeth A. Bennion teaches “Controversies in U.S Politics” as part of the general-education curriculum at Indiana University at South Bend. Most of the class is made up of first- and second-year students from a variety of majors, who hold various views on gun control, the death penality, and abortion.

For Bennion, a professor of political science, the course serves as a chance to teach students how to deliberate more effectively about what they read, hear, and see. (Read her syllabus here.)

The first half of the semester is devoted to understanding and identifying logical fallacies like ad hominem attacks, appeals to force, circular reasoning, straw men, faulty analogies, and equivocation.

Bennion starts there, she says, because it prepares students to better engage with one another once thornier topics are introduced. “When they make a claim that something is correct because that’s the way it’s always been, someone else will say, ‘That sounds like one of the logical fallacies we’ve been discussing.’ "

Unlike “The University Blacklist,” Bennion’s course steers away from inflammatory authors, focusing instead on speakers and writers who are able to make cogent arguments on either side of a debate.

In one session, students deliberate over capital punishment. They are asked to identify what they consider the strongest arguments on each side of the policy debate, examine evidence, and consider questions like, Can the death penalty be administered without discrimination based on race, class, and mental ability?

In another session, Bennion puts together classmates on opposite sides of the gun-control debate — based on a survey she does at the start of the course about students’ views — and requires them to devise policy solutions they can all live with. “The solutions students come up with are much more nuanced and much more reflective of public opinion” than those often debated in legislatures, she says.

Other times she asks them to defend a position on a controversial topic with which they disagree. “It’s not necessarily about changing students’ minds,” she says. “It’s about making them more aware of people’s points of view, detecting flaws in arguments, and discussing the strongest evidence in support of other people’s views.”

Occasionally she’s faced with a student who would rather argue a point than listen. She has found it effective to take those students aside and tell them that she appreciates their passion, but that the next step in their learning is to understand opposing viewpoints. “I’ve never had a student who didn’t at least take away a couple of things” from the class, she says.

Students sometimes come up to her after the course is over to tell her that they had found themselves in the middle of a heated discussion but were able to take a step back and analyze it from different perspectives. “They’re able to relate to a person making a particular argument and say, in a nonthreatening way, Hey, have you thought about this?”

American Ideologies and American Dreams

Samuel Abrams, a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, has taught several courses that consider ideological differences through the lens of presidential power and party politics. This fall he is teaching “American Ideologies and American Dreams.”

The course asks foundational questions: What does it mean to be an American today? How have beliefs and ideas about the United States changed over time? Who is realizing the American Dream and who isn’t? It also examines the American political system, looking at how collective decision-making works, for example, and the role of the media. (Read his syllabus here.)

Abrams says students must have opportunities to ask candid questions about political and social issues. In a previous course, on presidential politics, he says, it became apparent that some students didn’t fully understand what the Black Lives Matter movement stood for and felt that if they were to question it in conversations on campus, other students would accuse them of being hostile to the movement. “That led to an interesting discussion on how we deal with race, assimilation, reparations, and repairing past wrongs.”

Abrams has spoken out about what he sees as a lack of viewpoint diversity on campuses. Last year, after he wrote in The New York Times about a survey he did in which college administrators identified as liberal by a 12-to-1 margin, his office was vandalized, and students questioned whether he should keep his job.

To encourage students to speak frankly in class, Abrams sets a few rules. For one, students can talk about the class with others, but they can’t discuss the opinions of particular classmates by name. He also lays out his expectations in the syllabus: “We will use a variety of approaches based in logic and evidence to find answers to various puzzles about American policy and will treat this material as social scientists, not ideologues.”

His course is designed as a small seminar, which he feels is necessary to have a free and open exchange. He also makes a point of taking his students out to a play or a ballgame early in the semester. “When you get to know each other,” he says, “you can’t dismiss someone as crazy.”

All students are required to lead a discussion at some point and to prepare short memos on the readings, which include Joseph J. Ellis’s American Dialogue: The Founders and Us and Arthur C. Brooks’s Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America From the Culture of Contempt. The final project traces the history of a particular community or group and its view of the American Dream.

Abrams acknowledges that running a course like this is challenging: “Many faculty members are blindsided, if they’re not comfortable or if they’re not prepared. We need more training in dealing with this.”

How Civically Engaged Are Students?

Students were asked whether they “frequently” or “occasionally” engaged in the following:

SOURCE: UCLA’s Heigher Education Research Institute

Social Problems

As a sociologist, Ilana Redstone is attuned to the ways in which social norms influence how we think about things like race and gender. As a professor, she’s concerned that her students are often unaware of that.

So over the past year Redstone, an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, created a couple of courses to encourage them to wrestle with that reality: “Social Problems” and “Bigots and Snowflakes: Living in a World Where Everyone Else Is Wrong.”

“Social Problems” covers topics such as gender inequality, the urban-rural political divide, and racial and ethnic inequality. Students read works on those topics by popular writers, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s influential Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations.”

They also study counterarguments as well as controversial works, such as James Damore’s provocative memo, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” which argues that biological differences may help explain women’s lack of equal representation in the tech sector and leadership. (Read her syllabus here.)

The “Bigots and Snowflakes” course includes some of the same material but is more focused on what Redstone sees as a lack of viewpoint diversity in higher education and how that damages its mission. In that course, too, she includes controversial works on the right, such as Jordan Peterson’s “Politically Incorrect Professor” videos, so students an decide what they think of those arguments.

“This stuff matters in terms of political polarization,” says Redstone, who is also a faculty fellow at the Heterodox Academy, an academic collaborative. “You have to be willing to form your own opinions, not dismiss things because of who says them.”

One of her goals, Redstone says, is to help students see that their views, as much as anyone else’s, are built on beliefs and biases. If they start from that vantage point, rather from the idea that they are correct and others are wrong, she says, they are likelier to avoid communication breakdowns when they encounter different viewpoints.

“There’s a certain level of humility to recognize that, maybe the way I see the world is not Truth with a capital T,” she says.

If students can’t do that, Redstone says, they won’t know how to respond when they go out in the world and start dealing with people who think differently.

That goes for her peers as well. Redstone argues that higher education has a responsibility to “course correct” by acknowledging some of the biases and suppositions that have crept into the academy over the years. “This includes, among faculty and administrators, a lack of recognition of the distinction between a worldview and fact or truth,” she says. “It’s really hard. This stuff runs really deep.”

Beth McMurtrie writes about technology’s influence on teaching and the future of learning. Follow her on Twitter @bethmcmurtrie, or email her at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.