Leading tough conversations across campus.
The Prindle Institute’s newest program for DePauw Students, the Campus Dialogue Leaders, is designed around DePauw’s participation—beginning in 2024—in the Intercollegiate Civil Disagreement Partnership (ICDP), a consortium of Ethics Institutes from around the country working to foster democratically crucial skills and dispositions among students from all walks of life.
About the Partnership
The Intercollegiate Civil Disagreement Partnership (ICDP) is a consortium of ethics centers at six colleges and universities across the US that collectively provide a hybrid fellowship experience for students at those institutions focused on civil disagreement and dialogue. The six institutions (Harvard University, Stanford University, Santa Fe Community College, St. Philip’s College, California State University, Bakersfield, and DePauw University) are diverse geographically, in their structure, and in the students they serve, which allows students at these institutions to interact across many dimensions of difference.
The ICDP began in 2020, and is committed to three core principles:
- Democracy requires on-going work and investment.
- Civil disagreement is a core democratic practice.
- Civil disagreement begins with dialogue; a dialogic approach provides the needed structures and practices for civil disagreement.
Each institution has ~10 fellows per year who participate in the program, as well as two senior fellows who take on a leadership role for the year. The fellows at all the partner institutions come together in the summer for an in-person retreat where they learn how to have and how to facilitate discussions across differences. Fellows then return to their own campuses where they engage in the following:
- Meeting regularly with fellows at their own campus to have discussions about controversial political issues.
- Organizing and facilitating discussions for other students at their own campus to engage in civil disagreement (for example, at DePauw the fellows organized and facilitated discussions with 50+ DePauw students after the Presidential Debate).
- Meeting virtually with the fellows from other institutions to have discussions that take them outside of the bubble at their own institution.
- Attending in-person events at their own campus such as panel discussions with experts who disagree.
- Attending virtual panel discussions hosted by one of the partner institutions, followed by small-group virtual debrief sessions.
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