Intercollegiate Civil Disagreement Partnership: Why Do You Think That?
“Intercollegiate Civil Disagreement Partnership.” Reading the words “civil” and “disagreement” adjacent to one another in our highly polarized, social-media-driven US society may seem at best incongruous and at worst futile. But it’s even more complicated. “Civil,” in this context, does not mean polite; it means disagreements that “relate to the concerns of citizens,” for instance, technology and democracy, immigration, and wealth disparity. During this yearlong extracurricular undergraduate fellowship, students from five different colleges and universities learn to deliberately engage participants’ emotional investments in these vociferously debated issues.
Liana Keesing, a Stanford senior majoring in electrical engineering and writing an honors thesis in Ethics in Society, applied to ICDP because “having a consistent space to interact with students who attended very different kinds of colleges, had very different lived experiences, who weren’t all the same age and weren’t living in my same bubble was very exciting to me.” Cass Sheppard, another ICDP alum and a senior at California State University Bakersfield majoring in political science, noted that they were intrigued by the fellowship because “I genuinely love having difficult conversations about important issues, and I think it’s important to know how to facilitate productive conversations with people who have different beliefs and life experiences.” Ben Esposito, who graduated from Stanford with a BA in political science in spring 2022, was interested in the partnership because “political representation on Stanford’s campus is so disproportionate. More than 30% of the US population identifies as conservative, but Stanford’s student body skews liberal, which makes civil disagreement an issue.”
Keesing, Sheppard and Esposito are three of the students who participated in the 2020-2021 Intercollegiate Civil Disagreement Partnership. ICDP fellows meet for two hours most Fridays to develop skills for participating in and mediating “productive civil disagreements”: disagreements wherein discussants can listen, acknowledge one another’s shared humanity and foster understanding. Collin Anthony Chen, the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society’s Associate Director for Undergraduate Engagement, wanted ICDP to foreground disagreement, because on Stanford’s campus, "disagreeing with others in your peer group can be challenging when many share similar views. Some students are afraid of disrupting a sense of social harmony when they voice a different opinion.” Instead, in Chen’s view, college campuses should be spaces for "experimenting with ideas and discussing broad civic responsibilities without the fear of being ostracized.”
Fostering Civil Disagreements
To foster expansive civil discussions, ICDP first selects 40 students from a consortium of both public and private institutions and two- and four-year colleges and universities — one is a historically Black college with a strong focus on education for military veterans, two are colleges that are primarily Hispanic-serving and two are institutions known for high research activity.
The students from these institutions are also selected for the diversity of their experiences and viewpoints. For instance, Sheppard grew up in Bakersfield, attended a continuation high school and is completing a social science teacher preparation program ”to teach government studies to at-risk youth in a continuation school, and eventually a juvenile hall or prison.” Esposito was raised as a Catholic and center-right conservative in rural Rhode Island, and both he and Sheppard became more invested in politics as a result of the 2015-2016 election cycle. “But reading Deaths of Despair and Hillbilly Elegy placed me outside of my own social spheres and made me think about the middle of the country, in particular, that I believe is so often underrepresented in politics,” Esposito explained. Keesing grew up in a liberal household and area in Northern Virginia, but “worked as a page in the Virginia State Senate when I was 13 or 14, where I was exposed to students from all around Virginia. It was my first time living in a place that was politically different from the one I had grown up in and I really valued that experience.”
Participants to Mediators
Unlike most deliberative democracy courses that focus exclusively on policy, ICDP begins with students learning to ask and answer questions that can uncover the visceral experiences undergirding participants’ civil disagreements. “I found real value in ICDP’s approach of asking not what do you think, but why do you think that?” Keesing reported. “We so often jump to the intellectual, especially at places like Stanford, and ignore that you're just another human who has reasons.”
To create conditions that foster the openness and trust necessary for such personal interactions, the first half of the fellowship is dedicated to developing self-awareness and practicing “the principle of charity’” — essentially ascribing good intentions to the person you're conversing with. The goal is for students to resist seeing their peers as members of an opposing team, whose views they must debate and change. Experts such as Lilliana Mason, associate research professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity, also share their research with students to provide useful frameworks. Finally, by spending the first half of the fellowship participating in these kinds of exchanges, students are gaining the tools they’ll need to mediate the difficult conversations they’ll have in the second half.
Despite these powerful practices, challenges do arise. Similar to discussions that take place in the world outside the fellowship, students were sometimes worried about voicing opinions they believed might not be shared by others. Sheppard, as one of two people who identified as non-binary, felt anxious when the topic of transwomen in sports was discussed so they were comforted when the other student who identified as nonbinary was in the same group. By contrast, Esposito, who believed he was one of only a few conservatives in his cohort and usually the only conservative in his small group discussions, felt that “the burden was on me to advance the counterargument, to be the conservative voice.”
Looking Ahead
Chen admits that the ICDP is still a work-in-progress. He noted that when evaluating the course each year, students always ask for “more disagreement, more difference and a greater variety of student beliefs” — despite the coordinators’ best efforts to create the most diverse cohort possible. Esposito suggested adding more mid-western institutions to the consortium, such as Notre Dame University, to raise the number of conservative and perhaps rural voices. As it turns out, the partnership’s organizers agreed that more regional diversity would be beneficial, so the University of Tennessee has been added to this year’s consortium. Nevertheless, Chen believes that because the fellowship is self-selecting, “we may only attract students who already have a willingness to engage and hear different perspectives. We are not reaching students who are politically apathetic or who are generally pessimistic about political progress through dialogue.”
The fellowship’s vision is that the students who participate each year will share the skills and perspectives they’ve acquired with other members of their communities to grow the practice of productive disagreement. Ultimately, Keesing hopes “that we can just continue to find ways to increase a sense of shared humanity. That’s the real value, not the political — just accepting that you disagree with me and you’re a real human who has real beliefs and is as smart and capable of thinking about all of these things as I am.”
Donna Hunter is a freelance writer, editor, and tutor living in San Francisco. She has a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley and was an Advanced Lecturer in Stanford’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric.