The Conversations We Keep Avoiding

This excerpt is from a guest opinion piece by Dr. Jamal Watson of Trinity Washington University, originally published in The EDU Ledger.

If there is one sentence I hear more than any other from students, faculty, and administrators alike, it is some version of this: we don't know how to talk to each other anymore. Not across the political aisle. Not across the pew. Not even across the dinner table. We have become a nation of parallel monologues, each of us shouting into our own echo chamber and calling it conversation.

That is why I keep coming back to a program that is quietly doing something radical on 277 college campuses in 46 states. It is called Unify America, and I believe every college and university in this country needs to take a hard look at what it is building.

Unify America's president, Michelle Sobel, frames it this way: the skills required to be an effective citizen and the skills required to be effective at work are the same skills—the capacity to listen, stay curious, and disagree without walking away from the table. That is not a soft, feel-good talking point, but a survival skill for a democracy that has forgotten how to argue in good faith.

Here is how it works. A student signs up for a slot, almost like buying a movie ticket. They are matched with another student from a different part of the country, someone who differs from them politically, geographically, and often generationally in outlook. There is no facilitator hovering in the virtual room. Just two young people and a guided set of questions, walking through issues some of us are too afraid to raise at the Thanksgiving table. Arielle Mizrahi, the organization's director of partnerships, calls it building civic muscle, which is why the flagship initiative is called the Civic Gym. Nobody wakes up wanting a hard conversation with a stranger who disagrees with them about abortion, guns, immigration, or student loan debt forgiveness. But you can be trained to do it, the same way you train a muscle you did not know you had.

The proof is already on our own campuses. Dr. Kenisha Thomas, an associate professor of social work at Florida A&M University, a historically Black college and university, has run this program for three years, and she requires it of her students as a graded assignment rather than treating it as optional extra credit. What she has witnessed says as much about the state of the country as it does about her classroom.

Thomas teaches her students to strip the conversation down to history, data, and facts, because, as she puts it... read the full piece on The EDU Ledger.