College campuses ‘are roiled’ with protests. Here’s why phones are to blame, according to former Sen. Ben Sasse

University of Florida president and former U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse told Utah Gov. Spencer Cox that student protests that have recently “roiled” college campuses share the same cause as America’s increasing political polarization: new technologies that make it harder to have real conversations and strengthen real community.

“Our business model for how we consume information now is narrow, but deep,” Sasse said at a National Governors Association event in Salt Lake City on Thursday. “There is no large shared conversation that’s being had anywhere in America.”

The prevalence of smartphones, social media and constant notifications “takes your consciousness beyond the time and place where you’re breaking bread around the table with someone” and “drives us toward tribalism,” Sasse said. This presents an obstacle to public dialogue in a way that gets at the heart of what makes America tick, he said.

“Americans have this unbelievable idea that you have to actually compete and persuade, and you do it with love and argument and innovation,” Sasse said. “You don’t do it with compulsion, and power, and shout down.”

And this, he said, is what is missing among those who participated in recent student protests.

“Just think about the protests on campus in the last few months; there are things about them that are completely different than the protests of the 1960s, where you were really trying to persuade other people,” Sasse said. “Most of these protests right now are not trying to persuade other people, they’re trying to signal to the closest kid around you that you’re purer and deeper in your commitment to the cause, and that’s really different than a big broad American idea where persuasion is more important than violence.”

Sasse: Education reform is key to America’s thriving

Sasse joined Utah’s governor as part of the summer meeting of the National Governors Association, which Cox has chaired since July 2023. Cox’s “Disagree Better” initiative as chair has revolved around nearly two dozen commercial ads that have featured governors modeling how to have tough discussions with members of opposing political parties.

During the opening session of the event held in The Grand America Hotel, Sasse explained what he thought was the most important thing for governors to do in the next decade.

In order for America to thrive amid a technological revolution that is speeding up exponentially with the development of artificial intelligence, Sasse said leaders need to innovate with K-12 and higher education to equip Americans with the learning habits they’ll need to keep up.

“The education reform that’s needed in the next decade is probably the most pressing set of issues facing the nation,” Sasse said. “In the K-12 space, we have inherited a kind of factory model of schooling that fit industrialization; it doesn’t fit the post-industrial age.”

As artificial intelligence displaces jobs in more industries and offers a more tempting escape from real social interactions — creating a new “hybrid” era — America will also need to innovate its institutions. Sasse called for a return to the diversity of voluntary community organizations that the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville observed when he visited the young United States in 1831.

“Right now, we don’t have the founding wave of new Tocqueville-ian institutions for a hybrid era, and we’re always going to live in a hybrid era,” Sasse said.

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