Eight students from Harvard College have been named the inaugural fellows by the Intercollegiate Civil Disagreement Partnership (ICDP), a new consortium of five institutions. They join other fellows from the four partner schools: California State University, Bakersfield, CA; St. Philip’s College, San Antonio; Santa Fe College, Gainesville, FL; and Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
The students were drawn from a wide range of backgrounds and all expressed a willingness to engage in dialogue with others across a diversity of opinions and experiences.
The ICDP Fellows will participate in a fully remote program that will enable them to collaborate on developing skills to engage and facilitate conversations across political differences at their respective colleges and universities. The students will receive training in facilitation, engage in deliberative conversations within the Fellows group, and have opportunities to interact with speakers from different sectors over the course of the academic year.
“Meaningful engagement across political difference is essential to civil discourse, but increasing polarization has made cross-ideological contact among students less likely,” said Jess Miner, executive director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. “Our intercollegiate partnership approach creates opportunities for such engagement by bringing together students from different regions and different types of institutions of higher education: community colleges, state universities, and research universities. We are excited to be able to launch this new fellowship with our partner institutions, to learn from each other, and from our student leaders in the year ahead.”
In addition to acquiring real-world skills to become practitioners in facilitating civil disagreement, Fellows will have special opportunities to interact with the community of scholars connected to the ICDP. Fellows will also have access to a wide range of additional online programming offered by the five partner institutions throughout the academic year in support of their academic, professional, and personal development.
The ICDP Fellows receive a $1,000 honorarium for their year-long participation in the program, which is funded with generous support from the Mellon Foundation. The students representing Harvard in the first cohort are:
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