Chris Walsh: We’re really excited to be talking with Professor Sarah Igo of Dialogue Vanderbilt to learn more about how pluralism is working on the campus of Vanderbilt University. Professor Igo, thanks for talking with us today.
Sarah Igo: Glad to be here, looking forward to it.
Chris Walsh: Well, let’s start with you. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what’s going on at Vanderbilt in terms of the project there and what inspired you all.
Sarah Igo: Sure, so I am, by training, an intellectual historian in the United States and I guess I got interested in the topics of civil discourse on campus partly out of my own research and partly out of my sense as a historian that our public culture and the texture of public speech have really coarsened, no surprise to anyone out there as of late. And I wanted to understand the reasons for that and also how we might remedy that.
So, I’ve been working over the last few years with a program on campus called Dialogue Vanderbilt that has lots of different pieces which I’m happy to talk to you about. Some of them involve faculty, some students, some staff, some high school students and people who aren’t at Vanderbilt yet, but the program I guess in simplest terms is meant to restore curiosity and intellectual debate and openness on campus in every possible space.
Chris Walsh: Which is fantastic. So, you mentioned different components of the program. If you could, quickly walk us through what those are.
Sarah Igo: Sure, well, they’re changing and evolving all the time, but I’ll try to summarize as best I can. One piece of Dialogue Vanderbilt involves free speech, and we have a kind of institute for free speech on campus. Another is really civil discourse in our classrooms and in the campus culture at large. That’s probably the biggest part of the work and that involves pretty much all constituencies, but I’ll say a huge piece of that and probably the most important piece has been a student advisory board that we set up from the very beginning of undergraduates who apply to advise us, to create with us, to think with us about how to improve conversation on campus.
And that can be conversation about big things, about war in the Middle East. It could be about things happening on campus. And they don’t need to be political topics. They might be about debates going on about sports on campus or about other kinds of matters that are really pertinent to students. So, there’s a student advisory board that is sort of co-extensive with and advises all of our efforts. But in addition to that, we have programs for faculty who have taken part in workshops around pedagogy and inspiring trusting, but also really freewheeling conversations in classes through setting up things like classroom contracts – things like that – and really practicing and getting feedback on discussion skills.
We’ve developed into our first-year curriculum in the College of Arts and Sciences really intentional discussion skills all the way through. We’ve worked with student organizations with things like insight debates, which are debates that require some preparation, are really on topics where there are kind of evenly split groups of students and give them some preparation and support and figure out how to argue well over really tough topics. Those have been a big hit and a big success.
And then we’ve also done some programs for our staff. We’ve brought students in to talk about campus policies. So, as you’re probably seeing as I’m rattling things off, what we’ve tried to do is not think about this is a project that just has one home, but that is infiltrating, is sort of moving all over campus and trying to intervene at all levels of campus. I think one of our early insights was that top-down policies get you only so far, that you really need to engage as far as you can, the students, the staff, and the faculty on campus in the importance of civil discourse and free expression around intellectual matters to make things really work and to change campus culture.
Chris Walsh: So, my next question, and you may have just answered it, but let me try and probe a little further: it sounds like an exciting and ambitious project, but it could be fraught with some very uncomfortable disagreements and some tensions. So, what is the secret sauce, would you say, that makes all these different groups with different backgrounds and different opinions come together and be able to exercise this idea of civil discourse?
Sarah Igo: Yeah, I’m not sure there is a special sauce, but I will say the very best idea that we’ve had is having a student board, a group of students, pledged to, really and excited about, and interested in how to have better conversation on difficult or challenging topics as people with their ears to the ground, as people who really know what kinds of issues concern students versus faculty. We heard a lot in the early days of Dialogue Vanderbilt about speakers or programs that just didn’t necessarily draw students, and so we’ve been trying to listen to that.
I would say the other thing that maybe makes our program distinctive and has been really helpful is thinking about this as a commitment that’s going to need to be made at every level of the university. You can’t just work with students, you’ve also got to work with faculty, you’ve also got to work with staff, you’ve also got to work with senior administration. We’re finding, for example, that it’s been really helpful in creating a culture of better conversations on campus to start with orientation: the very first moments that students walk onto campus having orientation programs that are designed to explain that this is how we do things at Vanderbilt.
This is how we talk with each other. “All ideas welcome” that kind of thing. And then we thought, well, maybe we need to say more even before orientation. Maybe it needs to be part of the college admission process to have a question to ask students about an experience they had in talking to someone with which they disagree, and then we thought, actually, maybe we need to start talking to high schools and partnering with them to think about what are high school students learning and listening to and how are discussions in their classrooms unfolding or incidents or sort of political fracases and things like that on their campuses? How can we, by knowing more about those and partnering with high schools, think about continuities and what we can expect when students get to campus?
So, at any rate, I think the further we get in this work, the more we realize that all these different, really intricate parts need to fit together, and that’s something that we once thought was just inherent to the college experience. You bring people together from all sorts of places, and boom, you’ve got great intellectual diversity and pluralism. People will learn from each other. But we can’t assume that. I think it’s obvious we can’t assume that in our political culture, nor should we assume it of 18-year-old students coming to campus and encountering people with really different ideas and backgrounds and life experiences for the first time.
Chris Walsh: And that’s really great to hear, and I think I just want to emphasize the point that you made. I think, maybe, too often we think that people have those skills built into their hardware, but really, they’re things that need to be learned and practiced, and people who are good at it need to keep doing it continually. I mean, so I’m so glad to hear that you’re doing all that.
Sarah Igo: Yeah, I think we do. It has been a kind of automatic assumption we’ve had and have learned now time and time again that we shouldn’t assume. We shouldn’t assume that people know how to do this, that being a democratic citizen, which is something we hope people learn from their education or get practice in from their education, is something that is not easy.
And I say democratic citizen because, of course, in a democracy, one of the tasks that we have is being able to coexist with people who we radically disagree with and live together and live peacefully with those people. So, some of those skills need to be nurtured and taught on campus. I think they’re really taught well and can be taught well in our classes and the ways that are in seminars, people engage each other, but we need to be more intentional about it. That’s clear and that’s what we’re trying to do.
Chris Walsh: And Professor, we live in a time that seems, at least in the present, a very toxically polarized moment. I’m curious, how do you respond to skepticism – and that could be external or even internal within those at Vanderbilt – about building connections across differences? Like, how do you sell people on the fact that this is possible?
Sarah Igo: Yeah, it’s a good question. I don’t want to overstate our success in solving that problem. I mean, so the students that I’ve been referring to, our student advisory board, are people who came to us who said, “we’re interested in this.” And we’ve had the pleasure of getting to work with them because of their enthusiasm for this kind of dialogue across difference. But it’s clear that not all students want that; that the students who might need it most, and maybe the faculty who need it most are not the ones who will come to a place like Dialogue Vanderbilt.
So, I think for our program, for any program like ours, the challenge is about how do you truly extend the work to the rest of the campus? How do you build it in, sometimes to already existing frameworks? That’s what we found with, for instance, first-year orientation and our ongoing first-year – we call it “Vanderbilt Visions” – program to make dialogue a key component of that so that it reaches every student, no matter what. We have explored with – I think it’s a little different with faculty – we’ve tried to explore ways to engage faculty members who might be skeptical or think that this isn’t something they need to think about by also offering as many different kinds of workshops and opportunities as possible. And then again, sort of structuring it into some of the practices that we do in common.
For instance, our first-year curriculum in our College of Arts and Sciences, making that just part of how you teach the course is to teach civil discourse. But how do you make the case to the recalcitrant or the hostile to this idea? I’m not sure. I mean, I think one of the things Vanderbilt has been trying- the way we’ve been trying to tackle it, is to say that “if you want to come here, this is part of what we do.”
So, to try to make dialogue and civil discourse and sort of intellectual freedom more and more central to the ethos of the place so that students know coming in, this is what we’re going to ask of you, for example. I don’t think we’re quite saying the same thing to faculty, and I don’t know that we will. You know, “if you want to come here, this is-” you know, that’s a different conversation with faculty. It’s harder for lots of reasons. The kind of autonomy that faculty members have over their classes and their ways of doing things. But we’ve really tried to make it clear – and this is also in some of our work, I think, with high schools – that if you want to come here, here’s the exciting thing that we’re doing and inviting you to be part of and not making it, again, so much of a top-down kind of demand, but an invitation to be part of a culture that’s doing things differently and doing things better, we hope.
Chris Walsh: And it sounds like you’re being successful. And I will say, it’s a good reminder that when you’re reaching out to different stakeholders and constituencies, it’s not necessarily a one-size-fits-all approach to getting people to buy in, which I think sometimes maybe we overlook. So, I appreciate you sharing that. And the last thing I’ll ask you, and this is always a little difficult because it is such a vague term, but when you think about the concept of pluralism, how do you explain that? What is pluralism? I think, I mean, I think civil discourse or disagreeing better or building bridges are all ways we talk about it, but how would you define it?
Sarah Igo: Yeah, it’s a good question. I mean, I have one definition as an intellectual historian because pluralism has a long intellectual history in the United States. The United States envisioned as a place, sometimes more than at other times, where multiple kinds of people from different religious and ethnic and national traditions could live together and maybe even be better because of that richness. There’s a whole conversation in the 1920s about this and a lot of writing that I admire and still, I think, despite its datedness in some ways, has a lot to teach us.
But I guess I would define pluralism as the ability to coexist peaceably with those who are very different or who disagree with you. I think this is something that is absolutely baked into the mission of U.S. higher education. I think we have rightly been criticized for the ways that we’re not doing this as well as we should, but it is actually one of the key purposes of the university and of the liberal arts to develop that sense of strength in your own convictions, but ability to let other people have their convictions and maybe even sometimes to change your convictions. I mean, I think that is to me the promise of living in a pluralistic, democratic society. It’s also the promise of being in a seminar with really smart students who have very different ideas and who we allow to unleash them and debate them and test them and sometimes change them in conversation with peers.
So, I think the pluralistic idea is both in our national framework, but it’s in the much smaller framework of a 15-person seminar. And I do think there are things that one can import from that seminar into one’s life as a democratic citizen and that we need to be thinking really hard about the connection between the two.
Chris Walsh: Professor Igo, thank you so much for sharing all the great work that you’re doing. I’m excited about the future of the country after hearing that, so thank you again.
Sarah Igo: Thanks so much. A pleasure to talk with you.
