More than 200,000 students nationwide have taken “Perspectives,” an online course produced by the Constructive Dialogue Institute (CDI), which was co-founded in 2017 by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and Caroline Mehl. Universities including Harvard, Yale, and New York University have made the course a requirement for incoming students. Other organizations, such as BridgeUSA, also formed in 2017 — a year that saw violent protests at the University of California, Berkeley, against a speech by right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, events that fueled conservative narratives about campus “cancel culture.”
The boom in dialogue programming accelerated sharply after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack and the historic student movement protesting Israel’s war on Gaza, according to The Guardian. University presidents facing congressional scrutiny over alleged antisemitism, discrimination lawsuits, and threats of federal funding cuts turned to dialogue initiatives as a potential solution.
“Suddenly we literally have hundreds of [university] presidents who are coming to us saying we actually need to make this a priority,” Rajiv Vinnakota, director of the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, told The Guardian. His group launched a consortium of university presidents and a faculty institute in August 2023 with about a dozen universities; it now works with 135 institutions and in April announced a $10 million investment from a foundation whose founder, David Einhorn, has family ties to the far-right group Turning Point USA.
The Uncivil consortium, a group of scholars and researchers that includes Dartmouth College historian Bethany Moreton, analyzed the funding landscape behind campus dialogue initiatives. They found that 20 of the 23 foundations most active in the pluralism and depolarization space also fund conservative policy networks or pro-Israel organizations. Major donors to civility initiatives, the researchers said, also contributed to right-wing groups including the Manhattan Institute, the Federalist Society, and the Heritage Foundation, as well as pro-Israel entities such as the Anti-Defamation League, itrek, and the Central Fund of Israel. The Koch brothers’ foundations, which for years have sponsored efforts to push campuses to the right, have also been pivotal to the industry’s growth.
The Trump administration has also leaned into the trend, redirecting $60 million in federal funds that in the past aimed in part to promote college attendance by underserved populations toward initiatives promoting “civil discourse.” In a call for grant proposals, the Education Department explicitly linked the effort to student activism and the killing of far-right commentator Charlie Kirk last year, writing: “Civil discourse at America’s colleges and universities has been undermined by campus takeovers, violent riots, and even a recent high-profile political assassination.”
Practitioners of civility initiatives argue that the efforts are effective and respond to a real breakdown in social relations. Nicholas Longo, a facilitator at a CDI workshop for educators, reflected on a shift in emphasis from encouraging young people to “raise their voices” in the 1990s to now getting them to “listen” — “eloquently” and “with curiosity.” He said that the fact conservative donors backed dialogue work shows there is “bipartisan agreement” on the need for it.
“I actually think every social movement starts with people sitting in a circle talking to each other, and especially talking to people that they disagree with,” Longo said. “It actually is and can be radical.”
But some students and faculty on the receiving end of mandatory dialogue workshops have expressed skepticism. At the City University of New York, graduate student Leila Markosian said a “constructive dialogue” workshop last year, held after pro-Palestinian protests led to scores of arrests, made no mention of Israel and Gaza. When participants raised the topic, they were told that dialogue was only useful as a “post-conflict tool.”
“Everyone was dancing around the central concern,” Markosian told The Guardian. “The feeling among basically everyone was this doesn’t work and nobody wants to do it. It felt like it was being done not to actually bring students into vulnerable conversations … but to just suppress protest and suppress discord.”
Bethany Moreton, who recently took a dialogue training her college encouraged staff to complete, challenged facilitators who she said described campus protests as evidence of deteriorating dialogue skills. She asked them to name “a single improvement” in U.S. history that involved no protest.
“Polarization is actually something that’s perhaps necessary in a society,” Moreton told The Guardian. “No one really believes that somehow we’d have the Voting Rights Act if Martin Luther King had just sat down with the wizard of the KKK and they had hashed out their disagreements.”
Nancy Thomas, executive director of the Institute for Democracy and Higher Education at the American Association of Colleges and Universities, who has worked in the dialogue field since the early 2000s, said she now prefers the word “discussion” because the notion of dialogue has been co-opted.
“I want to have conversations about authoritarianism,” Thomas said. “I want to be able to say some things are right and some things are wrong.” She added that her approach has made it harder to secure support for her work. She said she does not believe conservative perspectives should be shut down, but added: “What I see happening right now is the opposite.”