Fall 2025 29 STUDENT CULTURE as conversation pieces: participants can speak as many times as the number of marbles they hold. The goal is to encourage students to partake in conversations about tricky, polarizing subjects with people whose perspectives might not perfectly align with their own. Across the university, a constellation of activities shares a common goal: provoking discussion across political divides. This includes Community Dialogues and dialogue facilitation training for residential hall staff, as well as a series of expert lectures and panels under the banner Democracy in Action, the semester-long Dialogue Facilitation Lab on subjects like free speech, and a new university website dedicated to freedom of expression. The hope is that, by creating a framework for OSU community members to have structured, productive conversations about difficult topics, the school can fight some of the entrenched political divides that administrators say they have observed on and off campus. This polarization, they say, is even reflected in how undergraduates interact in lower-stakes settings. Sharing a postage-stamp-size space with a total stranger has never been easy, but these days, roommate conflicts have transformed. “It’s as though students are adopting the same conflict lens that is used in political disagreements and applying it to their interpersonal conflicts,” said Stephen Jenkins, the executive director of University Housing and Dining Services. “If you think that your roommate is fundamentally a bad person, it makes you less likely to be willing to compromise.” The point of these programs is not to avoid conflict; it’s to demonstrate that it’s OK to disagree. In the spring, Oregon State invited the political theorist Patrick J. Deneen, a prominent conservative critic of liberalism, to speak at the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts, as part of the Democracy in Action lecture series. After an hourlong talk, Deneen sat for a discussion with Scott Vignos, OSU’s vice president for mission and impact (at that time, vice president and chief diversity officer), and Andrew Valls, a professor of political science. “Freedom of speech is usually considered a hallmark achievement of liberalism,” Valls said. “So to what extent would that be retained in your vision of a post-liberal society?” It was an interesting moment — on its surface, a literal conversation about free expression, but also, in a meta way, an attempt to model how to talk about speech.Valls describes himself as “more of a defender of liberalism,” so he wanted to gently challenge some of Deneen’s ideas.“I tried to approach it as someone who really wanted to hear more,” he said. The Deneen lecture was the last in a program subtitled “A Lecture Series on American Pluralism,” which had also featured conversations between Reza Aslan and Aaron Hahn Tapper about “Muslim and Jewish Americans in the Age of ‘MAGA,’” and Nicholas Jacobs and Daniel Shea, who discussed their work on the heterogeneity of rural voters — a group often portrayed as monolithic. Each event, in its own way, emphasized difference. According to Vignos, they were designed to counter the idea that there are right and wrong ways to talk about issues — an idea that, he said, is at the root of political polarization. “Oftentimes, we’re not trained to have those conversations. We’re trained to avoid conflict at all cost,” Vignos said. “It doesn’t matter what political viewpoint you have — a fear of hard questions is sort of universal.” The conversations he wants to foster aren’t about proving a point; they’re about being able to consider and evaluate different perspectives.At its best, a conversation across some seemingly intractable divide makes you interrogate your own assumptions and beliefs. Combating polarization is also about protecting the university’s learning environment. “Research shows that students learn better when they have a sense of belonging in a class,” said Inara Scott, who helped develop programs designed to make space for opposing viewpoints as senior associate dean of the College of Business. “It seems crazy, right? But, if you feel emotionally connected to people in your class, you’re going to learn more chemistry.” Oregon State is not alone in wrestling with how national political divisions are reflected on campus. Colleges and universities, both public and private, across the nation have been instituting similar programs around civil discourse and critical thinking — the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Princeton and SHARING A POSTAGE-STAMP-SIZE SPACE WITH A TOTAL STRANGER HAS NEVER BEEN EASY, BUT THESE DAYS, ROOMMATE CONFLICTS HAVE TRANSFORMED. continued
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