To dial down campus tensions, US colleges teach the art of conversation

NEW YORK - On a warm November day, a group of Columbia University professors set up “listening tables” near the centre of campus and hailed students rushing to class, inviting them to stop and talk.

About a dozen students, alumni and faculty members sat down, grabbed some free pizza and chatted about how the protests over the Israel-Hamas war had alienated some of them and inspired others.

Then, a woman in a kaffiyeh – the traditional Palestinian scarf – spoke up and the tension rose. Over the past year, her view of the conflict had evolved, she told the group. She talked about “this genocide”.

“I wouldn’t call it a genocide,” said adjunct psychology professor Scott Barry Kaufman who was moderating the group. “Do you hate me because I disagree with you?”

No, she did not hate him – “for that reason”, she said.

“Ouch,” Prof Kaufman replied.

As campuses have been caught up in protests and counter-protests over the Israel-Hamas war, universities have tried to regain control and dial down the temperature, driven in part by pressure from outside forces such as alumni, politicians and federal civil rights investigations into anti-Semitism on campuses. In the spring, some resorted to force, with arrests and suspensions.

Now, more schools are trying the gentler but also messy art of conversation as an antidote to student unrest.

Columbia has been holding weekly listening tables, hosted by a university research centre called the Trust Collaboratory, since September.

They are staffed by faculty members, students and administrators (including, at one point, university president Katrina Armstrong).

They have become a place for hundreds of students to find community, “which really makes me happy”, said Trust Collaboratory associate director Cristian Capotescu.

“Once in a while, we leave the door open to mild confrontations,” he added.

Indeed, the exchange the other day – with its feints and jabs, yet desire to engage – illustrated some of the promise and disappointments of this technique.

Calls for civility are common at times of crisis, but one historian cautioned that they can be problematic if they are mainly focused on containing the behavior of the protesters.

In the 19th century, many church leaders wanted to tamp down conflict over slavery within their churches and resorted to a posture of neutrality.

“So they got very focused on preventing the discussion of slavery at all and seeing the debates as the problem rather than the moral issues at hand,” University of Mississippi associate history professor April Holm said in an interview.

That said, she added, “I think students should be talking to each other”.

With catchphrases like “cultivating conversations”, “curious disagreement” and “respectful disagreement across differences”, advocates of civil discourse say the guiding principle is not to win the argument but to understand the other person’s point of view.

But the desire to win is a hard habit to break, and even some leaders of such programmes concede that there are problems.

“As much as I love civil discourse and promote it, I have many criticisms,” said Mr Jason Vadnos, a sophomore at Vanderbilt University. Mr Vadnos is on the student advisory board of a programme called Dialogue Vanderbilt, which was founded just before Hamas’ attack on Israel in 2023.

Often, the same people show up every time, Mr Vadnos said, and they are the peacemakers, not the hard-core activists.

Going to a one-time event is unlikely to change behaviour in the longer term. And it is hard to cut through raw emotions to some kind of mutual respect and understanding.

When it comes to the war in Gaza, Mr Vadnos said, many people are so emotionally invested that “even when they are hearing about other people’s perspectives, it is challenging to really step into their shoes”.

Demand for such campus programs has risen since the first Trump administration, according to the College Debates and Discourse Alliance, a group that organises debates about contentious issues such as abortion and cancel culture.

Lately, some students have chosen to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said Mr Doug Sprei, director of the alliance.

The evidence that these programmes work is mainly anecdotal, but a research project is finding that participants become more open to people they disagree with, Mr Sprei said. “There’s so much demand for it, we can hardly keep up.”

The problems the civil discourse programmes are trying to solve are painfully real.

Ms Nevia Selmon, a Harvard Divinity School student, told the story of a friend who was tied up in knots over whom to invite to her birthday party.

“I have all these friends who are super involved in the pro-Palestinian organising, and all these friends who feel super uncomfortable about the encampment,” Ms Selmon recalled her friend saying. “I don’t know how I can have them in the same space.”

Ms Selmon, who is Jewish, said anti-Zionist views seemed built into some classes.

“I reread different papers that I wrote last autumn, in classes taught by very far-left professors, Jewish professors, and I wrote things with language that I am not ashamed of, but I was just being so insensitive to the Israeli perspective,” she said.

Her experiences prompted her to join the Pluralism Project, which promotes interfaith dialogue.

“Last year, the temperature of the divinity school was very hot,” Ms Selmon said. “This year, it’s more lukewarm right now, and I feel like there can be spaces for this.”

Mr John Rose is one of the founders of the Civil Discourse Project at Duke University in North Carolina.

The initiative was formed before the Oct 7, 2023, Hamas attack out of a concern that “students were censoring too much”, he said.

The meaning of civil discourse is often misunderstood, he said: “Civil discourse doesn’t require you to abandon your deeply held principles. It’s a way of discussing that recognises the dignity of the other”.

Showing anger is permitted, he said. The only forbidden emotion is contempt.

Still, the Middle East is such a hot-button issue that even some dialogue programmes tiptoe around it.

At Binghamton University in New York, first-year students are taking part in workshops in “Principles of Conversation” this autumn, a basic skill for getting through college seminars, let alone political discussions.

“We’re trying to make this part of the culture from the time they arrive,” said Ms Alison Twang, director of the university’s Centre for Civic Engagement.

They start by asking personal questions about the students’ choice to come to college and then escalate to issues such as banning TikTok, immigration and gun rights.

Although they never specifically address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ms Twang said she has been told that students use their skills in conversations on the topic with friends and family.

Since the Oct 7 attack, “obviously the need has honestly just grown ten-fold”, said Ms Jenna Vallone, a senior at Binghamton majoring in political science. “Students are tired – I’m tired – of fighting.”

Ms Shira Hoffer, a Harvard University senior, was so distressed at the lack of constructive conversation about the Israel-Hamas war that she founded the Hotline for Israel/Palestine.

The idea began in October 2023 when she reposted a message to her dormitory e-mail list from Ms Claudine Gay, then Harvard’s president, denouncing “the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas”.

Ms Hoffer added a personal message offering to have a non-judgmental conversation, with her cellphone number.

People wanted to talk – especially about facts and history, rather than emotions. “I didn’t expect the barrage of texts I received from strangers,” she said. Many of them wanted to discuss how to solve the conflict.

“It was genuine in a way that was so diametrically opposed to the rhetoric we were hearing on campus – terrorism versus this or that, oppression versus the oppressed,” she said. “It was beautiful.”

She still runs the hotline, which now has about a dozen volunteers, though the texts have died down, she said.

Ms Hoffer, a modern Orthodox Jew, believes that curiosity is essential to dialogue, and that it can be taught. Once it is, she added, it is “muscle memory”.

But the listening table at Columbia showed how hard listening can be.

A week later, Prof Kaufman was still smarting over his clash with the woman about genocide, one of the more fraught debates of the war.

He had not formed firm beliefs on the genocide question, and had been probing to see whether she would be open to more discussion, he said.

He described the tension to the students in his psychology class at Columbia, trying to understand how he might have handled the encounter better.

The woman did want to be named, but in an interview later, she said she was still shaken, too. She said she had found the conversation surprisingly draining, and had turned to friends afterwards for emotional support.

“Sometimes we think that it’s the other person who is being narrow in their view of us, when actually it’s us being narrow in our view of them,” Prof Kaufman told his class.

It was a charitable view, and wasn’t that the point? NYTIMES