Opinion: What ‘civic dialogue’ programs leave out
These campus programs can’t succeed without viewpoint diversity
Editor’s note: Below is a preview of an opinion piece published Sunday, December 21, 2025 at Deseret News. To read the full article, click here.
A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education describes the current trend on college campuses of starting “civil dialogue” programs. These programs are designed to help students engage with diverse ideas in more constructive ways. This effort is commendable but the question is: Will these programs work?
“Civic dialogue” programs are a fast-growing ecosystem of initiatives, marched out under the banner of open inquiry. In my visits to campuses this fall, I’ve seen the same pattern: presidents opening the semester by announcing their intention to build a campus culture of open inquiry, backed up by real changes in policies and programming. Students are being taught the principles of free-expression and administrators are investing in “bridge-building” and “dialogue across differences” programming, and are even launching centers focused on civic dialogue.
After years of campus disruption, public distrust and a sense that universities can’t actually engage with conflict, leaders want to show that campuses can still be places of reasoned argument and scholarly decorum. This is good news: a university campus should indeed be a special place, a place devoted to the pursuit of knowledge. So if these programs help students listen more openly and ask better questions, they deserve our support.
But even as campuses embrace civil dialogue, there is a danger that some university leaders are quietly redefining “open inquiry.” And they are doing so in a way that makes campus dialogue more narrow and less intellectually demanding than it ought to be.
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Excellent piece! Indeed, the problem on campus runs deeper than just inability to civilly engage with each other. Extreme ideological imbalance, which led to the monoculture and group-think, is a much bigger problem. I have no idea of how to solve it -- but without broadening the range of viewpoints of our faculty there is no hope of restoring universities to their original mission, truth-seeking.
"It is easier to teach students “how to talk” about acceptable topics than to ask “what’s missing” from campus conversations in the first place. Without viewpoint diversity, “civil dialogue” risks becoming academic theater: earnest, well-mannered, but intellectually parochial."