Disagree With Me

Students had begun confiding in him. Tales of being dumped off social lists, disinvited from dinners, simply for sharing unpopular viewpoints or values in class. “I had students literally in tears in my office,” recalls Stanford law professor Norman Spaulding, JD ’97. Some described the crushing feeling of staying silent, even as discussion of a legal case shook them to their core, for fear of the social blowback. 

“That was the moment when I realized that, as someone who cares deeply about student learning and student engagement—it’s part of the reason I teach—I really wanted to try to create some kind of framework in which the culture of empathetic, intellectually rigorous engagement could be revived,” he says. 

Spaulding, an expert on legal professional ethics, plunged into the sea of academic literature—psychology, philosophy, communication, education—to collect the approaches that would best teach students how to disagree productively. It was all there: active listening skills and conflict mediation. Social contract and political theory, describing our moral and political obligations to society. Evidence-based ways to create inclusive learning environments and engaged learners, to combat cognitive biases and groupthink. The problem wasn’t knowing what to do, says former Law School dean and professor emeritus Paul Brest. It was that it was time to double down. “I think that what has made the issue urgent now is the increasing polarization of our society, where you tend to demonize people who you disagree with,” he says. The more that phenomenon is affecting students, he says, “the greater the need is to take measures to counter it.” 

Norman Spaudling (Photo: Sam McDonald/Stanford Law School)

In 2021, Spaulding and Brest piloted a Law School program they hoped would help. They called it the ePluribus Project, a reference to the U.S. motto E pluribus unum—“out of many, one.” “Students join ePluribus first by inviting somebody with whom they have an important difference but with whom they want to be in conversation,” Spaulding says. They participate in two 75-minute workshops focused on the skills for constructive dialogue, then move into reading groups to discuss controversial topics such as gun control or reproductive rights—even cancel culture itself. “The reading groups become not just a good substantive discussion,” Spaulding says. “They become a way of refining the underlying skills for being good at having a conversation on an important issue and doing it in a constructive way.”

Today, that original version of ePluribus (now called ePluribus SLS) is one of more than a dozen efforts across Stanford united through ePluribus Stanford, a university-wide initiative launched this academic year to bolster civic engagement and constructive dialogue among students and to coordinate the scholars focused on those topics. “What really became clear to me when I became provost in the fall of 2023 was that these issues were more important than ever,” says Provost Jenny Martinez, who gained national prominence in the spring of 2023 for a public memo she penned about campus free speech following a disrupted talk at Stanford Law School, where she was then dean. “The polarization, the inability to engage across strong disagreement, was creating a tougher situation.” A commitment to civic-oriented dialogue wouldn’t be new for Stanford—its first required citizenship course began in 1923—but existing efforts could be united, and new offerings added, in an attempt to reach every student and instructor. 

“We had a real opportunity to make Stanford a leader, and to set the stage for how we could have an environment of robust free speech, and in which everyone felt like they were included in the conversation,” Martinez says. She asked Spaulding and Dan Edelstein, a professor of French and Italian who directs the frosh core requirement Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE), to co-lead ePluribus Stanford.

Some programs under its umbrella—such as COLLEGE—reach a broad swath of the student body; others, like the one-unit course Democracy and Disagreement, are optional. All of them connect back to goals articulated in Stanford’s Founding Grant: “to qualify its students for personal success, and direct usefulness in life” and “to promote the public welfare by exercising an influence in behalf of humanity and civilization.” The opportunities meet students at every stage of their academic journey, beginning before they even step on campus with the online Summer Frosh Civil Dialogues program, and follow them into the outside world—there’s now a version of COLLEGE being offered for alumni. 

The stakes for maintaining a vibrant culture of discourse at universities are high. Without it, “we won’t make the discoveries that we otherwise would,” says Martinez. “We could miss the cure for a type of cancer. We could develop technologies like AI [in ways] that are harmful for society because we’re not able to bring together the right voices to decide how to best move forward. And we could struggle as a democracy.”

The Policy Lab

The rising polarization in broader society became prominent in the student body about a decade ago, says Martinez, then a law professor. She noticed that many students didn’t seem to know how to disagree constructively. “We were seeing reduced student skills in generations that encounter a lot of their political ideas on social media, where you don’t necessarily have the same back-and-forth and ability to exchange ideas that you do when you’re in person,” she recalls.

Colleges across the country reported the same. By 2021, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and RealClearEducation had teamed with College Pulse to conduct the then-largest survey of campus free speech, reaching 37,000 students from 159 universities. More than 80 percent of respondents reported censoring their viewpoints at their colleges at least some of the time. Two-thirds of students thought it was acceptable (if rarely) to shout down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus, and nearly one in four said it was acceptable to use violence to stop a campus speech. Some 61 percent said they’d be somewhat or very uncomfortable publicly disagreeing with a professor about a controversial topic. For their part, faculty members across the country reported increased instances of being sanctioned for their speech. 

The report was a rallying cry for educators. Critical thinking—believed since the days of Aristotle to be a prerequisite of learning—appeared to be eroding. In 2022, Stanford’s Office of the President asked the Law School’s Policy Lab to research and write a report on polarization, academic freedom, and inclusion at Stanford. Spaulding and Brest helmed the effort, working with eight ideologically diverse students in an autumn-quarter practicum to analyze the state of discourse on campus and suggest remedies. 

Paul Brest (Photo: Norbert von der Groeben/Stanford Law School)

Published in February 2023, the 35-page report considered national data as well as the results of Stanford focus groups to better understand the extent of self-censorship inside and outside the classroom. “One of the elements that was really moving and troubling—and revealing—is that the [instinct to self-censor] is felt all across the ideological and identity spectrum of our students,” Spaulding says. “It’s not just conservative students. It’s not just progressive students. It’s not just students in the middle. It’s not just students who come from religious minorities or students who come from other underrepresented groups. All across the spectrum, you see this reluctance to say what you think.”

Students in the focus groups cited not only social repercussions but also discrimination, formal censorship, and inconsistent support of free speech by university leaders as reasons for their reticence. “In the humanities, I feel like I have to pay a lot of attention to what I say [and] hesitate if I want to push back against something a classmate or professor says,” said one participant. “Overall, I exercise a good deal of discernment of when to speak, hold back of sharing opinions because of likelihood of alienation or scorn . . . because of having more traditional views like family is a fundamental unit of society . . . [and] we are bound to one another and God.” Another student described being confused by a conservative perspective a classmate shared. Although she wanted to ask for clarification, she decided not to. “I was very, very careful and maybe too careful with my words because I was concerned students in the class, or even the professor would think, ‘Oh, does she actually think this?’” The report went on to recommend a series of research-based interventions to enhance the quality of classroom discourse: first, skills and practices that students could put to use in group settings; second, pedagogical tools and classroom norms that faculty could employ. 

“A lot of students are in an experimental phase—they are trying out new ways of living, new ways of looking at the world, new perspectives,” says Collin Anthony Chen, ’06, the director of graduate and undergraduate programs at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, who develops and leads initiatives that facilitate student dialogue. He recommends entering a conversation with the frame that you’re just taking an idea for a spin—like trying on a new hat. “We need to have the freedom to try out different ways of engaging with the world.” Students could learn, the Policy Lab report noted, to recognize common cognitive biases or practice techniques such as asking themselves “Unless?” or “What if?” after they’d come to an initial conclusion.

Faculty, meanwhile, could establish norms such as “What happens in the classroom stays in the classroom” (ideas can leave, but attribution should not) and articulate core principles, such as thoughtful disagreement, hypothesis testing, and critical thinking—the connective tissue across all ePluribus Stanford efforts. “Even in the hard sciences, students need to learn how to think about what they learn critically,” says Brest, who has been teaching at Stanford since 1969. “The way science works—the way all fields work—is that people have hypotheses. They’re tested. Sometimes they turn out to be right; sometimes they turn out to be wrong. Progress in any area depends on criticism and then revision based on criticism. 

“Fundamentally, that is the most important thing that Stanford has to offer.” 

Point and Counterpoint

Shortly after the Policy Lab report was published, Debra Satz, a philosophy professor and the dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, convened a small group of faculty over pizza at her campus home to discuss how the university might combat self-censorship and raise the bar for classroom dialogue. Students were arriving at the university affected not only by societal trends such as polarization, she says, but also by reduced civic education—“this philosophy of teaching and exploring, and also substantive knowledge about institutions”—in high schools. What would be the best way, she asked her colleagues, to more openly engage them in productive disagreement that uses evidence, analysis, and argument? The group alighted on the approach of modeling it, and the seed of Democracy and Disagreement—a course in which two guest speakers sit on a stage and showcase respectful differences of opinion about controversial topics—began to germinate. It made its debut in the spring of 2024.

“Disagreement,” Satz told students at the outset of the 2025 course, “is a feature of a democracy. But it’s not always productive if people close their minds to facts. The closing of the mind is especially a problem for a university. It is because of this problem that we decided to teach this course.”

Satz and Brest craft the curriculum, choose the topics, invite the speakers, and serve as moderators for the discussions. It’s not about getting media stars who would draw a crowd but, rather, bringing in serious scholars who have dug deeply into the subject matter and can grapple with its nuances. If they can’t get the right people for a topic, they don’t do it.

‘The closing of the mind is especially a problem for a university. It is because of this problem that we decided to teach this course.’ 

In the first session in January, Daniel Fryer, an assistant professor of law at the University of Michigan, argued in favor of U.S. reparations for African Americans, but he defined reparations in broader terms than some students expected, including, say, Harvard’s decision to replace a school crest that had originally come from a donor family who owned slaves. (“I just thought reparations meant the U.S. government giving money to Black Americans,” one student said afterward.) Fryer also talked extensively about the limitations of reparations. “I don’t think compensation is necessary or sufficient when I think about racial restoration,” he said. Christopher Lewis, JD ’15, PhD ’21, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School, argued that economic redistribution in the United States is sorely needed but should go to those with the greatest need today—which might or might not be people descended from those who were enslaved on this land. “The richest white people have net assets of $100 billion,” Lewis said. “The richest Black people have net assets of around $2 billion to $5 billion each.” To truly redistribute wealth by race, Lewis argued, money would need to pass from the richest white people to the richest Black people. That, he said, shouldn’t be the goal. 

After rebuttals by each speaker and prompts from Satz and Brest, the speakers took questions from the audience. They considered how to balance moral philosophy, and one’s sense of right and wrong, against the importance of the rule of law. (“Jeff Bezos is robbed,” Satz posits at one point. “You could return the money to him or you could redistribute it.”) They weighed how national and international history should factor in. At the start of class, according to a straw poll, 69 percent favored reparations; by the end, that number had dropped to 43 percent.

But the goal, Brest had told the class, wasn’t to change anyone’s mind. “What conclusions you draw is up to you. Hopefully the course will provide food for thought.”

Debra Satz (Photo: Richard Morgenstein/Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences)

Last year, the course tackled topics ranging from whether there should be markets for human organs (Satz, a political philosopher and ethicist, took the view against) to whether social media is addictive (beforehand, 96 percent said yes; afterward, 63 percent) to the thorny topic on everyone’s mind across college campuses: the relationship between Israel and the Palestinian territories. Former Palestinian Authority prime minister Salam Fayyad came to talk with Tel Aviv University public policy professor Alon Tal, a former member of the Israeli parliament and a visiting fellow at Stanford, about the feasibility of a two-state solution. An audience poll showed that 93 percent of attendees favored the approach, though only 55 percent thought it feasible. 

Fayyad reminded people of the hopes of progress stoked through the 1993 Oslo Accord, even as terms reached then were vague on the prospect of Palestinian statehood. Since then, Fayyad said, the gap between the minimal acceptable position on the Palestinian side and the maximum the Israeli side believed it could offer had substantially widened. “Can we ever experience living as free people with a sense of dignity and being included as equals in a country of our own?” he wondered.

Tal, in turn, focused participants not only on the cruelty of Hamas’s actions but also on the idea that a two-state solution is as much an “existential need” for the state of Israel as it is an existential threat. He shared hope that because many Arab people in the Middle East live in countries that have diplomatic relations with Israel, perhaps progress toward peace could be made through regional diplomacy. He also offered thanks for an article Fayyad wrote in Foreign Affairs shortly after October 7, 2023, in which he called for the release of the Israeli hostages in Gaza. “I thought that was an incredibly courageous thing to do,” Tal told him. 

At the conclusion, Satz called the conversation remarkable. “I’ve been sitting up here almost weeping with the hope of serious, very hard conversation on one of the most difficult issues of our time. The way that the disagreement has been handled, and the student questions—” 

She thanked the speakers for modeling what universities are all about.

Trying It Out

Imagine you’re in a zombie apocalypse. That’s one scenario first-year student Karis Chen confronts on a Wednesday morning in COLLEGE 102: Citizenship in the 21st Century, the second in Stanford’s three-part frosh core curriculum. You have shelter and food. An armed stranger who’s gravely injured comes to your door for help. Do you take them in?

Tony Boutelle, PhD ’23, a lecturer in the COLLEGE program with a doctorate in cancer biology, frequently asks the 15–16 students in his sections to divide themselves into two groups, each standing across the room from the other, based on their answers to questions like: 

Should countries punish Holocaust denial? 

Should everyone seeking naturalized citizenship be required to take the civics test in English? 

Should this social post: “New Year’s Resolutions: 1. Cultivate female friendships, 2. Band together to kill all men” be subject to censorship or punishment? 

“It definitely gets the class talking,” Chen says. “Everyone contributes.” If you change your mind, you can cross the room—as many times as needed.

Edelstein, who directs Stanford Introductory Studies (including COLLEGE), also teaches one of the 83 Citizenship sections. One class is largely given over to the practice of active listening. “The single biggest problem in communication,” Edelstein proposes to students, citing a phrase often attributed to the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, “is the illusion that it has taken place.” After talking through the skills involved in active listening, Edelstein asks the frosh to practice with a seemingly low-stakes topic: Should Stanford athletes have separate dining? Eight pairs break off to discuss. Later they report back on their experience. Waiting so long to share one’s own views—that part of the process felt unnatural, one student said. So did restating what they’d heard. Another student, though, expressed appreciation for reflecting back what was said, saying that made it easier to find points of commonality.

“What I see in our students is a real thirst to talk about all these topics that feel taboo to them,” Edelstein says. “If you can create the conditions to make it safe to ask questions, I think there’s a huge sense of relief.”

Dan Edelstein (Photo: Connor Crutcher/Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences)

Dustin Schroeder, an associate professor of geophysics and of electrical engineering who serves as faculty director of COLLEGE 102, crafted a lesson plan for the course that challenges students to decide when societies might reasonably place limits on their own use of technology. First, they read a section of Plato’s Phaedrus in which a king talks with the god who invented writing as he tries to decide whether people should be taught to write. There, students are introduced to the idea that the inventor of a technology might not be the best judge of its benefits, or its limits.

Next, they read a New York Times story about the increasing use of cell phones within the Amish community and its attempts to rein that in. “The students often initially regard the Amish drive as somewhat quaint and their attempt to keep the technology out as doomed to fail,” Schroeder says.

But then they read a Foreign Affairs article about how to ensure that the gene-editing tool CRISPR is used safely. The authors argue that governments don’t understand the technology and that it’s best for scientists to regulate themselves. “Our students are mostly not into CRISPR’ing babies,” Schroeder quips. And they suddenly find themselves drawing on the same shapes of logic as the Amish in choosing to circumscribe their own behavior.

Schroeder has noticed what he calls “some beautiful side effects” to the fact that COLLEGE 102 instructors teach the same readings and topics but with widely different styles, from vastly different disciplines. “You can have a case in which a computer science professor is diagramming the axioms and logics of a politically intense speech, and students are going back to the dorms after that and their friends or classmates read the same things with a religion professor who really taught that differently,” he says. Beyond the classroom, as a member of a NASA mission to the moons of Jupiter, he sees the same beauty in bringing multiple forms of expertise to bear on knotty problems. “These are groups of people making hard decisions based on different sets of values, trying to reason together and participate in a group in which you are governed and govern each other,” Schroeder says. “In the end, how good of a job we do dealing with issues with interference between instruments, what observation we should make, how we should deal with technical setbacks—these are dynamics of technical citizenship.” 

When Edelstein deployed Schroeder’s lesson plan on technology in the classroom, students leaned into the Phaedrus analogy while pondering the use of ChatGPT and other large language models as substitutes for the writing process in modern education. One student wondered about the risks of “falling behind” by not learning to use the latest technology; another questioned how much of our thinking we should “outsource”—already, technology does so much. The group grappled with how to measure human intelligence. They questioned whether machines were capable of generating new ideas. How different was human reasoning from AI’s compilation of knowledge, anyway? 

“What will it mean to be human in the coming decades?” one student wondered. After class, another participant declared: “This is what college should be like!”

A Way of Life

Measuring cultural change is hard, university leaders acknowledge, but essential. The ePluribus Stanford team is working with in-house assessment specialists to create tools to gauge, for example, critical inquiry skills. “At a very broad level, you’d want to see some reduction in the reporting of self-censorship,” Spaulding says. “I don’t think you would ever get to zero. I mean, part of being a thoughtful participant in a community is being mindful of how you express yourself.” 

Another thing Spaulding is watching for is the extent to which students organize opportunities for constructive dialogue on their own terms. That, he says, might be the ultimate indication that the culture is changing. The Stanford Political Union is one such example. The nonpartisan student organization was founded in 1953 and went dormant in the 1970s, but students revived it in 2017 and then again in 2022 with the express goal of “fostering constructive dialogue at Stanford.” Another example is Democracy Day, the four-year-old academic holiday to encourage civic engagement and participation. On Election Day last fall, classes paused while students organized dawn-to-dusk events, from a public service career mixer to “Dine and Dialogue” with faculty.

Embedding the values of critical discourse throughout the community and measuring them is a long-term project. “I don’t expect, like, a Yelp-level review, where we just go six months and then we know where we stand,” Spaulding says. One sign of success might just be that you find yourself leaving a situation feeling unsettled about an element of yourself you really cherished, he says. Aristotle believed traveling through an aporia, a state of doubt provoked by contradiction, was a prerequisite of learning. Experiences like that aren’t so easy to measure.

Satz is proud to report that students in her courses usually don’t know where she stands on a given topic. “But I am very partisan on the value of an open mind and sustained reflection,” Satz says. “There is just so much we don’t know that we think we know. If you look at the history of humanity, it is littered with deep and tragic mistakes that we have made where we thought we were right about things.”

The two-pronged mission of a research university, Martinez says, is the production and dissemination of knowledge. “Both of those really depend on an open and curious mindset. You have to be able to question orthodoxy, to question the conventional, in order to move the boundaries of human knowledge forward.”

Of course, it’s also an important life skill, she says. “It is that ability to learn from mistakes that’s really critical to success across every career path and life that one can imagine.”

Jill Patton, ’03, MA ’04, is the senior editor of Stanford. Email her at  jillpatton@stanford.edu.