Can Universities Teach Us to Talk Again?

In an era when many Americans believe the country is too divided to come back together, Tufts University political scientist Eitan Hersh believes higher education has a crucial role to play in bridging divides and he’s putting that belief into practice through a new university center devoted to viewpoint diversity.

“What do we want from students when they graduate high school or college,” Hersh says. “We want them to be able to engage with lots of different kinds of people in the workforce or in civic spaces, and know how to handle disagreement, and know how to fight for the things that they care about and know how to listen and learn and develop new ideas.”

Too often, he says, universities and social networks confine people to intellectual bubbles. However, when students understand how others’ beliefs shape their views, they learn to think critically, listen better, and handle disagreement with more nuance. That philosophy drives the creation of Tufts’ new Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education, which Hersh leads. The center will host reading groups, workshops, and in-person discussions that encourage open, offline dialogue across disciplines and ideologies. The center’s mission extends beyond events. In fact, Hersh wants to rethink curriculum and teaching practices to ensure dissenting voices and unfamiliar perspectives are part of students’ education.

“It doesn't mean that you, as a student change your mind on every issue. But you just realize that these issues are complicated for a reason, which is that there is a lot of gray area,” he says. “And to me, that is quite depolarizing. Because all of a sudden, it takes something that looked like an us versus them story into a story of people with different values and senses of the world reach reasonable, different conclusions.”

While “viewpoint diversity” has become a politically loaded term, Hersh sees it as central to higher education’s purpose, not a partisan issue. In this episode, Hersh discusses his hope to rekindle a university culture defined by curiosity, conversation, and understanding.

Transcript

JILL ANDERSON: I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast. 

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Political scientist Eitan Hersh thinks teaching students to disagree productively might be one of the most important lessons colleges can offer today. At a time when Americans seem more divided than ever, many wonder whether our differences have simply grown too vast to bridge. Hersh studies how people form their beliefs, and how they can move beyond partisanship to think critically and engage more thoughtfully across differences.

As the head of the newly launched Tufts University Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education, he's rethinking how campuses can become spaces where people truly learn to talk and listen to each other. I asked why the new center is less about politics and more about taking on what he's called cool ideas in higher education.

EITAN HERSH: I think we kind of can see it from lots of different angles. We can see it from a research angle, about how do we get good ideas as scholars. We can see it as a teaching and learning angle. How do we learn? How do we know what the truth is? How do we get information? And I think, then, you can see it also as both a professional and a civic angle. Which is like, what do we want from students when they graduate high school or college? We want them to be able to engage with lots of different kinds of people in the workforce or in civic spaces, and know how to handle disagreement, and know how to fight for the things that they care about and know how to listen and learn and develop new ideas.

And so, for all of these reasons, whether it's research, education, or civic and professional life, what exactly do we need to do? I think we need to be able to learn from a really wide range of people, get lots of different kinds of inputs so that we can see what are people's value systems. How does someone go from a value system to an opinion about politics, or about an interest in some culture, a view of religion, whatever it is? How do you go from a value system to understanding data, or how you incorporate new information beyond just your values?

I think when you do this, in general, it helps you pursue the truth. I mean, that's the basic proposal here, that in order to get at the truth, we just need to have a pretty wide set of inputs. And there is this implicit criticism that this isn't happening enough, that, for a variety of reasons — it could be political polarization. It could be people's media diets are highly constrained. It could be that people's social networks are in a bubble. 
It could be that people feel intolerant towards other people because they feel threatened by other people. We haven't been doing this well enough. And so, we need this, essentially, infusion of spirit, of viewpoint diversity, to get us back on track.

JILL ANDERSON: One thing I saw recently was that there were some polls done showing many Americans believe the country is just too divided to ever come back together. How do you see universities playing a role in this? And do you think they can realistically bridge divides, or are they just reflecting them?

EITAN HERSH: I mean, I think that question hits at why this center even started to begin with. And the reason I say that is because I've always found in my teaching — and I mostly teach classes on elections, US elections. That's my area of expertise. And I have more recently taught this course on conservatism for public policy. But let's just focus on the elections class for a minute, which I've taught since I started being a professor in 2011 or so. What's this class about? It's mostly about these topics related to elections, gerrymandering, money in politics, voter ID laws, political party primaries. A lot of times, this very typical thing happens, which is that students come into the classroom with some basic sense of what they think they've heard about the issues. And they have a sense of what they're supposed to say. They're sort of right and wrong, black and white, gerrymandering bad, this one is all good, voter ID bad, whatever it is. And then you actually get into the discussion about, what is the law? Why do people with different values come to the law differently? What does the data say? And I think the thing that at least always happens for me in these political science classes is that you expose students to some gray area, or some sense that you can understand why someone reaches a different conclusion than you have reached.

And it doesn't mean that you, as a student change your mind on every issue. But you just realize that these issues are complicated for a reason, which is that there is a lot of gray area. And to me, that is quite depolarizing. Because, all of a sudden, it takes something that looked like an us versus them story into a story of people with different values and senses of the world reach reasonable, different conclusions. You see it on every single issue and every single class. And I assume many of my colleagues see the same thing. This is what gives us a lot of optimism, I think, that education is the thing that can break down those divides.

JILL ANDERSON: Tell me more about the center. I want to know what it's going to look like in practice, to create this space where students can really engage with hard, controversial ideas without fear, without judgment. What is that going to look like?

EITAN HERSH: I'll tell you the easy part first. The easy part is that we're going to host events, and reading groups, and workshops, and some headline events. But it's mostly not about frontal presentations. It's about creating a culture among students, and hopefully among faculty, too, where we're learning across departments and divisions that are just not even political. But just, this thing happens over at one side of the university. This thing happens over another. And, man, that conversation would be better and more exciting if the same group of people were having a joint conversation. I think, unfortunately, sometimes universities have this compartmentalization, where there's some great conversation about X happening over here. And no one else in university has access to it.

So, I think bringing a group of scholars and students together, where we're going to be constantly in conversation on tricky issues, and we're going to do it with a certain tone — first of all, rekindle face-to-face engagement. I think one of the weird things that's happened over time with Zoom and online learning is, like, we've really lost what is a huge added value of a university, which is people sitting around a table, no computers, no phones, no technology mediating them, where people look at each other and make eye contact, give each other the grace that they need to try out a new idea without feeling that someone's going to yell at them.

Part of this is like a culture of what I think a university ought to be. I've always tried to model this in my own classrooms — I've never except for the March through May 2020, I've never been on Zoom. I don't allow any technology in my classes. I don't ever use PowerPoints or anything like that. I'm an offline person, and the center will be an offline center. That's not to say we'll never do any media. But I think this is crucial, crucial to having these kinds of conversations.

Just to give you a sense, this semester, we're having a weekly workshop that starts in a couple of weeks. And the first thing we're reading together is a reading about why viewpoint diversity initiatives should not exist. And we're discussing it with a colleague at the Fletcher School who's an expert in free expression. And later in the semester, we're reading a critique of liberalism. And one of our political theorists is going to be leading that discussion. And then we're going to be reading radical feminist philosophy. And then we're going to be reading about new religious activity since the internet, and how religions changed because of — and a religion scholar is going to be in that room. And so, I hope this is conveying we're doing an eclectic set of readings and programs from all sides of the university, but we're going to have those conversations together in a classroom. So that's the easy stuff.

The harder stuff is thinking through, where can we improve our curriculum? And where do we see opportunities for scholars at Tufts and beyond Tufts to bring a spirit of viewpoint diversity into their classroom? And that can take a lot of different formats. But every department might have a version of a problem. And the problem is something like, we don't deal well with dissent from the common view in our field. How do we make sure, for the benefits of research and for the benefits of teaching, we are engaging with dissenting voices? Or how do we build a broader constituency for the things we care about? 

So as an example, I've been thinking a lot recently about how we teach about gender and public policy in universities. There's a lot of spaces on campus where there's conversations around gender and public policy that are conversations that most students are not accessing at all. In fact, I think it's reasonable to say that there are essentially two conversations on every college campus happening around gender. 

One is in a classroom around women's studies, gender, et cetera, and that has a particular constituency. And then there is a broad conversation about gender that, frankly, a lot of our young men are having, where they're getting inputs from online sources, where they're talking on WhatsApp groups. And that conversation is so totally separate from the classroom conversation. They're looking at different sources. They're having a very different conversation. And I think one really big benefit of what a university could be doing is bringing these constituencies together and have a conversation around some of the controversial topics in the news around gender in the classroom, with experts, and a broad constituency of students. It's in part maybe about thinking about dissenting views, but it's also about bringing people together in one space to have a compelling conversation and education around some topic.

And that's just one example. We're thinking about public health. Sometimes public health conversations are really narrow, and they could be broadened to understand who are the dissenting voices, and what is the nature of dissent. I could go on for a long time. But basically, thinking about curriculum and what we need to change in our curriculum to expand our constituencies or to deal better with different ideologies or worldviews, there's a lot to do there. And so, we're going to be working a lot in that area.

JILL ANDERSON: It seems like for a lot of folks, especially in higher education, the term viewpoint diversity feels like it's the new hot term to be using. Do you think that there is an understanding of what viewpoint diversity even means or is?

EITAN HERSH: I agree with you, it's hot. And it's also, I think, controversial, in part because its language that the current federal administration is using to describe what needs to be reformed. It comes off of years now of public opinion that suggests that conservatives and Republicans in the United States feel like higher education is very one-sided.

Higher education is one of these fields. It's not the only field, but it's one of these fields where if you look at the dispositions of those who work in higher ed, it tends to be a very one-sided — it's not generally useful to boil everything down to a left/right spectrum. But universities definitely are on the left, increasingly so over time, in terms of the dispositions of staff and faculty. And so, what's the problem? What's the problem? The problem is that, again, if you think that in order to apprehend the truth, you really need to make sure you're getting inputs from different angles, both to refine your own ideas — so you're learning what other people think, too. I always think students sometimes who take my conservatism class, some of them come in this. They're like, I'm a leftist, and I need to know how my enemies think.

A lot of other people are not like that. They're more like, I don't know what I think about any of these issues. And in order to be an informed, smart person, I need to make sure I understand. So, this is the value, that it improves truth-seeking to have a diversity of inputs. I think it's controversial only in so much as it's been the critique of universities from the right that's now kind of in the news every day, as this is one of the things that the Trump administration is purporting to solve.

JILL ANDERSON: I imagine in many universities probably right now are working on initiatives or looking into ways that they can do this type of work on their campus. What does walking the walk actually look like in practice? And how do we even know if we're making progress at a university?

EITAN HERSH: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think there's an inorganic way to do this that will be a total flop. And it's easy for me to paint this picture because it's the same flop that we've seen on a lot of other diversity initiatives that we've seen over the last bunch of years, which is if some, basically, administrative office at a University consults with their attorneys, and their HR representatives, and say, we are now going to host an event on viewpoint diversity, and there's going to be free lunch, and all students and faculty are invited, and — four people are going to show up. Because it's going to be lame. Like many of the trainings, sort of classic HR trainings, it's going to be lame. No interesting things are going to happen. And that'll be that.

I think the organic version of this is, it will work. And you will know it will work because it's going to be very popular. That's the answer. There is an absolute market demand for the kinds of programming that I'm proposing. Then when we have a class, well, we're going to tell students, ‘Hey, we're going to be offline. We're going to look each other in the eyes. We're going to talk about some hard issues. Those issues are going to be from all sides. We're doing that not because we're trying to provoke. We're not doing that because we're trying to win a debate. We're doing that because we want to learn and take each other seriously. And we're going to take you students seriously as adults who can be part of a challenging conversation, even one that hits on your core values.’ And students are going to be like, ‘Oh, yeah, that's exactly what I want. Because I want to be a mature adult who can do that.’

When it happens like that, whether it's in a classroom, or a workshop, or reading group, you get this group of students that I've seen in my university that are just so smart, so eager, and they want something. And so, I think you're going to see what works and not works based on what's the organic thing that comes from a genuine place of learning that is not crafted in some legal HR world. So, you're going to see the genuine and the non-genuine. And I think the genuine is going to thrive. And you'll measure it by butts in the chairs. And I think you'll also measure it by change over time in how students see themselves, they see the culture of their university, they see the brand of a university. Some universities have acquired a brand where different viewpoints are welcome. Some have acquired a brand where they're social justice, one-sided universities. Some have a brand of being, I don't know, home to fraternities. And I think there is going to be, and already is, a demand from families for universities that make their students think and make them open to learning from all sides. And I think, again, that the market will show us when we do that well.

JILL ANDERSON: It sounds like this is something that really needs to be baked in, embedded in all facets of higher education, not just in the classroom, not just like events, but really spread out all throughout the university. What have you learned about how faculty think about viewpoint diversity and how schools can support them in navigating it?

EITAN HERSH: Yeah, so faculty, as you know, there's so many versions of faculty, and there's lots of different versions of this. So, there's what I'll call the science adjacent to politics version, which is folks who are doing sciences, more hard science. But their work is either politically relevant, or it requires a broad constituency of support. And for them, if you frame your research in a way that's only appetizing to 20% of, say, the world around you, that actually threatens your research. Because you might not have a big enough constituency to get money from the government, if that's what you want, or from a foundation.

For some faculty, viewpoint diversity is thinking about how do you do research that is broadly thought of as useful to the world, where you have a constituency. And how do you choose ideas of what to do next that reflects the interests of the public, or of foundations, or of research-granting entities? That's one version, and that's totally unlike other versions. OK?

I think there's a second version, which is where I think our home bases for this center, is in more of the — it could be social sciences, humanities, foreign policy. Anyone who thinks we do politically adjacent work. And for a variety of reasons, we might have trouble introducing difficult conversations to our students. Maybe the students who come to our classes are not always up for it. Maybe they're coming out of high schools, where they haven't really learned yet how to have a hard conversation. Maybe it's because we faculty sometimes are in bubbles ourselves, where we don't read widely. We don't know how other people think about the same problems we think about. And if you are in a bubble, and your students are in a bubble, but you recognize the need to get out of it, then OK, we have a viewpoint diversity problem that we want to solve.

There's also wings of the faculty that essentially don't think we have a problem to be solved, because we've already solved it. We've already solved it. And here, the way that I would put it is like this. I think you have some faculty who would be coded more as lefty political faculty, who think that, basically, the world that we are operating in is a world that is conservative, capitalist, and patriarchal. And these scholars might be saying that, by doing some research that they're doing, which is a little bit, say, ideological or has an activist bent, they are providing the viewpoint diversity that's countering the mainstream world out there. And there's other faculty who think, well, no, no, no, the world that we are operating here in this university is not a conservative, capitalist, patriarchal world. It's kind of a radical leftist world. And we need to provide something that's counterbalancing that. So, you have all these different constituencies within the faculty who have different problems they're trying to solve. And sometimes those problems are diametrically opposed to one another, which is interesting.

JILL ANDERSON: So, I want to shift gears a little bit to talk about students and what we can learn from teaching directly about difference. You've talked a little bit about the course American Conservatism. It's attracted a lot of attention. What have you learned from that experience about how students approach or even avoid engaging across difference?

EITAN HERSH: I've learned so much from teaching this course. It's like the best educational thing I've ever done. Four or five years ago, I had no business teaching a course on American conservatism, but I learned a lot and wanted to learn a lot to teach this course. For one thing, it's made me remember how important it is to a university to actually be focused on classroom learning.

Universities do a lot of stuff. We do research. Sometimes there's events and speakers that are different. That's not the core of what universities do, the speaker series, say. The core of what we do is in a classroom. And in a classroom, students and faculty, they know what they're supposed to do. They know how to behave. They know that we're not there — for the most part — they know that we're not there to persuade or debate. We're there to learn. And we're not there to provoke. And if you create the right classroom setting, from my perspective, it's absolutely an offline setting. And you're featuring readings, which are handpicked for some reason. You think there's some value in the readings, but you don't endorse the readings. But there's some value in discussing readings. And our goal is to understand, what is this reading saying? What is this person saying? What are their assumptions? What are their values? What are they worried about? What are they trying to convince us of? Where might they be going wrong? Where are their assumptions faulty? Where is their logic going through weird leaps? That is a really fun activity of learning, and students know how to do it. They're up for it. That is so different from a provocateur guest speaker where no one knows how to behave. Is that person trying to make a stand, or are they trying to teach us something? That's sort of a weird setting relative to the classroom setting. So, I would say the first thing is that the classroom setting is so important to a university, which sounds sort of obvious. But it's not, I think, obvious to everyone. 

The second thing is that I think that our students are, for the most part, in these bubbles that they want to break out of. They really want to figure out who are these other people, in this case, conservatives, what do they think? What are their values? And sometimes they reach the conclusion that, oh, they're not so different from me. And sometimes they reach the conclusion as, they are different from me. But now I understand why. And I think it's a deeply moving experience for a lot of our students to have either of those thoughts. Like, wow, I really understand a whole set of people. I didn't understand before and where they're coming from.

JILL ANDERSON: Was any of this surprising for you, how they reacted to the class?

EITAN HERSH: Yeah, it is surprising. It's surprising because all of our students — I might have a mental image of my typical student. Who's my median student? They were a volunteer for the Elizabeth Warren campaign, and they're from Westchester, New York or whatever. But the truth is, every one of these students, every one of us, a whole book can be written about each one. And they all are complicated, and they have complicated family dynamics where they see the world in a different way. And when you speak to, depending on the issue, you're always surprised at what resonates.

So, I mean, as an example, a lot more of the class is on family and religion policy than I would have thought would be on this class when I started it. We have a week on capitalism, and regulation, and the welfare state. We have weeks like that. But there's a really strong appetite for thinking about social policy, family, and religion. And I think this really speaks to certain gaps in our students' knowledge base. A lot of students are completely secular in orientation. They don't know many religious people, and it's like opening a whole world to them. A lot of our students are well-to-do. And when we talk about the family breakdown among non-college educated people in America, they gasp. They're like, ‘Holy cow, what's happened to people in America who are not in this elite world, where they can't have a sustained family anymore? 

And who am I, some progressive student who wants to be an ally to the underdog? How have I never thought about this before?’ I think there's a lot that's like that. All the time, the students surprise me. I put some new reading on the syllabus this past year. It was about regulating pornography. And you put something on the syllabus, you don't really know what students are going to think about it. 

This was sort of in the aftermath of — I don't know if you remember this. I think I'm getting the story right. Project 2025 had some kind of comment that they want to ban pornography. And liberal students, and I think progressives in general, were making fun of this. And then you present this idea of regulating online pornography to students. And I was just shocked in the classroom how many of the students were like — I would say, the vast majority of students in this class were like, there's really a serious problem in our culture with access to very hardcore online pornography on your phone. And this was not like a left/right issue at all. This was a sort of 18-to-22-year-olds thinking through what they're exposed to, and what feels right, and feels doesn't right. And I was surprised. I literally had no idea when I put this on the syllabus what students would think of it. And so, you're always surprised by where they've come and gone.

JILL ANDERSON: And what sounds really interesting is sometimes what you uncover is that there is not that divide there.

EITAN HERSH: That's right. Yeah, I mean, oftentimes, it's really funny when students arrive at that. We have a week on affirmative action, both in employment and in education in the conservatism class. And I think every semester, there's been some student who go through the arguments. And this would be like a student on the left who would have thought themselves as supportive affirmative action. And then they read about affirmative action. They read about what it looks like in practice. And they say, ‘Oh, you know what? It doesn't seem great to be judging people based on their skin tone. Maybe we should focus on socioeconomics to make sure that we're valuing people from different backgrounds.’ And then another student will say, ‘Yeah, that's the conservative argument.’ And the first student's like, ‘Oh, whoops.’ It sort of took them a little while to get there, but they actually agree with each other on something that they didn't think they agreed with each other on ahead of time, which is interesting to see that.

JILL ANDERSON: You've noted that a lot of students come to campus, and they haven't maybe had the experience of talking across difference, or they maybe have not been exposed to some of these other ways of thinking or other parts of the country. How much of our ability to engage across difference is shaped earlier in our homes, K through 12 schools? And are we waiting too long if we wait until they get to college to teach these skills?

EITAN HERSH: Oftentimes, the students who come through my world on campus then go back to that Thanksgiving dinner table. And they're the adults. They're the grownups. They're the ones who can respond to a parent, an uncle, or whatever who's just upset, and living in their own media bubble, and thinks the other side's a bunch of villains or morons. And the students who come through our classes who can say, actually, let's talk about what's going on with those other people. Maybe they're not all morons and villains. Here's where they're coming from.

So. look, the cycle has to stop somewhere. But it's certainly not the case that the grownups are modeling excellent civic behavior and getting a diverse media stream. It's not what's happening. So, we need to start where we start, which is with our students. I think high schools, in particular, and middle schools, even, have so much room to grow on this in social studies and English classes.

Oftentimes, I think what we're doing in universities is like detox for the kind of one-sided, very superficial education that students are getting in high schools that are themselves oftentimes bubbles of groupthink, and where you have completely different challenges. Teachers who are afraid of parents, teachers who need to be accountable to principals, school boards, there's so many things going on there. But I do think it might not be priority one or two. But I think it's something actually in higher ed we should be doing, is helping secondary school teachers in particular work through these issues, too. Because not everyone's going to have this education in college. We need to graduate students, even from our high schools, who have a basic sense of how to learn from someone who is on the other side of an issue from them.

JILL ANDERSON: Looking ahead, what do you see as success for this initiative?

EITAN HERSH: I want the University to have that spirit that I think it's supposed to have. And it's a spirit of bombardment with great ideas and new ideas from everywhere, where a student is going to be thinking like, ‘Oh my goodness, here is some traditionalist Christian perspective I've never heard before. And here's this radical feminist thing I've never heard before.’ And their brains are good taking in this information, processing it, thinking through, what do I learn from this? What do I gain from this? Where am I uncomfortable with this? And they're able to have a conversation with their parents, with their peers, with their teachers, where we're constantly chewing on these ideas from all sides. And I think when we do that, it will be a moderating force in the world. Because we'll constantly have top of mind the beauty that comes with diversity. And it will help us be better researchers, teachers, students, and citizens. That's what we're hoping for, and we catch glimpses of it. I think when we have these moments where we have some intense conversation in a classroom, and then a dozen students come back to office hours, and we continue on, and then they go to the dining hall, and they introduce these ideas to new students of their friends, when you see it, you're like, yes. This is what a university is. And it is centered on in-person, face-to-face experience with lots of different types of people learning from lots of different perspectives with experts, the faculty who are experts on all these different things, who take each other seriously and are as interested in learning from each other as they are from themselves and from their students.

JILL ANDERSON: Well, there's so much here, I actually want to sign up for your class.

EITAN HERSH: Come by any time.

JILL ANDERSON: Yeah, we'll see if we can make that happen. Because it sounds really, really fascinating. So, thank you so much.

EITAN HERSH: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

JILL ANDERSON: Eitan Hersh is a professor at Tufts University. He is the director of the Tufts University Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education. I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast, produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.