On a disturbingly warm Friday in late November of last year, a group of student government leaders from the City University of New York (CUNY) gathered in a midtown conference room. The school year was already off to a fractious start, with crackdowns on pro-Palestinian demonstrations and emotions running high around Donald Trump’s reelection. But it was precisely such situations that these students were there to learn to manage, according to a specific method, in a workshop called “Foundations in Facilitating Dialogue for Student Leaders: A Training with the Constructive Dialogue Institute.”
The students, myself included, had been invited to the training by CUNY’s administration, in tandem with an onslaught of school-wide emails about the necessity of civil dialogue in the 2024-2025 academic year. As the workshop facilitator led us through exercises in mediation and tips on establishing trust and navigating conflict, questions emerged from the group. One person asked about violence against students from law enforcement or other aggressors. Another asked about engaging administrators in dialogue and how to address the top-down handling of campus conflicts. Someone else raised their hand to inquire about the place of emotional trauma and pain in the space of dialogue, especially for students overwhelmed by the scale of suffering in the genocide in Gaza. To this last question, the facilitator offered a candid, if feeble, response: “Dialogue is a post-conflict tool.” It couldn’t actually offer us much help in the heat of the moment.
The Constructive Dialogue Institute (CDI) was founded in 2017 by Jonathan Haidt — co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, which argues against “safetyism” on college campuses (things like trigger warnings and uninviting conservative speakers) — and Caroline Mehl, who comes from the business world. It joined a legion of nonprofits oriented toward uniting Americans via civil dialogue. A veritable industry has emerged to promote a set of techniques meant to help people with different values, beliefs, and perspectives interact with one another, laying the groundwork for future understanding and collaboration. Universities have been the focus of their efforts — the idea is to prepare the next generation of leaders across sectors — and big foundations and donors are spending millions each year to bring these programs to campuses across the country. Business is booming, our instructor told a group of us, especially since the student movement for Gaza broke out last spring.
The institutionalized notion of civil dialogue emerged from American diplomacy techniques and was popularized as the “Sustained Dialogue” model by Harold H. Saunders, who held positions as assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research and assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs between 1975 and 1981. Citing the importance of sustained dialogue in establishing the Camp David Accords and other sensitive diplomatic negotiations, Saunders developed his experiences with peace processes into a model for interpersonal dialogue that could apply to any conflict, no matter the scale. As Saunders explains in A Public Peace Process: Sustained Dialogue to Transform Racial and Ethnic Conflicts (1999), his formal introduction of the sustained dialogue method, “We can no longer think only of what states do to each other. We now see relationships among states and groups as a political process of continuous interaction between whole bodies politic. That includes citizens outside government as well as in government.”
At the same time that Saunders was writing his book, the Clinton administration was injecting the ideal of civil dialogue into domestic politics. In an introduction to the 1998 “One America Dialogue Guide,” Bill Clinton predicted that “our country’s ethnic and racial diversity will continue to expand dramatically” and proposed a vision for an “honest dialogue” to unite Americans across differences. The following year, students at Princeton University introduced the Sustained Dialogue model to the campus setting in a 1999 campaign to “improve race relations,” as a pamphlet from the group Saunders founded puts it. Today, the Sustained Dialogue Institute counts 125 institutions as part of its campus network.
Dozens of colleges and universities around the country boast some sort of civil discourse initiative, from endowed programs like Middlebury College’s Kathryn Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation to more general resources like the University of Wisconsin’s Civil Dialogue Project. Many third-party nonprofits like CDI have found a market for their workshops at schools that don’t have permanent programs.
CDI co-founder Mehl has said that her group’s goal is to “address polarization by translating behavioral science research into accessible evidence-based educational tools.” The CEO of BridgeUSA, a nonprofit that describes itself as “a multipartisan student movement that champions…responsible discourse,” created the BridgeUSA Temperament Scale to measure, on X and Y axes, “how willing someone is to engage across lines of difference.” On the website for Braver Angels, a nonprofit dedicated to political depolarization, a cluster of red and blue animations spin out statistics like “After participating in our programs, 68% of participants had a positive view of the other side.” In 2023, CDI published a study in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology, concluding that 775 college students who participated in their asynchronous educational program experienced “small to medium-sized increases in intellectual humility” as a result of the training. All of these statistics fuel the market for dialogue workshops, like CDI’s on-campus trainings (available for $10,000-$15,000) and orientation modules (priced between $40,000 and $60,000 for large universities).
Universities are eating it up. As contributors to a 2011 volume on the history of the Sustained Dialogue Institute noted, “From our experience, we found that the idea of sustained dialogue largely sold itself to administrators willing to provide resources.” The authors added, “You should put some thought in the beginning …into where your start up investments will come from.” Since that book was published, investments in civil dialogue have ballooned — and across political lines. Most of the money seems to come from large foundations.
Donors are spending millions each year to bring dialogue programs to campuses across the country.
In 2022, the John Templeton Foundation alone granted $2.7 million to CDI; $1.3 million to College Debates and Discourse (an alliance between BridgeUSA and Braver Angels); and $420,000 to PEN America’s “Free Speech for the Rising Generation” program. That same year, PEN America also received a $700,000 grant from the Lumina Foundation to host a series of workshops on “Divisive Concepts in Education” and a $450,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to provide students, faculty, and higher education administrators with workshops on campus free speech. The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations handed over $275,296 to Dickinson College for their “Dialogues Across Differences” initiative, $319,200 to Duke University for their “Teaching Civil Discourse in the Classroom” program, and still had $152,586 left to grant to CDI. In 2023, the Charles Koch Foundation granted $75,000 to the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, a nonprofit “on a mission to help young people collaborate across differences” by “engaging in difficult conversations.”
Each of these organizations has also supported College Presidents for Civic Preparedness, a group of nearly 100 college presidents convened by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars to “coordinate their efforts to champion civil discourse across curriculum and campus life.” In their inaugural progress report, College Presidents for Civic Preparedness states that out of 77 participating institutions, 88 percent offered courses or seminars that centered on civil discourse during the 2023-2024 academic year.
That, of course, was the year that student voices rose up in opposition to their schools’ investments in companies that profit from the genocide in Gaza. In response, university leaders have advocated for dialogue workshops and other conflict management initiatives that they promise would allow students to articulate their demands without, presumably, resorting to the encampments, building occupations, throwing of paint on famous statues, and walkouts that have attracted so much media and political attention.
“Our disagreements are most effectively addressed through candid, constructive dialogue, building not on disruption, but on facts and reason,” said Alan M. Garber, interim president of Harvard University, on May 6 of last year. Appearing before Congress that April, Columbia University president Minouche Shafik shared that she’d created “listening forums” in which students could express their views. These forums are part of a university-wide “Dialogue Across Difference” initiative, which aims to foster “dialogue and civil debate, especially among those with differing opinions and viewpoints, with mutual respect”; it also envisions “professional development opportunities for faculty hoping to facilitate difficult conversations in our community.” On the other side of the country, California governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation mandating that public universities in the state “undertake educational activities to counter discriminatory incidents on campus.”
All of this ignores the immense power university administrations wield over their student bodies. Students have been suspended and expelled and have had their scholarships revoked and their visas canceled. As a Harvard Crimson editorial put it, “Open conversations don’t happen under threat of sanction.”
Most concerningly, students’ free expression rights are kept in check by force: Across the country, university leaders have called in police to quell student protests. By the end of the spring 2024 semester, nearly 3,000 people had been arrested for their participation in on-campus demonstrations. Of those 77 schools participating in College Presidents for Civic Preparedness, I found that at least 16 of them — over 20 percent — pressed charges, threatened academic discipline, or called security and law enforcement officers against protesters last year. After the NYPD was deployed to Columbia’s student encampment in April 2024, the Washington Post reported that a group of billionaires had previously attended a private Zoom meeting with Mayor Eric Adams, in which they assured him that they could pressure Columbia’s leadership into permitting him to call law enforcement to campus. One of these billionaires was Daniel Loeb, whose philanthropic endeavor, the Margaret and Daniel Loeb Foundation, has donated at least $75,000 to PEN America.
During a short break in our Constructive Dialogue workshop, the facilitator sat down to dine on catered sandwiches with me and the other students at my table. She confided to us that it was hard to show up for trainings at schools that had cracked down on student activism just months earlier.
Schools like CUNY. Last April, the night the NYPD descended on Columbia, it sent the same team of militarized officers to an encampment in Harlem at City College of New York. The NYPD and the CUNY Campus Police kettled protesters and used a taser, pepper spray, and batons; students reported broken bones, chemical burns, and concussions. The NYPD arrested 173 people (more than at Columbia — one of many differences noted in the police treatment of students at the wealthier, whiter, private university). Twenty-eight received felony charges, some of which were burglary charges. As of this writing, eight of the students who refused plea deals are awaiting a verdict in their trial.
Leila Markosian lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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