The Promise of Building Bridges

The university should be the quintessential place of learning, where students can question and grapple with new and challenging concepts. Many students meet others from different backgrounds and cultures for the first time at university, making its role as a place for vibrant intellectual exchange, dissent and critical thinking even more important.

A dangerous trend, however, hinders university and K-12 schools from living up to their full potential: toxic polarization. Dialogue can help us reach across our differences to counter polarization and develop the ability to navigate an increasingly fraught political environment with courage and compassion. The role of dialogue is also foundational to community engagement and learning across a range of settings.

Toxic Polarization

Toxic polarization involves the deterioration of trust and an extreme divisiveness between opposing “sides” that in turn breeds organizational, civic and communal dysfunction. At a national level, toxic polarization manifests not only as intractable disagreement, which grinds the gears of government to a halt, but also as active dislike and even fear of the perceived “other.” Oftentimes, this “affective polarization” is not based on engagement or knowledge, but rather on distorted, generalized or caricatured views of a perceived “other.” For instance, researchers have found a large perception gap between the extreme views Republicans and Democrats think people in the other party hold versus what they actually believe. This kind of affective polarization erodes public trust in one another and in democratic processes and institutions, increases the potential for political violence, and deteriorates our individual and communal well-being.

This pernicious polarization trend has seeped into education communities across the United States. Students and school community members are active consumers of, and often participants in, divisive discourse on social media and in other public spaces. Many administrators struggle to effectively address issues that impact their communities, especially when significant differences exist among community members. Some educators express fear of bringing controversial topics into the classroom (or are barred from doing so by legislative or other restrictions). And while many students are vocal advocates of issues they care about, some are choosing to remain silent and disengaging from public discourse due to fears of saying the wrong thing, expressing controversial ideas or being canceled by their peers – in effect “retreating from the public sphere,” according to legal scholar Norm Spaulding. The result is that deep learning and meaningful discussion, the very purpose of schools and universities, is breaking down.

We see this breakdown on our campuses. The attack in Israel by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and the devastating war in Gaza have been force multipliers of extreme division, reducing or eliminating opportunities for dialogue – and in UCLA’s case, leading to outright violence. In a toxic climate, those who hold different political opinions are viewed as threats, implicit and explicit acts of hate increase, and political positions not only fuel intense arguments but also make people question one another’s very humanity. In this way, toxic polarization in education not only interrupts learning, it interrupts the day-to-day functioning of the university itself and stokes fear and uncertainty in the wider community. Without the capacity to address toxic polarization, the public university ceases to serve its mission.

The Dialogue Opportunity

Dialogue does not shy away from differences, but rather confronts and negotiates them directly, skillfully and respectfully. This ability to handle conflict or difficult conversations in educational, work and community settings is essential for everyone, and as such, is built over time.

Education requires a core capacity to build bridges, and universities can play a pivotal role in countering toxic dynamics. Eboo Patel, leader of Interfaith America, describes the unique potential of universities to build bridges: “Our college campuses gather people of diverse identities and divergent ideologies in a space with common activities – from biology classes to intramural badminton – that have the potential to shape cooperation. Colleges help the nation set its civic priorities … graduate leaders who make these priorities a reality across a range of sectors, and advance a knowledge base that helps practitioners do their work better.”

The UCLA Dialogue Across Difference Initiative aims to do just this: to confront toxic polarization directly and to promote the values of intellectual engagement, curiosity, empathy, active listening and critical thinking. The initiative seeks to elevate opportunities and skills for dialogue among the campus’s many constituencies and to build a robust culture of dialogue and bridge-building, which can have important implications in communities as well.

Building a culture of dialogue is not about creating empty or sentimental exchanges. Nor is dialogue an effort to steer people away from passionate disagreement, protest or advocacy. People who are divided on politics may have intellectually valid disagreements and, in many cases, deeply visceral and personal stakes in their stances. True dialogue does not ask participants to silence or water down those political positions or moral commitments. Likewise, dialogue is not a crisis-response tool – in the heat of a traumatic moment, such as the protests and counterprotests at UCLA in April 2024, other forms of de-escalation, trust-building, security and mental health support are necessary.

Rather, dialogue as bridge-building is a long-term and sustained effort, as the Los Angeles Bridge Builders Collective describes, to “increase our individual and collective capacity to address and resolve conflict, work across differences, and lead empathically and effectively.” Dialogue does not shy away from differences, but rather confronts and negotiates them directly, skillfully and respectfully. This ability to handle conflict or difficult conversations in educational, work and community settings is essential for everyone, and as such, is built over time.

Bridging differences and fostering a culture of dialogue can have many different aims and outcomes. For example, one aim may be deepened intellectual engagement with difficult concepts and increased critical thinking skills. While polarized discourse flattens and simplifies, dialogue has the power to complicate and add nuance. A culture of dialogue can also lead us to investigate why people are so divided on various political issues rather than make assumptions about others’ moral character. When contentious or personal issues come up in the classroom, workplace or community, for instance, asking questions of curiosity – such as “What do you mean by X?” or “What is at stake for you?” and importantly, “What are the actual differences between us?” – can help work against the effects of polarization and broaden understanding of a given topic.

Another aim is to increase empathy and foster an environment where everyone can show up as their full selves, feel seen and connect with one another more authentically. A culture of dialogue challenges members of a community to create shared group norms that everyone buys into, to share their perspectives openly and to invest in deepened and intentional relationship-building. In education, when students and teachers feel a real sense of belonging – when they feel respected, that their perspectives matter, like an equal part of the community – they are more successful learners and educators.

Finally, dialogue skills can help us be more nimble, flexible and thoughtful problem-solvers. Dialogue can improve our dialectical thinking skills, helping us examine opposing or contradictory ideas and face complicated or even unanswerable problems with greater resilience.

Since we will all inevitably face conflict in our work and communities, learning dialogue practices can help us address and resolve conflict more effectively. And dialogue initiatives and processes can help educational, organizational and civic leaders make better decisions as they learn to incorporate the considerations and expertise of diverse constituencies.

Illustrations by Sam Ward

Building the Muscle for Dialoguing Across Difference

Like our body’s muscles, dialogue skills require cultivation and regular exercise. At UCLA, we think of building the muscle for dialoguing across differences on three levels: engaging in, facilitating and convening dialogue. Thinking about dialogue on these levels can help demystify how to “do” dialogue in educational and community settings.

1. Engaging Across Difference is an essential skill set. This capacity to engage in conversations across differences does not develop intrinsically in most people; on the contrary, it can be incredibly challenging.

Conflict both activates and is exacerbated by innate cognitive biases and behaviors. For example, confirmation bias involves our automatic tendency to select and prioritize evidence that confirms our previously held beliefs; motivated reasoning is the active process of building a “case” to prove our beliefs; in-group or affinity bias is our unconscious preference for perceived members of our own group or people more similar to us; and cognitive inflexibility and rigidity describe our tendency to harden and dig in to our own positions during conflict, sometimes as a protective mechanism. These natural human tendencies have the potential to make conversations across differences stressful, unconstructive and even threatening. They can close learners off to new ideas, stunt their ability to grapple with difficult information and impede critical thinking.

Therefore, engaging across differences requires self- awareness, both about the learners’ own goals and intentions for engaging and about their own biases, positionality and assumptions.

Beyond self-inquiry and awareness, engaging across differences involves developing strong communication skills. For instance, the national nonprofit Resetting the Table trains people in how to uncover and in turn prove they understand what really matters to their conversation partners. By doing so, people sustain their partners’ “receptivity,” or willingness to stay in the conversation and continue exploring each other’s perspectives, even if what follows is disagreement.

Other relational skill-building efforts include: developing greater empathy or compassion, focusing on dialectical thinking and the understanding of multiple or paradoxical narratives, and developing personal relationships between groups.

2. Facilitating Across Difference requires multiple overlapping skill sets and abilities.

Educators are facilitating classroom conversations every day; rarely, however, are they provided with the tools to manage charged classroom disagreement and conflict. Further, while teacher preparations vary across the U.S., most teacher credentialing programs (and academic preparation programs) do not require educators to engage in professional learning and implementation about facilitating dialogue. And yet, these skills are essential to advancing what Paulo Freire termed “problem posing” education, which engages both teachers and learners in inquiry about the world. Effective facilitation across difference is also key in a range of contexts in communities and across organizations where conflict may arise.

On one level, effective facilitators create and “hold space” that is conducive to honest and open inquiry as well as full and authentic participation. This might involve setting norms of conduct, as well as building participants’ trust that the facilitator sees and understands them, and in turn that they have the freedom to express dissent, disagreement or confusion without fear of reprisal or shaming.

Further, facilitators provide a model: They do not shut down difficult conversations or shame people for bringing up a divergent opinion, but rather ask questions to uncover greater meaning and often reframe conflict to encourage learning and growth. Self-inquiry and awareness of their own and others’ biases are crucial skills for facilitators.

To effectively facilitate conversations across differences, facilitators must be able to perceive and respond to many nuanced group dynamics. For instance: What are the differences present between participants? What is at stake for participants in the conversation? Whose perspective is being heard, and whose is not? Do the different participants truly understand one another? Are they mischaracterizing one another? An educator facilitating a classroom conversation might also ask themselves: How does this difference between students illuminate something important about the subject matter? What opportunities for critical thinking does this conversation provide?

The need to facilitate conversations across differences extends beyond the classroom, and department chairs, school administrators, and organizational and community leaders would all benefit greatly from this skill.

3. Convening Across Difference – the capacity to hold programs, run meetings and write communications that effectively navigate the differences between stakeholders – is essential to fostering a culture of dialogue.

In education environments, conflict across differences increasingly happens outside classroom settings. PTA meetings, staff and board meetings, public events, student government events, political protests, informal student convenings and campus communications are just a few sites of conflict and polarization. Some education leaders respond by ignoring differences, saying nothing and opting for neutrality; others try to convene programming to address a conflict, but often with trepidation or employing divisive or exclusive methods. And others – as we saw in various university responses to the wave of campus protests in spring 2024 – seek to confine or restrict potentially divisive speech. According to a landscape analysis of bridging in higher education by Interfaith America, campus leaders “often feel ‘caught up’ in the culture wars. Many senior administrators also seek, but are lacking, confidential spaces to wrestle with the good faith challenges of balancing freedom of expression with diversity, equity and inclusion, even as the stress of enrollment and budget challenges undergirds most decisions.”

School administrators, event organizers, communications professionals and DEI practitioners may not necessarily need advanced facilitation skills, but they should understand their role as conveners of diverse populations, what it means to practice inclusion of diverse perspectives during contentious conversations, and how to make people feel seen and heard even when strong differences are present. Further, these leaders and practitioners should have an understanding of how conflict functions, be versed in design elements to reduce hostility, and have a sense of what kind of additional dialogue-related resources (e.g., expert facilitation) might be needed in a given situation.

Dialogue Across Difference at UCLA: A Four-Pronged Approach

To build the muscle for engaging, facilitating and convening across difference at UCLA, the Dialogue Across Difference Initiative is engaged in a four- pronged approach: student leadership, teaching, programming and training.

First, students are both the primary audience of the university and the primary drivers for change from the bottom up. The initiative is therefore providing mentorship and leadership-development skills around dialogue to student leaders and supporting them to develop their own ideas for promoting dialogue among their peers. Second, we are offering training and funding opportunities for faculty to incorporate dialogue topics and pedagogical practices into their courses. We also aim to engage the entire UCLA community through campuswide programming that models effective dialogue across real lines of difference.

Finally, the dialogue initiative is also focused on increasing training opportunities for UCLA administrators and staff to build their dialogue skills. This includes discrete capacity-building workshops for different campus audiences to learn how to engage, facilitate and convene across differences. In 2024-25 campus leaders will also deepen their capacity to teach dialogue skills to their respective audiences through “train-the- trainer” opportunities. The initiative will also regularly compile and share information about relevant bridging and dialogue resources both within and outside the UCLA campus.

The UCLA Dialogue Across Difference Initiative is one of many projects across the country that seek to counter polarization, to foster a culture of dialogue and bridge-building, and to ultimately help educational institutions achieve their bold visions. Community groups, local governments and organizations can also benefit from a model to build the skills for meaningful exchange, empathy and critical thinking. In a diverse and polarized environment, we need to invest more in the ability to approach conflict and difference with nuance, thought and skill.