Does going to college make you better or worse at having a disagreement?
One of the primary goals of a liberal education is to learn from people you disagree with through civil discussion. However, the numbers show that America’s current education system is doing the opposite.
In September, a PEW Research Center poll found that about 6 in 10 American adults say that political conversations with people they disagree with are stressful, while only 36% say they are “interesting and informative.” The same poll found that those with a postgraduate degree are actually 8% less likely to find political disagreements “interesting and informative” compared to those who never attended college.
Is it possible to reverse this troubling trend? How can we turn our universities into places that promote informative disagreement rather than eroding it?
There are many at Baylor who believe they have an answer: find people who disagree with each other, give them a controversial topic, and guide them in civil discussion.
About 6 in 10 American adults say that political conversations with people they disagree with are stressful, while only 36% say they are “interesting and informative.”
On January 22nd, President Linda Livingstone moderated the first in a series of “civil discourse” panel discussions on politics and faith. On April 12-13th, Baylor will host the 2024 National Bioethics Bowl, in which teams will debate difficult ethical dilemmas in the medical field. And throughout the spring semester, the Bo Bo Spiritual Life Center will be hosting a “Bridging the Gap” course, part of a national initiative attempting to train students across the political spectrum to seek common ground on contentious issues.
Behind each of these projects are people who have hope that Baylor students can grow from their disagreements.
Annalise Shero, co-president of the Baylor student organization “Table Talk,” is one of those hopeful people. Table Talk hosts weekly student conversations on controversial topics, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, affirmative action, and feminism in the Barbie movie. Annalise clarified that Table Talk discussions are not competitions. Rather, “this is a conversation where we are all trying to learn from each other.” Despite this spirit of charity, Annalise never encourages participants to water-down their true opinions. “We want people to come in with strong opinions and vocal opinions, because if we didn’t talk about the things we think, then there would be no point to having the club.”
The dynamic that Table Talk has cultivated is so antithetical to America’s polarized culture that it seems almost contradictory. Moderators ask people to express their unmitigated opinions on the most divisive issues, while still preserving an atmosphere where, in Annalise’s words, “everyone would listen when someone talked rather than mentally preparing what they were going to say in response.”
While Table Talk simply aims to provide a space for open discussion, Drs. David and Elizabeth Corey, two Baylor political science professors, are taking a more structured approach. This semester, they are teaching a class together titled “The Hardest Issues of Our Age” as part of a national initiative to promote civil discourse on college campuses. The class asks students to discuss controversial political topics such as immigration and gender identity in a framework of freedom, charity, humility, and curiosity. According to Dr. David Corey, “the course is designed to help students understand that most people’s views are based on fundamental goods to which they are committed; and learning how to discover those goods is the first step toward political understanding.”
In their own way, each of these projects is teaching Baylor students to disagree in civil, informative ways. However, it is important to acknowledge that building a community which rewards disagreement, even civil disagreement, comes with dangers as well.
The goal of having a conversation with someone you disagree with should always be to come closer to the truth or at the very least to understand why people hold the views they do.
Over the past seven years, I have been immersed in just such a community: competitive policy debate. I have observed competitive debate culture from a variety of roles: debater, judge, coach, tournament organizer, and even reality TV show contestant. Because a debater must prepare to argue both sides of an issue, competitive debate rewards not only listening to arguments that oppose your own, but actually learning to make opposing arguments yourself. The critical thinking, creativity, and rigorous research that this atmosphere encourages are all crucial for developing informed opinions on political issues. However, if used in the wrong spirit, those same skills can work against the truth rather than for it.
I once heard the story of a champion college debater who would often get Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on his door. Whenever this happened, he would pick a random religion in his head, and through subtle persuasion and careful questioning, attempt to convert the Jehovah’s Witness to that religion. He is reputed to have sometimes succeeded.
This kind of relativist attitude is common among competitive debaters. Many of those debaters would enthusiastically place themselves among the 36% who find political disagreement “interesting and informative,” but they are clearly still missing something. It is not enough to make our disagreements civil, or even for them to be “interesting and informative.” The goal of having a conversation with someone you disagree with should always be to come closer to the truth or at the very least to understand why people hold the views they do.
Illustrations of these types of disagreements abound in Plato’s dialogues and other cornerstones of liberal education.
In the “Republic,” Socrates’ friend Glaucon makes a robust case for living an unjust life, even though he does not believe the argument himself. Socrates thanks his friend for the strong opposition, and the difficulty of the argument prompts Socrates to spend the rest of the dialogue forming a detailed theory of justice.
Whenever Thomas Aquinas sets out to engage with a question in the “Summa Theologica,” his first step is to list “objections” to his view: several well-formed, persuasively written counter-arguments. He then refutes the objections individually and presents his argument at the end.
In a similar vein, John Stuart Mill argues in “On Liberty” that no dissent should be forcibly silenced, no matter how wrong we may believe it to be. Beyond the possibility that the dissent may in fact be true, he adds that even wrong opinions can lead to a “clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
What each of these thinkers has in common is that they ask more of themselves than mere civility. They ask more of themselves than disagreeing in an “interesting, informative” way. They ask of themselves something that requires much more vulnerability and courage: to expose their most dearly held beliefs, the foundations of their identity and worldview, to the most compelling opposing arguments.
In the midst of a polarizing election season, that degree of bravery may seem like a lot to ask. But the growth of opportunities at Baylor for civil disagreement is a promising first step toward a campus culture of renewed openness, charity, and truth-seeking.