No, college campuses are not doomed. Don’t miss the reasons for hope

What is it like to be a conservative student on American campuses today?

Well, it’s sometimes complicated. Just ask Sam Rechek, who recounts sitting in a philosophy class at the University of South Florida when the topic turned to climate change.

“The general consensus was that the U.S. government needs to be doing a lot more to counter the effects of climate change,” he said, describing one student who raised a question about “jobs that might be hurt” along with some concern about “too much government involvement in market mechanisms.”

Maybe you can probably predict what happened next. “The rest of the students in the class just jumped on that,” he says. “They took the worst version of his argument and attacked it.”

To his credit, the professor did what a good teacher would do, stepping in the student’s defense and asking others to let his perspective be heard. But these appeals were “drowned out” by the outrage of other students in the class.

Afterwards, Rechek pulled the student aside, asking him, “how did that make you feel? And he said, “yeah, I didn’t like that. And, and I don’t think that I’ll express a view like that again.”

Let’s make this better

These kinds of stories, featured prominently on some media outlets, cause many to assume all university classrooms are like this — with students themselves monolithically portrayed as “closed off from discussion..., hesitant to share their views or like really staunchly committed to a position and unwilling to change their mind,” Rechek summarizes.

But “it’s not that simple,” he insists, despite these kinds of disappointing moments. Rechek couldn’t stop thinking about his fellow classmate getting pounced on rhetorically.

The experience troubled him so much that he began talking with other undergraduates about starting a new student organization at USF, which they called the First Amendment Forum , or 1AF — bringing together conservative and liberal-leaning students alike who he said “had enough of fear, silence, and separation and wanted to do something about it.”

More than advocating for First Amendment principles of free expression and civil discourse alone, these students practiced them in a weekly discussion forum — finding themselves getting better and more comfortable.

It was watching Rechek moderate a panel of “powder keg topics” that really caught the attention of Mónica Guzmán, host of the “ Braver Way” podcast — noticing that this student “knew how to listen. But like, really actually listen.”

Guzmán asked Rechek more about his experience on this podcast, which the Deseret News is helping to promote , in partnership with KUOW, Seattle’s NPR news station.

Creating conditions for listening

Students who show up at an IAF forum get put into small groups where they do a couple of conversational “warmups” — starting with sharing a “hot take” on an issue they care about after introducing themselves.

“Everyone’s got hot takes. I mean, pepperoni on pizza,” Rechek says. “Just trying to make people comfortable with sharing things that are maybe a little bit less, you know, like, commonly held views.”

“I was just thinking pineapple on pizza,” Guzmán interjects. Speaking of pizza, throwing free food into the mix for hungry undergraduates has been a big draw, Rechek says, with posters that say “free speech, free people, free food.”

As part of this introduction, organizers next feature “the five minute topic” — focused on “something silly” and inviting comment on a topic “completely separated from political ideology whatsoever.”

After breaking the ice like this, the group shifts to the main weekly topic, selected the prior week by a vote of 1AF student members. “And they don’t shy away from the tough stuff,” Guzmán observes, turning towards “whatever’s heating up in the headlines” or “on campus that week.”

That has included abortion, policing, protest, or something that was a big deal in Florida, such as, “what role schools should play in teaching kids about gender and sexuality.”

Rechek and IAF are not alone in sparking these kinds of productive conversations on campus. Manu Meel, Ross Irwin and their team at Bridge USA have been mobilizing students across campuses for a decade with similar kinds of groups.

These kinds of planned processes, Guzmán suggests, become “structures that force people to listen.” That includes how participants in these forums raise their hands, with names written on a board, and people allowed to speak in order.

“You’re being forced to listen, not just to the room, but to yourself,” she says, in a process that helps people become more conscious of their own beliefs. “What am I actually trying to say? Oh, that guy just had a good point. I better add that … to my point.”

By comparison, those locked in hostile conflict “have no structure and a lot of tension,” Guzmán adds. “Nobody pauses to listen. We just don’t.”

Rechek agrees this structure is a big part of any success like this: “People in the right situation can be curious about a lot more than they think they’re curious about.”

Making space for even the quiet ones

The moderators make sure the conversation includes space for both timid and activist personas in the room — due to their belief that “nobody’s unqualified to talk about what the right thing to do is” when it comes to “issues that affect us as a society.”

This helps, Rechek says, with people who feel insecure in a conversation, thinking “I haven’t read enough. I’m not qualified to talk about this.”

Why work so hard to make sure all these voices are included? “The search for truth is best pursued on the basis of a vast variety of competing perspectives,” Rechek says, channeling John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” in explaining the philosophy behind the club.

Disagreeing strongly and enjoying it too

Rechek himself grew up immersed in warm conversation between an evolutionary psychology professor mother and a Catholic father. “They’re happy and they make it work,” he says, even though “they disagree on whether there’s a God and the value of religion to society.”

“Competing perspectives can live well or can live alongside each other, even when they’re fundamentally in disagreement about the most serious questions at the heart of being a human,” he summarizes, describing the core lesson he took away from his childhood.

That’s the same kind of atmosphere Rechek and his team has tried to replicate for university students. “Arguing and providing reasons for the views you have,” he says, followed by openly engaging the views of someone who “thinks differently. ... It’s fun. It’s so much fun” — suggesting that most people have forgotten entirely that “disagreeing is fun.”

Guzmán observes that what these students are experiencing is “this beautiful magic of humans thinking together. It’s almost like a mega brain starts to form.”

“It’s like an engine and it starts to roar and move,” she adds, and “feels almost like people can’t help but be pulled in,” with “their hunger to express and to add” building over time.

Real challenges and stretching

“Of course, I’m not so naive to say that it’s always fun,” Rechek is quick to add. “But it certainly can be, and if we do it well, it’s more likely to be fun.”

“Civil discourse is really hard,” he emphasizes. “I can’t emphasize enough how hard civility is when the topic becomes one that touches your heart” — describing significant tensions in the group as they tried to navigate Florida legislation restricting what teachers could share with young students in the classroom about sexuality.

Guzmán empathizes with students having to navigate an atmosphere where the political left has “the dominant culture.” Recalling her days as the opinion editor at the college paper years ago, she recalls the mockery often targeting conservative columnists, “oh, what did the conservative columnist say this week? Ha ha ha ha.”

“And nobody thought it was a problem,” Guzmán recalls. She then reflects on her own 11-year-old son, who leans conservative in some of his attitudes. “Do I want college or education to be a place where my son can’t be fully expressive and fully received?”

“It just kills me,” she says, to imagine someone prejudging and acting in a way that silenced her son. “That, to me, is taking someone’s light and turning it off. Why would we do that to each other?”

Real hunger and hope

After so many experiences with other students who “actually hunger and yearn for real, productive discourse,” Rechek describes feeling hopeful. However easy it is to believe in a “bleak world,” he says, “I was so overcome by optimism about the possibilities for the future of civil discourse.”

“The truth is that on most college campuses, most of the time,” April Lawson adds, “the discourse is much better than what we see in the news.”

But it’s the bad stuff that often gets covered — e.g., “if it bleeds, it leads.” Yet “there is a Sam on every campus,” Lawson adds — multiple people on every campus “who want to make this change.”

“If campuses around the country bust out again this fall with tension and agitation about the issues challenging so many of us,” Guzmán says, “if I see and hear in the news a sense that it’s all a mess, that it’s chaos, that it’s hopeless, I’m going to wonder where the Sams are. … And what I can do to give their stories a boost.”