For months, the biggest headlines from American campuses have centered on legal battles with the Trump administration. These arise, in part, from growing public skepticism (especially, but not exclusively among conservatives) about U.S. campuses.
Removed from these combative headlines — and receiving far less attention — are proactive steps being taken by many universities to get at the heart of concerns felt by many Americans.
Presidents and senior leaders from nine of America’s private universities gathered on Oct. 7–8 in Washington, D.C., for discussions about what more could be done to “model healthy civic life and intellectual exchange” on U.S. campuses.
Convened by Jonathan Haidt’s Constructive Dialogue Institute, these universities included Brown University, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, Tufts University, Vanderbilt University and Yale University.
Participants in the two-day summit worked to “develop innovative models for strengthening constructive dialogue, open inquiry and free expression in higher education.”
Haidt, a New York University professor, said of the gathering: “At a time when polarization threatens both democracy and higher education, these leading institutions have come together to chart a new path forward for our country.”
Brown University President Christina H. Paxson said this is “a moment where there is an acute need to sustain environments where everyone is treated with dignity, even and especially as they vigorously advance and contest opposing points of view.”
Culture change or coercion?
The Constructive Dialogue Institute is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization founded on the idea that “a thriving democracy depends on people’s ability to engage with diverse perspectives, evaluate information critically, and collaborate on shared challenges.”
The organization helps support leaders on campuses, high schools and work places to identify strategies to create “cultures of inquiry and dialogue.”
Caroline Mehl, who co-founded the Constructive Dialogue Institute with Haidt and leads it as executive director, said pressure from the federal government is making the work more complex “because it’s creating skepticism about the sincerity of the work.”
Even though she’s witnessed campus leaders “deeply committed” to the work, she has also observed growing public wondering about “why are you doing this?”
“On the one hand, people (on the right) are questioning, ‘are you truly sincere?’ And then from the left, people are questioning, ‘are you only doing this to appease the federal government?’”
Reassuring the public
“Top of mind for everyone is concerns about declining public trust in higher education,” Mehl said.
This declining trust is a significant motivation for campuses to have “a really central civic mission to the American people.”
Especially within our cynical political climate, Mehl said that “getting diverse stakeholders to buy into this work” remains a significant challenge.
“Right now in America, it’s hard to get people to agree on anything,” she said. “This is really challenging. Creating a space for cross-partisan dialogue is hard everywhere in the United States.”
This is also not a problem that’s unique to college campuses, Mehl added. “And so no one in higher ed has quite cracked (the code) for how to solve everything.”
“This is really challenging. Creating a space for cross-partisan dialogue is hard everywhere in the United States.
— Caroline Mehl
Is the commitment genuine?
Some may still wonder how sincere university leaders are about change, especially at a time when such change is being demanded. Are these campus efforts legitimate enough to make a meaningful difference for a conservative student showing up at Brown University or Yale next semester?
Mehl described being struck at “how eager” university leaders were to join together and how “deeply engaged” they were in collaborative discussions. Rather than a new initiative, she pointed out that for many years these universities have been doing similar work. “Respectful discourse has long been integral to academic excellence at these institutions.”
Paxson, for instance, remarked that “for generations, Brown has been a community that most successfully addresses challenges through dialogue, debate and a commitment to listening to each other.”
There is also acknowledgment, however, that change needs to happen. Linda G. Mills, president of New York University, called the gathering “another invigorating step on NYU’s journey of bridging divides and creating a campus where all can flourish.”
The new tools and perspectives she’s learned, Mills said, have left her and other colleagues “committed as ever to empowering our students to engage across differences — with thoughtfulness, openness and civility.”
These university leaders say they want to signal to the public that they are committed to healthy discourse.
“Dartmouth is committed to helping our students learn to engage in dialogue across difference — an essential skill for training future leaders,” said Sian Leah Beilock, president of Dartmouth.
Yale has a “Cultivating Conversation” initiative, along with the “Harvard Dialogues” and “Dartmouth Dialogues” — the latter, described as “strengthening a culture in which community members engage in respectful discussion across differences and feel comfortable having their views challenged.”
“Solving the world’s most pressing challenges hinges on our ability to understand and discuss viewpoints different from our own,” Dartmouth states on their website.
Positive steps to celebrate
The Constructive Dialogue Institute developed “five pillars for campus culture change” that guide their work. Mehl said that on each campus they have seen interesting, effective work taking place.
For instance, she said, Harvard leaders saw an opportunity to train teaching fellows to create spaces on campus “that promote inquiry and dialogue” by “infusing opportunities for curiosity, intellectual humility in the classroom.”
Mehl also noted that Yale is providing space for fruitful innovations to take place organically at the smaller department level, and then finding ways to “scale up” effective strategies pioneered in “specific pockets of the institution” within their larger, decentralized university system.
“Because each campus has done something different,” Mehl added, there are lots of opportunities for shared learning across campuses. Rather than a one-off event, the Constructive Dialogue Leadership Institute signals the beginning of a formal collaboration among these campuses aimed at “strengthening constructive dialogue and free expression.”
Those plans include mobilizing additional faculty to model and champion healthy disagreement, partnering on institute-led “Learning Labs” focused on testing out creative solutions to “persistent challenges” and accountability through measuring the impact of dialogue initiatives.
It remains a challenge how to effectively measure something that can feel “a little bit ambiguous,” Mehl acknowledged, in order to see what’s working well versus not.
Another challenge is simply time, she added. “This is really deep culture change … and so there needs to be some patience involved.”
“That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t see signs of progress along the way, but really significant change is going to take time.”
In 2026, Constructive Dialogue Institute plans to convene a similar cohort of leading public flagship universities, as they seek to grow a network of institutions explicitly committed to “strengthening higher education’s civic mission.”