Universities are complex organizations. The diversity of ongoing work, especially in liberal arts institutions, stems from the mission of extending and transmitting human knowledge in all its aspects. Therefore, it’s not surprising that the processes that are employed in this work, also, vary greatly across the organization.

Some academics do their work in solitary endeavors. They may have like spirits in their departments or on other campuses, but they are not in active collaboration doing shared work. Instead, they pursue their passion of their minds by themselves. Of course, the products of their work are disseminated and receive critique and commentary from others. But the production of their work is solitary.

Others work in teams. These teams often involve both faculty and staff, sharing goals of pursuing knowledge building or knowledge transmission. In these units, the distinction between faculty and staff often disappears. The joint work requires close ties and share work flow, such that joint dependencies between faculty and staff are constantly evident.

Since universities tend to be decentralized and knowledge is dynamic, new units of work may be desirable. This is a post about those who build such new units.

“Entrepreneurism” is too often associated only with new organizations whose goal is profit. Academic entrepreneurism involves actions by one or more academic staff who recognize a new goal in knowledge creation or transmission. Such work builds new undergraduate majors, new graduate programs, new research centers, or new collaborations among multiple units.

Unfortunately, the standard reward system among faculty does not explicitly recognize such work. In their formation as scholars, faculty must generally complete their dissertation by themselves; they pursue their pre-tenure activities in a manner to demonstrate that they by themselves are building a distinctive research portfolio of new knowledge; the reward system of professional associations honor individual achievement. Everything nurtures a self-oriented person.

Hence, the choice to build a new unit within a university requires unusual attributes. A conceptualization of a new structure must be created. Argument or evidence must be brought to bear that the new structure would advance knowledge or improve the educational enterprise over the existing structures.

Given that financial resources are scarce, critiques from existing unit members are natural. Dealing with financial implications of a new initiative is often a new task for academic staff. What source of revenue can be used to establish the unit? What risks exist that such a source will disappear in future years? Can the unit be self-sustaining financially?

So, it takes a special kind of personal initiative, the ability to see things as they could be, for those who build new units in universities. This is risk-taking behavior because it would be much safer to work within the existing reward system of one’s field.

The most successful new research and educational units appear to be those built by not just one person, but multiple faculty sharing a vision. They are often accompanied by staff who share the vision and work side-by-side to achieve it. While the leaders must successfully articulate the vision to those in authority or those with financial resources, in the early days, they also tend to be hands-on doers of the work. In that sense, they are less selfish, they are focused on the work, not on individual prestige. They derive their internal rewards from seeing the vision emerge.

The value of involving multiple faculty and staff is robustness. A group of diverse minds offers greater chance of success than one alone. Multiple people avoid the real threat that the unit is built around such a unique viewpoint that it cannot endure past the first leader. Small research centers built around a single powerful character rarely survive past the departure of that character. Multiple founders increase the likelihood of leadership succession and evolution over time.

In addition, the most successful new units are open systems. They build a culture of invitation that is attractive to many, both committed new members and those with partial affiliation. The joy of the work is a magnet for staff, students, and faculty. Hence, the leaders of such units are servant leaders, more selfless than most, interested in group achievement not just their individual achievement.

These are rare traits in any work organization, but especially so in academic environments with their emphasis on individual achievement. Without such academic entrepreneurship, however, universities struggle to evolve. Hence, those among us who conceptualize and build sustainable new units are precious colleagues.

José Andres, the restaurateur and social entrepreneur, yesterday gave the 2024 Tanous talk, which was organized around a set of questions posed to him. Most of the questions concerned his leadership of the World Central Kitchen.

The World Central Kitchen provides meals and nurturance in response to humanitarian crises. Sometimes the crisis arises from natural causes (e.g., hurricanes, earthquakes); other times there are the results of human behaviors (e.g., forced migration because of conflicts, destruction of infrastructures in war). The Kitchen is working in Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, Lebanon. He arrived in Gaston Hall fresh from work in Asheville, in the wake of Hurricane Helene.

In addition to being a great humorist, Mr. Andres (who can be referred to as “Dr. Andres” given his Georgetown honorary degree in 2018) was fully evident as a man of the people.

Part of his story was an immigration story, clearly part of his identity. A funny anecdote was an early arrival in New York City, when he observed the night sky and the stars, while seeing the US flag. He concluded that the stars on the flag represented the unlimited capacity of the skies with its stars, the unlimited ambitions of the country. (Only later did he realize that each star represented a different state of the union.)

He told his story as an immigrant to the United States in 1991. He described his early volunteering in helping in food service for needy individuals. It inspired the World Central Kitchen.

One of the attention-grabbing assertions that he forwarded was that the World Central Kitchen was the largest organization in the world. Larger than the US government. Larger than the United Nations. Larger than Walmart or Amazon. As the listeners’ skepticism grew, he then said “Yes, it’s the largest but many of the members of the World Central Kitchen don’t know about their membership. His point was elaborated by noting that the horrors of the situations that they enter almost always are accompanied by a rallying of people around the crisis. Restaurants and chefs are willing to drop everything to help. Transport groups volunteer equipment and staff. Requests for the World Central Kitchen are almost always granted, given the clarity of their mission to feed and care for those harmed by a crisis. In that sense, we are all members of the World Central Kitchen.

While José Andres did not use much of the nomenclature of the Jesuits, he enunciated their values clearly. One of his expressions, repeated several times, is that the measure of our values is what we would do for people we don’t even know. It’s too easy to help those in need in one’s family or neighborhood, but the greatest needs arise in people we’ve never met. Helping them is the true test of whether one is living their values.

He asserted that plans are not useful to his work. He sees that other service organizations become highly articulated structures, with operation manuals that specify the behavior of their staff. In Andres’ experience, those plans, when faced with a crisis and the chaos of disasters, threaten success. Speed and flexibility succeeds when plans are faced with unanticipated realities.

If the Kitchen arrives on scene and witnesses other groups serving a need that it might normally offer, the staff identifies gaps that still exist and tries to fill those gaps. They quickly change what they do. If they arrive as the first responding group, they may have to reset their expectations to the impediments that the situation presents. What the Kitchen does is dictated by circumstances in the locale in need.

Chaos is unpredictable. What is needed can rarely be fully predicted. If one is not nimble, one fails. The focus must be on the people one is helping, both to save them from immediate peril but then to consider how they themselves might build more enduring solutions. So he told stories of teaching cooking skills to those affected by crises, so that they could build job-related capacities for the post-crisis period. For example, the World Central Kitchen has built food producer networks to address chronic food insecurity.

Each story José Andres told illustrated a driving force to reduce suffering. It is difficult to have experienced this event without concluding that this is what “people for others” really means.

The Jesuits have a set of pairings of values that seem on the surface to be in direct tension. Some of these are displayed on light pole banners on the Hilltop Campus – for example, “Contemplation in Action.” The impact of the phrases is that they force a pause, to understand how one might combine such an unusual marriage of goals.

This is a post about another challenging combination — magnanimity and humility.

Universities are pretty good at half of this. In academia, the magnanimity part is second nature. Every feature of academia supports striving for new insights, creating new ideas, inventing new interpretations, discovering new facts. Go big; make a difference. Create your unique contribution. So, the magnanimity side is certainly a robust feature of knowledge production.

On the education side, the mission of universities seeks to form the minds and spirits of students striving to become better. That too drives toward magnanimity. The students are given the challenge of fixing all the things wrong with the current world. What bolder mission could there be than shaping the next leaders of the world?

But, there’s another notion that is forwarded on Jesuit campuses – the “magis.” The intended meaning is a continuous striving in our actions to become closer and closer to God. However, in high-powered academic environments, a misinterpretation that can easily slip into practice is that all “magis” means is to work harder. Strive for higher production levels. Create more work. Spur hyper-activity to become even more prominent in one’s field.

In short, in universities, there is the danger of avoiding the tension between “magnanimity” on one side and “humility” on the other.

Thus, when we turn to the humility side of the pair, there’s a bigger challenge. Much of academia is geared toward critical review of one’s work. A manuscript is reviewed and critiqued by others, often anonymously, yielding unbridled attacks both on the goals of the manuscript and the quality of its arguments. A proposal written for external funding of research is submitted to peer review, often by those who have rival ideas that they are seeking to fund. A seminar talk is followed by oral critiques of one’s peers.

Such external ongoing critical evaluation often produces the need/desire to promote one’s work vigorously, to aggressively establish one’s reputation within the field as a thought leader, and to actively seek the praise of the community. Correspondingly, success in a field brings with it personal rewards – membership in honorific groups, awards from professional organizations. The whole system is geared toward individual accomplishments.

Such is hardly a recipe for breeding humility.

Students we mentor and nurture are under great pressure to promote their “brand,” to build their resume with evidence of personal achievement, to construct networks that will increase their visibility. In short, their worlds entail the same threats to humility that their faculty mentors face.

It is, therefore, deeply refreshing to encounter academic faculty and staff who focus on their work and not their own place in the pecking order. Georgetown is honored to be home of many such scholars. It is they who build a community of truth seekers that achieve the true mission of a Jesuit university. Both magnanimity and humility, while always in tension, co-exist in their lives, to the benefit of all of us.

Georgetown held the first open convening as part of the Georgetown Dialogue Initiative on Monday, September 23rd.

The event was organized around two political figures who are former governors of Tennessee. One, Bill Bredesen, is a Democrat, who worked in the pharmaceutical and health insurance sector, and served as governor from 2003 to 2011. The other, Phil Haslam, a Republican, who served as governor between 2011 and 2019, was the CEO of the Pilot Corporation and then an executive in a high-end retail clothing company.

The event began with the two ex-governors talking about immigration, an important issue facing the nation, on which the two have disagreements. Governor Bredesen emphasized the value of refreshment of a society by new members seeking to build a successful life in a new country. He noted that low fertility rates in the United States have led to an aging population, which has led to lower labor force participation and the need for new working age persons. He referred to the long history of America as a country of immigrants. Governor Haslam, in contrast, emphasized the importance of a nation-state to have borders that are respected. Countries have a right, he argued, to constrain the movement over those borders. Security of the US borders were important.

Of great interest was how the two engaged in the dialogue, noting when they agreed with the other – “I think I agree with you when you said…” but they also said, politely, when they didn’t agree – “I see that issue a little differently than you…”.

Professor Abby Marsh followed their dialogue with some questions. The three talked about the role of humility in dealing with others in a disagreeing conversation. One told the story of his early days entering an election in a very heterogeneous area. He said his advisor told him to visit small towns and rural areas. The advice was proffered because his background was quite different from that of those areas. So, he spent a lot of time visiting with residents of those areas. He learned to listen. He learned to ask others to describe what underlay their beliefs. Why did they hold opinions on a given issue? What were the underlying experiences that led them to that opinion? He learned that there were often real understandable reasons why they held beliefs very different than his. But he had to listen to them. The experience changed his perspective, teaching him the complexity of various issues, and that his original beliefs were too simple.

One governor said something like “I’ve never convinced anyone to change their views by arguing with them.” It was a telling observation of an ex-governor. He was saying that it was important to learn what matters to the other speaker. What do they care about? What are their preferences? Without knowing those, he was asserting, little real communication can occur.

It was quite clear that the two governors waited for the other to finish their conversational turn before that other began. Sometimes, the other then said something that acknowledged that they heard what the other said. There was a clear signal that the other was listening to what was said. There was no overspeaking, interrupting one another. My inference was that that trait served them well in dialogue across differences.

All agreed that the tone of the speakers makes a real difference. Both implied that the showing of respect to the viewpoint of the other was a necessary ingredient in dialogue across differences. It’s part of active listening. Someone mentioned that until you confront your own beliefs with arguments against them, you can’t be sure whether your beliefs have merit.

The two governors host a podcast called “You might be right.” It’s a saying of Howard Baker, a former senator from Tennessee, from 1967 to 1985, especially in describing the need to be open-minded to the possibility of new ways of thinking. The podcast is associated with the Baker school of Public Policy and Public Affairs at the University of Tennessee.

It was a great first event for the Georgetown Dialogues Initiative. The students in the audience were filled with questions and probed how the governors handled other contentious issues. It was a good learning experience for all of us.

I was in several airports over the last few days. The scene is certainly different from last year with widespread lack of masks worn by most travelers. The workers at food outlets, however, are disproportionately masked. People are starting to stand closer to one another, but the crowd outside a gate still seems to display greater spacing than in 2019.

The experience got me to thinking whether we had data relevant to whether societal behaviors among strangers had returned to their pre-COVID state or whether there seems to have been a long lasting change in these behaviors. To simplify, if we compare how people behaved in 2033-2024 to 2019, do we see big shifts?

Earlier posts described some reactions of our faculty to incoming students whose high school years were online. They have observed reluctance of students in interact in class, to engage in discourse about the material, and to profit from the give-and-take that is key to learning. This was one of the stimuli for the Georgetown Dialogues Initiative.

Of course, 16-18 year old’s are still experiencing brain development. Their reaction to the isolation the COVID created may be more dramatic than for fully developed adults.

But, it is fair to note that many working adults also experienced the disruption of working at home – the mixed blessing of no commute to the office, but the isolation of working by oneself, save for zooms.

So a quick scan of recent social data seemed a logical way to see if large scale changes in adult behaviors might be continuing. This post is a haphazard collection of such indicators.

It looks like church attendance, which experienced a large drop, has continued to decline in the past years. Those communities have not yet rebounded.

Outdoor sporting events, on the other hand, are experiencing a surge in attendance, mirroring the experience of professional conferences, both of which were switched to virtual media during COVID. Similar data come from membership-based golf clubs, again an outdoor environment.

There seem to be echoes of the dramatic changes that we saw during COVID — youth spending less time playing sports, hanging out in person, and visiting museums, parks, and zoos, while spending more time hanging out virtually, watching TV and shows, playing video games.

Movie theaters are showing modest gains recently after near-complete shutdowns, but nowhere near the 2019 levels. Such indoor gatherings of strangers remain much rarer in 2024 than in 2019.

Top Golf, an outdoor driving range and eating place, which saw dramatically increased demand during COVID, is now declining in revenue. Customers rent “bays” for hitting the balls. If a group of, say, six friends go to Top Golf, they tend to rent two bays. The largest proportionate drop in sales is for the renting of multiple bays simultaneously – groups of friends or co-workers.

There is a decline in volunteering for nonprofit organizations, food banks, kitchens for meals distributed to the poor, etc.

Since volunteering has been shown to be related to survey participation, I did a quick check on recent participation data. For several decades Americans have been increasingly not participating in surveys. COVID saw sharps declines. Post-COVID the declines continue at a sharper rate than pre-COVID decline.

It difficult to discern a simple set of principles that fit the various data points. It looks like outdoor groupings of people have recovered to prior states. Remote and hybrid work seems to have affected co-worker groupings. Indoor events seem to have only modest recovery. Of course, it will impossible to separate out the effects of COVID from contemporaneous changes in the society (e.g., recession, employment displacement, technological changes). Decades from now we might know better the “what’s” and “why’s” of long-lasting changes in society and those that were short-lived blips in human history.

The structure of human knowledge is constantly evolving. New insights often emerge from importing findings or methods from one field into another, often to the surprise of many working in each of the fields.

Naturally, as new combinations of knowledge arise, educational programs that blend the fields together also emerge. Georgetown faculty have been on the forefront of such developments. For example, the last four undergraduate majors created at Georgetown are shared across multiple schools, not “owned” by a single school.

The very first of these majors was a new degree, part of the Izmirlian Program in Business and Global Affairs, the Bachelor of Science in Business and Global Affairs. This is a major jointly administered by the McDonough School of Business and the Walsh School of Foreign Service.

The program was founded on the observation that issues facing businesses have changed. Given the evolution of transportation networks and markets, more and more businesses have global connections, either to acquire materials for their processes or as markets for their services and products.

Hence, leaders of global firms need understanding of geopolitical influences on economic activities. They must understand how global supply chains can be affected by regulations, culture, and political influences. Of course, to serve these needs, Georgetown was able to take advantage of faculty strength in the global affairs at the Walsh School of Foreign Service, on one hand, and the McDonough School of Business, on the other.

The curriculum was designed from scratch, with faculty from both schools involved. As a result, many first-year students are quite challenged by the interdisciplinary nature of the gateway course. With different disciplinary perspectives/approaches in the same course and classroom, some first-year students will come to office hours and ask “what specific things do I need to learn to do well in this course?” Brad Jensen, the lead faculty on the program, reports he replies “This is not high school. We are trying to teach you how to think, not what the facts are or what to think. This requires applying the appropriate conceptual frameworks to specific situations. That is what we are hoping you will learn.”

So, in each year of the program, students enjoy the benefits of experience-based courses. For example, recently sophomores went to the Dominican Republic for socioeconomic and cultural immersion, focusing on how local communities and stakeholders are affected by national and international business and policy. Juniors recently participated in a project-based multi-location experience designed to explore the distribution of business activity through the lens of an industry’s value chain. Students partnered with a medical device manufacturer and traveled along the value chain of the medical device industry, visiting their operational headquarters in the US, manufacturing in Mexico as well as R&D units in Ireland. Seniors produced a capstone project where students worked with and traveled to foreign government ministries to help explore financial and climate-change related issues.

The program has attracted unusually strong students. The first graduating cohort include the MSB class valedictorian; the second, the SFS graduate with the highest GPA in the class. Nearly half of this year’s class earned Latin Honors. The graduates are being hired by leading consulting firms, global technology firms, government, legal firms, think tanks, and nonprofit organizations.

This is only one of the new Georgetown programs that faculty have led, blending together multiple domains of knowledge for new approaches to human understanding and endeavors. It employs innovative experience-based tools that cement learning by applying theoretical concepts in on-the-ground situations. Georgetown faculty and staff that design and conduct these programs deserve our admiration.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, work locations changed for many workers in administrative roles in all sectors of society.

We are several years past the worst of the pandemic, but many corporate leaders are still searching for a balance between on-site work and remote work. Hardly a week goes by without a mention of a company’s CEO changing their mind about the value of bringing all workers back to the office. The Federal government, too, seems not to have reached an equilibrium on this issue.

Of course, there are sectors of the economy with staffs that have been scattered throughout the country for decades. Many consulting businesses have been operating with such a model routinely, while there also exist large offices of centralized staff.

But post-COVID, there is more commentary about inequities that arise when some of the staff are present and some of the staff are remote. There are observations about the advantages that seem to accrue to those staff who choose to be in the office more. They can more easily interact with supervisors in spur-of-the-moment conversations. They are in the room with the meeting leader, while remote staff are on zoom. Some note that promotions seem to go to those workers more often. A challenge to long term cohesion of the work organization results.

Correspondingly, remote staff suffer blurred lines between work and social life. In some sense, they are “always at work.” While the advantage to this is running small errands for the household when needed, the disadvantage is the lack of pressure to focus on work in a restricted set of hours or days. Work is spread over more hours than would be true in the office.

One can easily see how two cultures can develop in such work organizations. Cohesion is threatened; we-they breeches can arise.

At universities, undergraduates on residential campuses are fully present, as they were pre-pandemic, interacting with one another in residence halls and classrooms. In contrast, commuter students and graduate students often come to campus only for the classes and some study groups.

The faculty whose research uses universities laboratories are also onsite for their research and oversight of lab technicians supporting the work. Those whose research are based in university libraries remain on site.

For some decades, however, many faculty have sited all their research materials in their homes. The ubiquity of technology at home enhances the quiet scholarly time there. In contrast, older faculty can remember a pre-email time, and some remember more full-day presence of their colleagues. (At Georgetown, there are memories of a faculty lounge where during-the-day card games were held.)
Compared to faculty, the academic staff, however, are largely still present. Entering a typical department in a school one sees a reception area with support staff present, but few faculty office doors open.

This gulf in universities may pose a similar challenge of multiple cultures that other US work organizations are facing. Those present may tend to feel isolated from those remote. The faculty and staff who are present everyday experience a different work life than those who come only to deliver classes, attend monthly unit meetings, or meet with students. They pass one another in hallways; they look at the pictures of new children or grandchildren. They bump into one another in the unit kitchen. These experiences breed the multi-dimensional connections common to work mates.

The mix of the remote and the onsite deserves attention of those who care about the culture of a university community. It may require some new efforts to keep the social cohesion of the work unit. This is a puzzle facing all universities now, and we should discuss how to recover social cohesion in the new mix of onsite and remote.

There were scores, if not hundreds, of welcoming events over the past few days at Georgetown. Academic leaders welcomed new faculty, undergrads, and graduate students to their new homes. Staff and administrators welcomed families accompanying their students into the larger Georgetown community.

Each event had separate messages, relevant to the audience. Saturday’s new student convocation was filled with ritual, with first-year students, before they even had attended a single class session, donning their graduation robes, reciting the honor pledge and being introduced school-by-school as the class of 2028. Transfer students were equally welcomed. The convocation this year enjoyed the best weather I can remember. The weather added to predictable joy of the event. Even the tears shed by families were mixed with laughter and pride.

Later, the new graduate student induction took place in Gaston Hall and, reflecting our growth in graduate programs, the hall was filled. Remarks focused on advice to interact with other students outside of class, form study groups, connect as student members to the professional associations connected with the program, and begin to read the journals of the field, to build the muscle of keeping up with the field.

The new faculty orientation was a two-day affair. In addition to the necessary information about payroll and benefits, there was much content about their roles as instructors and researchers/scholars. So, school deans and vice provosts describe the environment that we’re seeking to build to support faculty careers. Faculty leaders described the shared governance within Georgetown. Jesuit leadership described how the lived values of Georgetown animate from a tradition that is centuries old.

On Saturday, the deans of each school welcomed parents and students who enrolled in their programs.

Throughout the sessions, one of the themes, often repeated multiple times in the same ceremony, was dialogue across differences. Many speakers noted that we live in a fractured world, with polarized groups avoiding contact with each other. The oldest cleavages in human populations are re-emerging, conflicts based on religion, race, ethnicity, immigrant status, wealth, language, and culture. The polarization in the United States is evident to us but similar division exist in much of the world. Many speakers talked of the need for our new students to reach out and meet those quite different from themselves. They acknowledged that this might take some courage and trust that such an approach would not lead to a social media canceling.

Another theme was the spiritual side of beginning a new stage of higher education. Some speakers talked about Georgetown’s effort to build community with strong diversity attributes, as an aspiration motivated by the Jesuit values underlying the university. Others noted the social support that classmates can offer one another, uplifting spirts when tough times are encountered. Much talk focused on how faculty were devoted to the whole student, caring not just about their intellectual development but their formation as a caring, empathetic person for others.

Of course, the most complete evoking the spiritual was the Mass of the Holy Spirit, a traditional start of the academic year at all Jesuit schools. This was held in Gaston Hall. The large auditorium was packed with new and returning students. The mass was concelebrated with many of the resident Jesuits on campus. It symbolizes a collective invocation of the Holy Spirit to inspire wisdom, courage, and compassion. It reflects the Jesuit commitment to integrating faith and education, emphasizing the importance of spiritual growth alongside intellectual development. The ceremony seeks to foster a sense of unity and purpose among participants, reinforcing the Jesuit values of service, justice, and the pursuit of truth.

All in all, we’ve started the year, filled with guidance along many dimensions – from how to study and learn, to how to teach, to how to support one another, to how to gain divine inspiration.

Let the year begin!

Universities are institutions that experience an annual lifecycle. Over the next few days, we are seeing the yearly rebirth.

The quiet, relatively empty campus of summer runs on a different daily schedule than that beginning in early fall. Of course, many faculty and staff continue their work, especially as the fall approaches. There are summer courses ongoing. There are high school programs and sports programs. But it’s quiet.

Very, very soon, the busyness jumps up dramatically. But, there have been many weeks of preparation. The grounds crew and operations staff have been working, power washing walkways and walls, sprucing up the plantings, painting areas that needed work. Like every vibrant university I know, there’s also construction on campus. All of these are building a better institution – a new residence hall on the site of Henle Village, and a large updating of heating and cooling conduits underground. That will complicate movement a bit, but it’s another sign of renewal.

This week at Georgetown is a long series of welcoming events for new members of the community. New faculty attend orientation sessions, learning about the research and teaching support services. New graduate students arrive and meet the program faculty who will become so important to their careers.

With each passing day, there is a growing current of parents and undergraduate students, who are moving into residence halls. Humans carrying heavy objects. Of course, the big events start tomorrow and through the weekend. There are scores and scores of existing students who come early to guide new students through the move-in process and assist with New Student Orientation (NSO), a multi-day affair, attempting to inform first-year and transfer students how things work at Georgetown. A big message, delivered by almost every speaker, is care for the whole person, dialogue across differences, people for others, and other Jesuit values that animate Georgetown.

One of the highlights is the scene of NSO students under an arch of blue and grey balloons, shouting welcomes loudly to new students and their parents as they drive in with their cars completely stuff with belongings.

On Saturday, the more formal new undergraduate student convocation, with intentional pomp and circumstance occurs. New students don their graduation robes (to the surprise of many) and recite the academic honor pledge, a symbolic note to their entrance into a scholarly community. Families, some teary eyed, all bursting with pride, witness the event.

Faculty return, busily finishing last minute preparations for their classes, meeting with other colleagues when necessary. Of course, many staff, especially those whose research uses campus facilities, have been toiling away all summer. For staff who have worked all summer, these days too are a renewal of energy in the unit, but also the harbinger of much more work. The processes of the academy are being fully engaged anew.

It’s hard to beat this feeling of a new beginning, a sense of renewal, another chance to get better, to try new ideas.

Of course, the most welcomed change in the atmosphere are the young people who transmit their energy, hopes, humor, and camaraderie to the formerly quiet places. Their presence reminds us why we do this work.

Please forgive the persistence of posts on civil discourse across differences, but we increasingly see threats to such interchange as touching the core operations of a university. The past posts here and here informed about the Georgetown Dialogue Initiative. This post describes services to faculty that the Center for New Designs and Learning (CNDLS) is offering right now.

The Georgetown Dialogue Initiative is organized about different activities. The first is a set of classes that are designed to involve two instructors who will demonstrate the grappling with different theoretical or practice perspectives on the course content. This will allow students to two adults listen to opposing ideas, grapple with them, point out how they are different, and try to understand the underlying assumptions of the differences.

The second is a set of larger events with two speakers in dialogue about a topic on which they disagree. The first of these will occur on September 23 in Copley, with a Republican and a Democrat ex-governor in dialogue.

The third part of the Dialogue Initiative is work to assist all faculty in transmitting to students the capacity to engage in conversations confronting different viewpoints. The tools CNDLS has built could be adopted without major intervention in the content of a class but may make important differences in the outcome for students.

A first introduction might be a quick visit to a website that is a valuable portal into a whole set of tools — Inquiry and Dialogue Toolkit. An even quicker look can be obtained by reviewing a quick summary.
The toolkit has a variety of suggestions about how an instructor can build an environment inside a classroom to engage in conversations that present alternative and conflicting perspectives on an issue. One goal is to remove the fear of students of being canceled by their classmates because of views they forward. Removing the fear is assisted by acquiring conversational skills.

The essential requirement in learning environments is that the focus is on ideas. To absorb alternative ideas requires curiosity that leads to active listening to the ideas. Thus, it is key to seek a separation of ideas, on one hand, from the persons forwarding the ideas, on the other. In short, ad hominem statements conflate ideas and people and destroy real communication of ideas.

There are many recommendations for trust-building features of the classroom. Instructors are encouraged to use Chatham House Rule, to limit discussion outside of class to the ideas presented by not the identifying the person who offered the idea. Another clever suggestion is to write down the ideas on the classroom board or display, without identifying the person who forwarded the idea.

There are other suggestions that may be difficult for faculty to implement but appear to have great value in setting the right environment. Faculty can admit that they themselves make mistakes in speaking and need to clarify what they meant in a later conversational turn. Humans misspeak. Hence, listeners need to give the other a chance to elaborate and correct miscommunications.

Toward that end, there is the guidance of urging students to inquire about the reasons underlying another’s position on a topic. Knowing why someone believes something often helps resolving what on the surface appear to be irreconcilable differences.

Some of the toolkit offers suggestions that may help an instructor ease students into discussions inherently conflictual. One idea is to start with a set of simple exercises in which differences of opinion are likely to occur. I love the following ideas:

• “Ask [the] group “What makes a good pet?”; when the conversation quickly devolves into a “cats vs. dogs” debate, point this dynamic out to students.”

• “Dedicate a portion of a class session to a “fishbowl” discussion centered on a low-stakes topic, like identifying the best kind of candy. Before starting the discussion, have the “fish”, i.e., the students who will be in the center of the conversation circle and speaking, step out of the room briefly to ponder their ideas. [When they return] Ask the students still in the classroom (the non-fish) to pay attention to the conversation dynamics, not just to the content of what is said.”

The unifying goal of these exercises is to identify conversational features that enhance effective communication of alternative perspectives without breakdown in the interaction.

In addition to these tools, available to all, CNDLS will host a series of workshops open to all faculty, including an MCEF-CNDLS Teaching Forum on Productive Tensions. It will also offer workshops on Teaching Around the Election and other topics as events unfold. Stay tuned for these.

In short, Georgetown faculty have a great new web resource to explore new ways of encouraging open discourse of alternative ideas, building the capacities of students to learn how to navigate discourse among differences. CNDLS deserves our thanks.