Think Students Won’t Consider Opposite Political Views? Here’s How 2 Universities Got Them to Try

The task facing roughly 40 students here at Cairn University this week seemed simple enough: In groups of four or five, spend a few minutes discussing a question. Then move on to another.

How did your family talk about politics when you were growing up?

What’s one political issue or event that has caught your attention in the past year?

Do you think your university encourages free speech and diversity of thought?

In America under President Trump, however, those kinds of questions have become more fraught. Many campuses are rife with conflict over political issues and controversial speakers. College leaders and professors fret that many of their students don’t seem to be interacting much with peers who hold different views — and when their paths do cross, the students often clash.

That’s why these students from six Philadelphia-area institutions gathered for two hours here at Cairn, a small college a bout 25 miles north of Philadelphia, over punch and other refreshments. They came here to learn how to civilly debate political issues in a polarizing time, in an ideologically diverse group. They came here to talk, to listen, to hear disagreement — and maybe, just maybe, to reconsider their own views.

The event, “Can We Talk? Political Dialogue in Donald Trump’s America,” was organized by faculty and staff members from Cairn and the University of Pennsylvania, and they served as facilitators, establishing ground rules, throwing out questions for the groups to tackle, and strolling around the room to help frame the students’ conversations.

If things get uncomfortable, stressed Harris Sokoloff, director of the Penn Project for Civic Engagement, ask us for help.

Cairn and Penn teamed up to host two similar events in the spring, just for students at those institutions. Last month students from other area colleges were invited to join for the first time. This week, Eastern, Saint Joseph’s, Temple, and Villanova Universities were also represented.

“I was troubled by the lack of real dialogue at Penn, in the wake of the elections,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of educational history and one of the organizers. He’s also author of Campus Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know, published last year, and often comments on campus free-speech debates. “There was lots of outrage and gnashing of teeth, of course, but very little attempt to understand why Trump won.”

Mr. Zimmerman and his colleagues advertised the event on local campuses by sending a flier to student organizations and publications. They also contacted a few professors and encouraged them to bring their students. As a result, the students who came were more likely to be politically active, as well as conscious of recent concerns about polarization and how it might be affecting the campus climate.

At one table were four students from three different colleges: Penn, a secular Ivy League institution; Villanova, a Roman Catholic institution; and Cairn, a Christian institution formerly known as Philadelphia Biblical University. Two women, two men. Two were African-American, two were white.

Ben Koshland, a Penn graduate student in education policy, from Baltimore, was a veteran of this exercise; he had participated in the three other events this year. Across the table was Lizzie Walker, a Cairn senior from Scranton, Pa. She, too, had done this before. Two rookies rounded out the group: Taiya Sharif, a Villanova freshman from New York City, and Amir Williams, a Cairn freshman from Philadelphia.

Thorny Questions

The first question, about their families and politics, was designed as an icebreaker, to get the students talking.

Mr. Koshland said he and his siblings would debate politics around the dinner table, vying passionately to try to make the best argument. That wasn’t the case for Ms. Sharif, though she recalled her first introduction to politics and partisan divides. As the 2008 presidential election neared, she asked her father why he was a Democrat. His response: “I don’t really have any interest in Republican views.”

Ms. Walker said her mother used to lean liberal but over the years had become a conservative and an avid watcher of Fox News. In 2012, her father had whispered to her, half jokingly, “Don’t tell your mom I voted for Obama.”

After 15 minutes, it was time to discuss a thornier question: What political issue has most captured your attention over the past year? A panel of five students at the front of the room — whose role was to briefly model productive dialogue before students at the tables gave it a try — reported that they had already sparred at length over abortion.

Paige Betoff, a senior at Penn who supports abortion rights, admitted that she spends most of her time interacting with people who agree with her on that. Surrounded by four students from religiously affiliated universities, she suddenly found herself in the minority.

She and her peers found common ground, however, when considering how greater access to contraception might mean fewer abortions. “If you survived an abortion discussion, you’re doing pretty well,” Mr. Sokoloff joked, prompting laughter.

Back at the table, the four students dove into current events, as well as the political climate on their own campuses. Despite their different backgrounds, they seemed to agree, for the most part, on many contentious issues.

When Ms. Walker described her difficult experience trying to protest the potential shutdown of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, at her mostly conservative university, the other students were sympathetic. None of them were Trump voters. They all supported gay marriage, more gun control, and black football players’ protests of police violence by kneeling for the national anthem.

“There is a whole system of oppression. It’s in education, it’s in job opportunities,” said Ms. Walker, who is white. Mr. Williams, who is black, nodded in agreement.

Elsewhere, there was both agreement and disagreement. At one table, a student explained his strong support for gun rights in the context of recent mass shootings, while his peers listened respectfully. At another, a Penn student and a Cairn student debated America’s place in the world and whether the country should remain part of the United Nations. While there were plenty of conservative voices in the room, few of those students were specifically speaking up in favor of President. Trump.

Some students said afterward that they had definitely stepped out of their bubbles. While Kelly Ebersole, a Cairn junior, said her views hadn’t changed that evening, she was glad to have interacted face to face with students outside of her usual social circle.

“I want to be friends with the people I talked with, even though I disagreed with some of them,” said Ms. Ebersole, who grew up in a family that was more focused on faith than politics but leaned conservative. It was especially refreshing to take the conversation off of social media, she added. “Seeing people’s faces makes it a lot easier to talk.”

The group of Mr. Koshland, Ms. Sharif, Ms. Walker, and Mr. Williams, on the other hand, had had a vibrant discussion, but not really a debate. Had the students simply found common ground among their differences without much difficulty? Had they felt like they couldn’t voice disagreement? Or had they unintentionally found themselves in an echo chamber, exactly the kind of bubble this event was trying to avoid?

Indeed, Mr. Koshland said afterward that part of the reason he had attended all four of the dialogue events was to try to meet as many people of differing opinions as possible. Both this time and last month, however, he’d ended up among students who seemed like-minded.

Getting students — and others — out of their campus echo chambers is a challenge facing many colleges, particularly in this politically polarized time. Mr. Zimmerman, the Penn professor, hopes this forum can become a model for other campuses as they try to do just that.

Over the past year, he said he’s been struck by how many students genuinely want to talk with people who hold opposing political views.

“And once they do so, they discover that the ‘other side’ isn’t nearly as awful or hateful as imagined,” he said. “But none of this will happen without very purposeful efforts on the part of our institutions to make it happen.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.