By: Nikki Rojas / Harvard Staff Writer
From a challenging year came opportunity, and for Hopi Hoekstra, in her first year as Edgerley Family Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, that included efforts to strengthen speech and culture and to promote interdisciplinary collaboration.
As one of three strategic initiatives, the FAS launched efforts to promote dialogue in disagreement, an investment in creating a vibrant and inclusive academic community for students, faculty, and staff. Among these efforts was work led by Eric Beerbohm, professor of government and faculty director of the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, who was named senior adviser on civil discourse last December. In his new role, Beerbohm helped create frameworks to further constructive dialogue, including the workshop Setting the Table: Best Practices in Establishing Civil Discourse Norms in the Classroom.
“What we tried to do was to provide a range of events that engaged in honest and difficult topics, always offered a range of perspectives, and modeled civil disagreement and consensus building,” Beerbohm noted.
“The most surprising thing was the hunger for skills trainings—as much from our students as our faculty and staff—on how to engage in charged conversations about some of the most difficult topics of the moment,” he added. “That often involved creating spaces outside the classroom as much as inside the classroom to encourage people to present often radically different perspectives and to safely share those perspectives.”
Beerbohm noted that faculty recognized the need to consider best practices in the classroom “to encourage students to feel comfortable sticking their neck out and sharing values that are core to them.”
A two-event series in the spring saw faculty debating best practices on the pedagogy of civil disagreement and constructive dialogue. The second event, led by Michael Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, pushed faculty to deepen the conversation.
“There’s incredible expertise across FAS on how we can create a cultural shift so that we can model the kind of disagreement that we hope our students can come to see as one of the greatest things that they have to leave Harvard with,” Beerbohm added.
FAS Chief Campus Curator Brenda Tindal’s expanded role also contributed to endeavors to strengthen our academic community by nurturing a foundation of respect and trust. In February, she was named senior adviser on academic community engagement to Dean Hoekstra. Tindal’s initial efforts have centered on cultivating spaces for faculty, students, and staff through facilitated dialogue and deep listening. In concert with her broader portfolio as campus curator—which includes more than 11 million square feet of co-curricular and shared spaces across the FAS campus, along with visual-culture renewal projects at Lehman Hall, Annenberg Hall, and the Faculty Room in University Hall—Tindal has convened more than a dozen listening sessions and is devising programs and strategic partnerships to deepen academic community engagement in the FAS.
“This past year was challenging and created fissures in our community. At the same time, it underscored critical areas of opportunity for our institution and highlighted the resilience of our academic community as we all work toward advancing the FAS’ core academic mission,” she said.
“Academic community engagement is a way to begin to mitigate some of those fissures, bring our community together, and celebrate all of this diversity and unique perspective,” she added.
In Harvard College, Danoff Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana launched the Intellectual Vitality Initiative to support students as they develop critical principles around respectful dialogue. Director of the Intellectual Vitality Initiative Camila Nardozzi said the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel and continuing war in Gaza underscored how important the work is.
Early efforts included creating programming in partnership with PEN America. A two-day summit held in January featured a panel discussion on censorship, disinformation, and the state of free speech on college campuses. The Summit on Intellectual Vitality and Free Expression offered three workshops for students, faculty, and staff to consider ways that universities can protect free speech and academic freedom.
“The values of Intellectual Vitality are to engage in respectful dialogue with curiosity, humility, and respect,” Nardozzi said. “While it can be difficult in the heat of the moment, the point is for people to remember that first, we’re all human. We all have different backgrounds and we’ve all been formed by different experiences.”
Beerbohm envisions the FAS as a “seamless garment” that includes all of the expertise found within it. “The image is one of deep coordination across these units and realizing that it doesn’t matter what part of FAS [they come from], every one of these component parts grapples with problems that are not just technical, but ethical, where values are in play and—necessarily—in tension,” he said.
Looking ahead, Beerbohm, Tindal, and Nardozzi emphasized that their work on speech and culture in the FAS will be most effective if it becomes part of the fabric of teaching and research.
“Dean Hoekstra has brought an energetic, connective form of leadership—whether in collectively imagining AI’s place in the classroom and society or in exploring the question of how we engage with one another about values that speak to our core convictions. She has convened faculty from across FAS to share our very best practices in scaffolding dialogues, debates, and discussions,” Beerbohm said.
In the year ahead, the Safra Center will launch what Beerbohm called “a disagreement lab,” an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods research and inquiry space that will support research on disagreement. The FAS community can also expect a series of public lectures and a civil-disagreement panel series, as well as a fellowship led by the Intellectual Vitality Initiative and the Safra Center.
The FAS Working Group on Civil Discourse also began working this fall to coordinate FAS efforts on constructive and civil discourse, including interventions in and out of the classroom. “It’s our hope this body will innovate, together imagining ways— tools, skills, resources—for a cultural shift on campus,” Beerbohm said.
Echoing Beerbohm, Nardozzi expressed her hope that “people, instead of attacking one another, would engage in dialogue and criticize ideas and not people.”
“We all have different pockets of the FAS that we’re working with,” she said. “In working together and in being in constant conversation with one another, we’re able to bring those different areas together and ensure that we can learn as much from debate as agreement and grow as a community.”