A blueprint for better conversations

In April, President Alan Garber and Provost John Manning announced a faculty working group to examine how community members experience Harvard classrooms and the broader campus environment and to make recommendations on how the University can most effectively nurture and reinforce a culture of open inquiry, constructive dialogue, and the free exchange of ideas.

The Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group, which released its report on Tuesday, was initiated to address concerns that members of the community feel constrained in their ability to share their views, with some students, faculty, and staff members expressing hesitancy to discuss controversial issues out of concerns about peer judgment, social media criticism, professional or reputational damage, and the potential for complaints about bullying and harassment. The working group conducted surveys and held extensive listening sessions across Harvard’s campuses and found that among students, 55 percent of respondents said they are comfortable engaging in discussions of controversial issues inside the classroom, with 45 percent indicating that they are reluctant to share their views about such topics.

Among Harvard faculty members and instructors, 59 percent of survey respondents reported that they are comfortable pursuing research on a controversial topic; 49 percent reported that they are comfortable leading a classroom discussion about controversial issues; and 32 percent reported that they are comfortable discussing such issues outside of class. The working group underscored that, while these findings are not unique to Harvard, the reluctance of community members to discuss controversial topics demands attention. The report thus highlights activities and pedagogical best practices already in place across the University and makes recommendations to nurture open inquiry across its campuses.

The Gazette discussed the report with the co-chairs of the working group: Tomiko Brown-Nagin, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law, and professor of history; and Professor of Government Eric Beerbohm, faculty dean of Quincy House.

The working group faced what seems a difficult task, assessing an emerging cultural problem at odds with strongly held beliefs about the nature of the educational experience at Harvard. How did you tackle this issue?

Brown-Nagin: We engaged a broad cross-section of the Harvard community over a period of several months. As co-chairs, we met with faculty representatives of every Harvard School. We conducted 23 listening sessions with more than 600 Harvard affiliates, including faculty, instructors, students, staff, and representatives of the Harvard Alumni Association. We also surveyed undergraduates, graduate, and professional school students from all of the Schools as well as faculty, instructors, and staff. I found the conversations with so many different members of our community fascinating. One could really appreciate the cultural differences and the wide variety of disciplines, backgrounds, and viewpoints that are represented across the Schools.

Were people eager to talk about this?

Beerbohm: Implementing Chatham House-style norms during our listening sessions really made a difference. It created a space where people felt safe to open up about their hesitations around discussing contested topics. Students, staff, and faculty shared their fears about being misunderstood or misrepresented, whether in class or outside it. One student said something that really stuck with me: “I want to speak freely, but I’m constantly worried that if I say the wrong thing, I’ll end up all over Sidechat or TikTok and be labeled forever.” That captures a key concern we highlighted in our report — many students are reluctant to share their views because they’re afraid of peer judgment and social media backlash. But what’s encouraging is that our discussions often pointed toward solutions. Many participants expressed a hunger for tools to help them disagree more constructively.

Did anything surprise you in these conversations?

Brown-Nagin: We often think of Harvard in terms of the whole instead of the parts, and this was an assignment that brought to the fore both the whole and the parts. In speaking to the different groups across the University, I was impressed by the hunger for engagement about the issues at hand, the unified commitment to excellence in teaching and learning, and support across the University for learning communities in which everyone can thrive. Students, faculty, instructors all want the tools and the policies in place that will enable the kind of intellectually engaging community that people arrive on this campus to pursue.

Coming from the Law School, where we teach about an adversarial system, there’s comfort with disagreement and an expectation that arguments can be made in support of many different positions. The same is true for my understanding of the history profession, which also involves the interpretation of evidence. So, one thing I did find surprising was the extent to which some across campus do not necessarily welcome debate and disagreement. To me, they’re a big part of the point of higher education. Becoming a professional in any field should mean learning how to be persuasive, how to marshal evidence in support of an argument, how to reason.

What did the committee find through its work?

Brown-Nagin: A majority of Harvard students — including 55 percent of survey respondents — reported that they are comfortable engaging in discussions of controversial issues in the classroom. However, other students, including 45 percent of survey respondents, reported that they are reluctant — some very reluctant — to share their views about charged topics. We also identified key drivers of this reluctance to talk about controversial issues. The first is concern about peer judgment. Harvard students respect one another. They respect one another’s talents and positions, and they’re very concerned about what others think about them. There is reluctance because of worries about criticism on social media. There is unease about potential reputational damage from speaking out. We also noted some concern about potential bullying and harassment complaints being made against them as a result of comments in class. The other thing we found is that this reluctance is not confined to students. There are many faculty and instructors who also expressed a reluctance to teach about controversial topics. I should note that this concern is greatest — as one might expect — among untenured faculty or non-ladder instructors.

It is critically important to appreciate that the reluctance to speak about controversial issues is hardly unique to Harvard or to the higher education sector, generally. It is a widespread problem across American society and institutions. However, given our mission of excellence through the pursuit of truth and the creation and dissemination of knowledge across generations, the difficulty in speaking openly and respectfully is especially harmful in higher education.

Beerbohm: It’s a significant challenge and not unique to Harvard, but I think Harvard is uniquely placed — with our full immersion system of undergraduate life, in particular — to tackle it. I think we can learn a lot and share a lot with broader higher education.

Are there substantial best practices already in place that might lead us toward a community-wide answer to this challenge?

Brown-Nagin: Absolutely, there are people all over our campuses who are already engaged in doing the work of promoting constructive disagreement. But we still have work to do. The point of the report’s appendix is to showcase some of the models and resources that are already available and suggest to readers that although we are reporting on challenges, we also have tools available to move toward remedies.

Beerbohm: Our findings show that Harvard is already home to a wide range of best practices that, if expanded and systematized, could foster a more robust culture of open inquiry. Many of our faculty are employing innovative classroom techniques designed to foster constructive disagreement. This involves creating spaces for respectful, good-faith dialogues where participants are genuinely curious about each other’s perspectives. One promising practice is the use of anonymous polling at the start of discussions, which allows students to see the diversity of views within the room and feel more comfortable sharing their own perspectives. In my own teaching, I’ve started to use large-language models to identify and engage students who hold outlier views. I’ve found that hearing these students’ voices, in particular, can expand the space for ideas and arguments.

A cross-section of our courses already focus on the skill of constructive disagreement, and this is something we could expand across the University. Take Michael Sandel’s course, “Justice: Ethical Reasoning in Polarized Times.” It engages about 700 students in some of the most contested issues of our time. What’s great is that some sections meet in the Houses, with follow-up discussions in our dining halls. This creates a spillover effect — a kind of co-curriculum that engages with students who aren’t enrolled in the course.

We envision the Bok Center for Teaching, the Harvard Initiative for Teaching and Learning, and the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics developing required teaching modules that, early on, foster the intellectual virtues necessary for productive discourse — qualities like humility, fairness, and curiosity. We can also reward faculty who excel at navigating difficult discussions and share successful practices across Harvard’s different Schools. Our professional Schools have some of the leading experts in facilitation and negotiation, and we hope to tap into their expertise as we build community-wide solutions. The real challenge is creating consistency so that these modules aren’t just one-off experiences but become a defining part of our students’ time here.

Let’s talk about the recommendations. Is there a particular thread that ties them all together?

Brown-Nagin: What we are suggesting through the recommendations is that there is an imperative for the University and the Schools to take steps to ensure that everyone is aware of what is expected of us. We have to broadly appreciate lively classroom interactions, disagreement, a spectrum of viewpoints in order for us to move toward a realization of our goals of open inquiry and constructive disagreement. We have to agree that rigor, debate, and disagreement are elements of an excellent education. Another overarching theme in the recommendations is that the capacity to engage in challenging conversations can be taught and learned. These are challenges on which we can make progress. There are many different Schools that are committed already to making progress and my hope is that the report can galvanize greater commitment to the goals of the working group and to the tools necessary to achieve them.

Beerbohm: We’re recommending what you might call a “full stack” solution — one that doesn’t stop at orientation but runs throughout a student’s entire experience at Harvard. This means cultivating these skills from the moment students set foot on campus and reinforcing them through every aspect of University life — from the Yard and the Houses to student organizations, and of course, within the classroom itself.

Our report emphasizes that this culture of empathetic curiosity has to be immersive. It’s not just about isolated events or courses; it’s about embedding the norms of open inquiry across curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular spaces. This includes creating environments where students and faculty alike are encouraged to engage with views they profoundly disagree with. We stress the importance of modeling these practices ourselves. That means faculty demonstrating what my colleague Ned Hall calls “collaborative disagreement”—bringing students and alumni into these discussions, and creating spaces where diverse perspectives can be explored without fears of conversations going viral on social-media platforms. The goal is to make these ideals — of open-mindedness and big-heartedness — central to our students’ experience.

The report makes several recommendations. Are there ones that you think particularly important?

Brown-Nagin: I would cite the recommendations about confidentiality of classroom discussions and responsible social media usage as absolutely key to making progress on some of the challenges that we identified. So many different people expressed concerns that statements made in class might be disseminated in ways that could be harmful to the speaker’s reputation; that fear is obviously detrimental to open inquiry and constructive dialogue. Several of our Schools have mandated the Chatham House Rule of non-attribution of classroom statements that we cite in the appendix and that we hope will be more widely adopted to mitigate fears about communicating in class and to build trust in the classroom. The reluctance to freely communicate inside and even outside of class is strongly related to concerns about reputational damage from social media postings. There is a widespread concern about being attacked on social media and it, too, is highly detrimental to open inquiry and constructive dialogue. Fortunately, there are many people on campus who are well acquainted with these and who can help us find ways to both promote responsible usage and ensure the freedom of expression absolutely also vital to achieving our goals.

Beerbohm: There’s a kind of collective action problem when it comes to open inquiry. Members of our community seek challenging dialogue but many report hesitation in initiating it. As faculty, we can play a crucial role in breaking this stalemate. Through case studies, simulations, role-playing, in-class games, and debate, we can signal our commitment to creating a learning environment where students feel safe to disagree — with each other and with us. It’s important to set clear classroom norms that encourage critical thinking and respectful debate, making it explicit that diverse perspectives are not only welcomed but are essential for intellectual growth. This isn’t virtue signaling but a deliberate effort to reshape classroom norms to foster trust and openness, giving our students the permission to stick their necks out and experiment with ideas and arguments. One student shared with us, “I sometimes feel there’s an invisible script in class that I’m expected to follow, and if I deviate from it, the atmosphere goes cold.” Our challenge is to counteract this by demonstrating that there is no script — that the most valuable contributions come from genuine engagement and independent thought, not from echoing presumed viewpoints.

Is that moment when the classroom goes cold also the moment when the faculty member should step in and open up the conversation? Is there an element of faculty skill-building needed here?

Beerbohm: Absolutely. When the classroom atmosphere goes cold — when we sense that students are starting to bite their tongues — it’s a signal that we need to create structures that allow the conversation to reopen. This might mean assigning roles for students, running a simulation where each student knows they are advocating for a position, even if they disagree with it. The ability to argue a point you personally don’t hold is a cardinal take-home skill, not just in law school but across disciplines. It’s Socratic at its core. We’re also envisioning faculty workshops where we can share best practices, techniques that have been successful in keeping classroom discourse open and constructive. This doesn’t mean a one-size-fits-all approach, but it is our pedagogical responsibility to establish this ethos early in our syllabi and in the first weeks of class. The norms of how we respond to and harness disagreement need to be clear and practiced from the start. Our report highlights the need for a carefully worked-out pedagogy around disagreement, and this is where skill-building among faculty and graduate students can make a real difference.

How does norm-setting happen?

Beerbohm: We take a pluralistic approach to norm-setting. Some of our colleagues co-create a compact with their students on the first day of class, defining how discussions should unfold in ways that are both rigorous and respectful. Others provide a set of guidelines for dialogue and invite students to discuss and refine them. There are also faculty who don’t formally set out rules but instead model the behavior from the outset, allowing students to observe and internalize these norms through experience. We were careful not to prescribe one particular method in our report. Each of these methods — whether co-creation, guided discussion, or modeling — can be effective, depending on the instructor’s style and the classroom dynamic. The key is to ensure that students — through a pedagogy inside and outside the classroom — embrace norms of constructive dialogue grounded in empathy and curiosity.

How will mastering this ability to have conversations across differences help students when they leave campus?

Brown-Nagin: In addition to pursuing truth and creating knowledge, the University and certainly the College explicitly aspire to educate leaders who can contribute to broader society. And our view is that learning to thrive on a campus that includes many identities, experiences, and viewpoints is excellent preparation for living in a democratic society committed to pluralism and opportunity for all.

How does your work intersect with the Presidential Task Forces on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, and on Combating Anti-Muslim, Anti-Arab, and Anti-Palestinian Bias?

Brown-Nagin: I think our community is eager to imagine how open inquiry could move us toward a better way of talking about the kinds of issues that are being tackled by those task forces. Few of us have been unmoved by the events of the past year. In our listening sessions, we heard from a wide range of students about experiences inside and outside the classroom that touch on the charges of those task forces. Some of the most gripping stories came from Israeli and Jewish students whose attempts to engage in dialogue were rejected by other students, who have disavowed talking to Zionists on the assumption — mistaken in many cases — that all of those students agree with whatever premises are being ascribed to Zionism. We also heard from Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian students who had been called “terrorists” on the assumption that anyone who cares about or stands up for the rights of the Palestinian people supports terrorism. Some reported that criticisms of Israeli government policy were wrongly conflated with a challenge to the right of Israel to exist.

So there very much is an intersection between the goals of open inquiry and constructive dialogue and the imperatives of those task forces. These are very complicated, painful issues. But if we are to live up to our expectations, our aspirations to open inquiry and constructive dialogue, we have to be able to engage across those differences. Open inquiry is for everyone, for all backgrounds and identities, and I hope that this work can be a part of an effort to create opportunities and spaces for community members to connect across those particular boundaries.

Beerbohm: I’d like to add that our report aligns with the important work of our sibling Working Group on Institutional Voice. That report raises concerns about how, when University leaders speak on certain issues, they might inadvertently pre-empt individual speech and, in some cases, hinder open inquiry. The fear is that official statements can close off debate by signaling an institutional stance that may discourage the diverse and rigorous exchanges essential to the pursuit of truth.

Our report offers a vision for how a university that speaks less as a collective entity can foster a vibrant dialogue among its members. We emphasize our responsibility is to create an environment where differences are not only tolerated but welcomed. The goal isn’t to prescribe viewpoints but to support a culture where people are encouraged to engage with the sources of each other’s disagreements and, through that engagement, uncover new insights. Taken together, the reports present a unified vision: a commitment to open, rigorous dialogue. It’s a vision in which intellectual diversity is embraced as part of the search for truth — which is what unites us as a community.