Lisa Kloppenberg: Thinking about our students in these contentious times, how can our institutions effectively prepare them to be comfortable with ideological differences and to argue and disagree in a constructive way?
Vincent Rougeau: Well, one of the reasons it’s not easy to do this is that our students are living in a world where they don’t really have many elders who are great role models in public life. Still, we get these young people at formative stages in their lives, where they are more open to learning and engaging, where we can intentionally build community and bring them together to get to know each other in a more intimate way in courses and in residential communities. In these contexts, we can help them build relationships, to feel a little bit more comfort and safety, to get to know people who have different views and see them as human beings. That’s a very important start.
Eduardo Peñalver: I completely agree that the role models are falling short. For the past six or seven years, the state of our public discourse has been disheartening.
Another context is the way that people communicate with one another through social media, where they have not built the muscles of productive disagreement. So, especially on the Jesuit campus, the beginning of the solution has to be in building relationships of trust among our students and in using these relationships as a foundation for challenging one another in more productive ways.
LK: In the classroom, you’re always building relationships, particularly in a smaller class. But doing this well demands a lot of intentionality from the faculty and openness from the students, the kind of thing that works in small groups or immersions where people really get to know each other at a deeper level. This is the opposite of social media where we not only self-select into separate groups but where there’s no really deep engagement.
So, how do you see the work of the classroom making a difference in this context? And how should the classroom differ from what’s happening in other parts of students’ lives?
EP: I think when we’re preparing students of all backgrounds, we have to pay attention to the importance of really charitable listening. Students may resist that, and today it’s just countercultural to train your mind that way.
One of the things I’ve stressed with students is the importance of empathy, of putting yourself in your opponent’s shoes, as an argumentative skill. If you are going to persuade others, that will require putting your mind in places where you would often rather not have it go. Not only do you have to listen, you also have to listen charitably and with empathy to understand the best version of your opponent’s argument—and ultimately your own argument.
There is no interest in that kind of persuasion on Twitter, as far as I can tell. And all sides of the political spectrum are falling short in the effort to persuade others, to figure out the opponents’ concerns and how I can make the position I’m advocating attractive to someone from that perspective or with that set of experiences. Yet if we want to make progress on any number of issues that we care about on campus and as citizens, we have to be able to do that effectively.
LK: That reminds me of Saint Ignatius’s famous “presupposition” in which he says we should be “more ready to put a good interpretation on another’s statement than to condemn it as false.” We listen for that nugget of content that allows us to make the best interpretation, but we also don’t demonize that other person when we disagree.
So, my question is how to make sure that we apply this approach in a way that is fair to everyone and that allows us to support vulnerable and marginalized people on campus who don’t feel like they belong. How do we help these people engage in argumentation without feeling attacked or silenced?
VR: That’s a really important issue for us to think about if we’re going to live together in a democratic society, and particularly if we’re going to live together in this diverse democratic society. The idea that those who are vulnerable or marginalized can come into our institutions and claim a presence and be meaningfully represented in all aspects of our common life—this is critical for building a strong democracy going forward. That we hear the voices of these people in our institutions now when there’s at least a little more willingness for them to be heard by classmates and faculty, this can be transformative.
Of course, it can be difficult to engage in diverse groups, and yet diverse conversations allow people to reckon with their own preconceived notions—their own classism or racism, whatever it is—and when they are in a strong community, they can care for one another in a way that allows for transformational work to take place despite the difficulty.
LK: Let’s go back to the social and cultural context you both brought up at the beginning. The context that our students have been formed in isn’t very conducive to deep personal relationships, to dialogue, to working across differences, to finding common ground. So, as you think about this context, what particular things should our institutions seek to stand for as we think about ideological diversity on campus?
VR: I’m thinking of Saint Ignatius himself here as I think about those spaces of tension, which may be the spaces where we actually find truth and a sense of the whole. In fact, I think tensions underpin that notion of the “cannonball moment,” too. When there’s something truly challenging and mind altering, it can actually allow you to see more clearly. So I think these institutions need to be able to be places where earthquakes, where cannonball moments, where moments of deep discomfort do the work they are designed to do—the work of moving us forward into clarity.
I think at Catholic institutions, though, we have a real opportunity to have these difficult conversations in a certain context where there are other values that define the rules of engagement, where the humanity of the speaker is always assumed, where we can speak plainly on why we believe in that humanity, and make clear that this humanity in itself is a reason why we think that these conversations have to happen. We can proceed from a deep sense of faith and spirituality that is committed to the dignity of the human person. And not only to the dignity of the human person as an individual but to the dignity of the human person in community. That value of interconnectedness is a critical part of how we should talk about disagreement and navigate conflict.
In a culture that is so focused on the individual, so winner-take-all focused, we’re ultimately being countercultural by drawing on our Catholic commitments to structure these conversations as communal and not merely individual.
LK: I think the value of ongoing reflection, which is emphasized in the Jesuit practice of the Examen, can be mobilized for the sake of more effective disagreement, learning, and intellectual growth. We can reflect persistently on how relationships of trust and how the centering of the human person and how the emphasis on the dignity of the person in community—how these things can both create deep discomfort but also might help us grow closer to the truth.
So, what else might you see as practices or habits that could help us in these ideologically divided times?
EP: Within the Spiritual Exercises, there’s also the use of imagination and the deep consideration of possible alternatives that is involved in the imaginative work of true discernment. There’s the spiritual practice of imagining yourself in those various alternatives, which can be good practice for engaging imaginatively with others’ perspectives.
But the idea that God might be at work among the people we’re disagreeing with, amid the perspectives that we find appalling—the kind of openness behind this idea is challenging in a good way. The notion of finding God in all things is a tool that we can use as leaders of Jesuit institutions as we encourage members of our communities to engage more productively with one another and, really, with people outside of our campus communities in the end.
Lisa A. Kloppenberg is a professor of law and special assistant to the vice president for university relations at Santa Clara University, where she previously served as law dean, provost, and interim president.
Vincent D. Rougeau is president of the College of the Holy Cross after having served a decade as dean of Boston College Law School.
Eduardo M. Peñalver is president of Seattle University, a role to which he was appointed after serving as dean of Cornell University Law School.
This article excerpt was originally published in Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education (August 23, 2022) and is reprinted with permission. Read the full interview here.