In an age of political polarization and civil unrest, many have lost faith in universities as promoters of positive engagement in the public square. With only 36 percent of Americans confident in universities, public trust in higher education has fallen to historic lows. As protests rage, chancellors defend free speech while grasping in vain for some unified vision of virtue in the midst of moral fragmentation. Ever learning, the risk-averse undergraduate student either lifts an index finger to sense the directional winds of campus opinion before committing her position, or through prudence, she stifles her dissenting belief mindful of the risks to her future professional prospects. No wonder many believe the art of disagreement is dying on college campuses.
Undergraduate students hold divergent perspectives, yet expressive disagreement, a historic hallmark of campus life, is increasingly scarce. Who can blame a student for being conflict-averse? Disagreement is stifled due to self-censorship as students misidentify conflict avoidance with civility. And being uncertain of others’ core personal identities, the student enters a minefield once they express an opinion or conviction on just about any issue of weight. So rather than risk a triggered reaction, the risk-avoiding student only dares to voice his convictions in a siloed small community which all too quickly turns into an unproductive echo chamber.
But this is not my experience in teaching in a Christian liberal arts college. Courageous conversations are happening amongst undergraduate students who expressively disagree in seminar courses, public lectures, residential dorm rooms, and across the public spaces of campus. When a new acquaintance learns I work as a professor of politics, I am often met with a sympathetic hushed tone and asked how difficult it must be to teach in such times with flagrant and fragile youths. Joyfully, I respond with anecdotes of students confidently disagreeing with civility and the youthful zeal whereby the same students actively seek to make their minds malleable and open to reconsider.
One example comes to mind. A Political Science major, just weeks from graduating, timidly presented her final policy proposal to limit gender-affirming healthcare access for minors in a senior capstone course. After the class concluded and students were gathering their belongings, a fellow classmate directly approached the presenter. Now it was clear to me after leading the seminar throughout the semester that these two particular students were ideologically quite divergent, and, admittedly, I was wary of what would happen next. But what I overheard washed away any lingering mistrust I harbored as the classmate simply said, “I really appreciate what you presented. I did not know some of the information you shared and have never heard someone from this side talk about the issue with care.”
Civil disagreement is powerfully unfettered through the paradoxical freedom found in a religious university. The Christian university is defined by statements of faith, which, by affirming particular beliefs, explicitly mark the boundaries of acceptable disagreement within the campus. At first blush, one may easily believe such boundaries would stifle free inquiry and civil discourse. And a well-articulated statement of faith does indeed pose constraints on the limits of disagreement, but the beauty is now the boundaries of reasonable disagreement are known and clearly communicated.
All universities are morally forming the student. Indeed, a primary function of education is the formation of students toward some moral outcome – we may call it civics or value-based education – but universities are instructing their students toward a moral outlook. Universities are fraught with tensions over what we want our students to value in their individual and societal objectives. After the university was liberated from traditional moral structures, campuses across the United States lacked a unified framework to set the boundaries on core beliefs and championed free inquiry and expression.
But there are always limits on what expression is reasonably tolerated at the university. The problem then emerges when the explicit value of free expression conflicts with a university’s implicit and ambiguous boundaries of reasonable expression and inquiry. The university that makes explicit its limits of disagreement, therefore, is advantaged to foster civil discourse within its constraints.
The religious university has the potential to foster trust amongst its student body to encourage courageous conversations in an era of risk aversion and polarization. In asking faculty and students to affirm a statement of faith trust is implicitly present. We can leverage this trust by making explicit with our students the wondrous work it can do to foster expressions of civil disagreement in meaningful ways. Shared Christian faith may be summoned to broker peaceful engagement between two seemingly irreconcilable viewpoints.
I recall one student asking to meet with me during her freshman year and being exasperated by some opinions shared by her professor in a required onboarding course for students in their first semester. While sitting together under the shade of an oak tree, she refuted with deep conviction several positions expressed in the classroom. After listening for a time, I smiled and asked if she thought the professor, regardless of the provocations, was sincere in his signing of our statement of faith. She looked at me for a moment, and with a sigh, said yes. This simple question unlocked a trust that enabled her to return to the classroom with charitable criticism. She still did not agree with her professor, but because she trusted the professor held his hand firmly to the statement of faith, she could more easily disagree with civility and an eye for nuance.
A shared identity in the Christian faith enables students (and faculty) to move more nimbly through contentious issues and controversies. In an age of identity politics, students often self-censor because they fear the expression of an opinion may threaten a classmate’s particular experience and their core personhood. While diversity should abound in the Christian university, the presence of a common Christian identity encourages a student to trust that his classmates will respond with civility when he shares an opinion. A student misstep, and these do occur in the seminar environment, may be mitigated through leveraging the trust particular to a community with common beliefs. A first step to fostering trust is to simply trust our students. Instructors may call attention to the duty of Christians to love our enemies and treat critical ideas with charity. Christian professors can model mutual vulnerability which results from the relational interdependency created in a healthy seminar.
Students do not want to become campus castaways and tend toward self-preservation through self-censorship. The often-hidden work of the belief in the Imago Dei liberates the college classroom toward civil discourse. I make a concerted effort to make explicit the wondrous core tenet that humankind is created in God’s image. While students may find an opinion to be vile and worthy of contempt, they must not treat the person with contempt. In fact, students have sought forgiveness from one another for turning their arguments into weapons designed to harm a classmate with whom they disagreed – all while not affirming the opinion that was the cause of the disagreement. May we foster and maintain the trust needed to facilitate civil disagreement in Christian universities.
