At Columbia University (NY), professors, students and administrators have been setting up “listening tables” since September, inviting students to stop and talk about big issues such as the Israel-Hamas war. This focus on conversation is an attempt to address student unrest and help them find community. The guiding principle of such civil discourse is to understand the other person’s point of view rather than simply winning an argument.
The demand for such campus programs fostering respectful discourse has risen since the first Trump administration, according to the College Debates and Discourse Alliance, reported The New York Times. Research has shown that participants become more open to people they disagree with, the Alliance’s director Doug Sprei told the paper.
Projects have been popping up on a variety of campuses with the Civil Discourse Project at Duke University (NC), first-year “Principles of Conversation” workshops at Binghamton University (NY) and Dialogue Vanderbilt at Vanderbilt University (TN).
