‘I can tell you don’t agree with me’: Colleges teach kids how to hear differing opinions

This story about the Bridging the Gap program was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for its higher education newsletter.

By: Javeria Salman, The Hechinger Report - December 3, 2024

WILLIAMSBURG, Ky. — Sunlight streaming in from giant windows behind her, Gabrielle Fomby began to tell the six other students seated near her about an experience in fourth grade science class that shaped her view of her skin color for years.

“We were sitting criss-cross applesauce,” recounted Fomby, a sophomore at Louisville’s Bellarmine University. “And the girl next to me was picking at the bottom of my shoe. I was like ‘Please don’t do that, they’re dirty,’ and she was like ‘Yeah, just like your face.’” As Fomby spoke, the students around her gasped.

Fomby said she was aware that most students at her predominantly white grade school didn’t look like her, but she’d never felt self-conscious until that moment. She began to question if that’s how other students viewed her: as dirty, because of the color of skin.

Another student, a Bellarmine junior, volunteered to share their story next.

The student said they’d grown up in a predominantly white town, with a dad who was openly racist. They didn’t agree with his perspective but it wasn’t until they began to meet people from different backgrounds in college that they realized how troubling his worldview was. He’d warned his child against making friends with Black students at Bellarmine because “they are not like you,” recounted the student, whose name is being withheld to protect their privacy.

The students were gathered earlier this fall for a weekend retreat at the University of the Cumberlands in southeastern Kentucky as part of a program called Bridging the Gap. The program, organized by a Kentucky-based nonprofit of the same name, had brought together 14 students from four universities in the state — a mix of secular, religious, urban and rural institutions — as part of a semester-long course on developing ways to communicate with people of different races, religions, cultures, politics and worldviews. An offshoot of a national initiative of the same name run by nonprofit Interfaith America, the program was started in 2020 to help shrink political and cultural divides on college campuses.

Data shows that college campuses have become more divided in recent years, with students’ increasingly making decisions about where to enroll based on factors such as political climate, diversity and free speech. Yet some experts believe that college campuses are also well-positioned to foster civil discourse and start healing those chasms.

Young people arrive at college at a “really pivotal point in their development,” said Stephanie D. Hicks, a lecturer in the University of Michigan’s Program on Intergroup Relations. “Students are coming out of their home communities that in many ways tend to be homogeneous, and they’re coming to college campuses which are a little to a lot more diverse.” Skills they gain in college about working across differences will stick with them and potentially help them reshape other institutions they’re part of in the future, she said.

The Bridging the Gap program is one of at least a dozen such initiatives launched at colleges and universities since 2020. Donald Trump’s reelection, and divisions on issues such as Israel and Palestine and LGBTQ+ rights, could intensify the need for such campus programs, experts say. So too could the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ban, said Natasha Warikoo, a professor of sociology at Tufts University: By potentially reducing overall diversity on campuses, the court’s decision adds to the pressure on institutions to ensure that students from different backgrounds have meaningful interactions.

Groups like Bridging the Gap also face new scrutiny because of the ban and backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion. In Kentucky, some of the universities involved, including Bellarmine University and University of the Cumberlands, run the program through their campus DEI offices. Laws curbing college DEI initiatives have been adopted in more than 10 states in recent years, and while Kentucky isn’t among them, two such bills have passed the state house. Trump, meanwhile, has threatened to punish universities that do not adhere to his views on issues like DEI.

Tomarra Adams, Bellarmine University’s chief DEI officer, said the proposed anti-DEI legislation in Kentucky focuses on public institutions; private universities like hers have a little more latitude in running programs like Bridging the Gap. But she said the general trend is worrisome. “We live in a red state and in a time where books are being banned and curriculum is being curtailed, there is certainly a possibility that Bridging the Gap could face some difficulty,”  she said.

What do you think makes America great?” Angelika Weaver, co-facilitator of the Bridging the Gap retreat at the University of Cumberlands, asked students as they stood across from one another in two rows.

For the prior hour, the group’s members practiced being good listeners — remaining attentive and silent even when disagreeing with a statement, verbally and nonverbally affirming they were listening, making eye contact, and having an open body posture.

As Weaver gave instructions for discussing the question about America, some students raised their eyebrows and shifted uncomfortably. Fomby, who’d been paired with Bellarmine junior Jack Schablik to discuss the question, confessed to him it had surprised her. She told Schablik, who is white and serves as a peer mentor to fellow Catholic students on campus, that she didn’t think America was great. She cited its history of slavery and racism, and police violence against Black people.

Schablik listened, nodding, sometimes asking her to expand on her thoughts. When it was his turn to answer the question, Schablik said he believes “we live in the least oppressive society that has ever existed.” That doesn’t mean American society isn’t oppressive, he said, but that’s less true than at any time in its history — and there have always been Americans working to make it more just.

Schablik paused, taking in Fomby’s facial expression and body language, before saying, “I can tell you don’t agree with me.” Fomby had been silently listening, but she’d closed her arms across her chest and stopped nodding along.

Noting her own body language, she apologized, saying that she hadn’t meant to express disagreement or make Schablik feel bad. Rather, Fomby said, she’d been caught off guard by the question and his answer.

The prompt was intentionally framed to be provocative, Carrie Brunk, the program’s lead facilitator, later told the students. “If you were open to listening to what another perspective was like, that’s practicing exactly what we’re asking y’all to practice,” Brunk said after the exercise concluded. “It doesn’t mean that it has to change your personal view. It’s just like you’re creating a more complex understanding.”

For their final question of the exercise, Weaver asked students to consider difficult conversations they’d had with people across lines of difference, while practicing asking open-ended questions and employing active listening skills.

Helen Belcher, a graduate student at Bellarmine’s College of Education who also participated in the previous year’s cohort, spoke with her partner for the exercise, Alex Santiago, a Bellarmine sophomore, about a fight she’d had with her sister over President-elect Donald Trump. Belcher’s sister, a Trump supporter, had criticized her for backing Vice President Kamala Harris. Belcher said she employed some of the listening and communication skills she’d learned at the 2023 seminar to recognize that they just had very different perspectives. It wasn’t her role to persuade her sister or counter every point she made. Belcher said she was surprised at how quickly a casual conversation between family members could turn ugly.

“I was ready to get into some really heated conversation,” Belcher said. “Deciding not to pursue that felt almost like a victory. It was not easy. It was very hard. And I still feel like, did I do the right thing?”

At retreats like this one, Brunk said she’s found that students and other young people, more so than older adults, have a “a strong desire to find commonality.” Some research on younger people backs this up: A 2020 study from the nonprofit Springtide Research Institute, for example, found that 81 percent of people ages 13-25 say it’s important to understand both sides of political issues.

“Is there a true generational difference and a willingness to see and be with one another differently, rather than be oriented toward polarization or be driven toward polarization?” Brunk said. “We find that when we’re bringing young people together in these ways to engage and we’re creating a space for them to build connections, that’s what they build.”

That’s part of what led Simon Greer to launch Bridging the Gap in 2020. Greer, a longtime progressive community organizer and entrepreneur, had a long and ugly public feud with conservative political commentator Glenn Beck beginning in 2010.

In 2020, the two agreed to finally sit down and talk about finding common ground. Later, Greer said he’d viewed Beck not as a person but as a caricature. In a film about Bridging the Gap, Greer said much of the divisiveness in American society today stems from “demonizing and caricaturing” those with whom we disagree.

Greer had piloted the program in late 2019 with students from Spring Arbor University, a Christian university in Michigan, and Oberlin College in Ohio. The next year, he officially began Bridging the Gap with the goal of bringing together students from ideologically diverse campuses and teaching them basic skills like listening, giving feedback, sharing their stories and navigating difficult conversations.

Since then, more than 50 colleges and universities have participated in Bridging the Gap initiatives. In Kentucky, the program has changed several times, hosting an entirely virtual cohort of students in 2021, a full-year cohort in 2023 and shifting back to a semester-long model this year.

In addition to two retreats, the 14 Bridging the Gap students in Kentucky this year participate in bimonthly virtual sessions with its organizers, including Bellarmine’s Adams and Devon Goings, director of diversity and inclusion at the University of Cumberlands, where they discuss the curriculum, supplemental reading and documentary films like “American Neighbor,” about race in America. The students at Cumberlands also have a weekly class with Goings for school credit.

Goings said that many of his students have never left Appalachia or eastern Kentucky, where the university is located, before enrolling. “Just be curious about other people,” he said he tells his students. “Be kind in the way that you have conversations, and be humble in that.”

Adams said that one of the challenges the program has faced so far is attracting students from more conservative backgrounds. The participants — at least in Kentucky — have been students with moderate to liberal ideologies or beliefs, she said.

Kentucky’s program works in partnership with Interfaith America, the Chicago-based nonprofit that merged with Greer’s Bridging the Gap in 2022 and began to offer it as part of the group’s existing programs on college campuses.

Rebecca Russo, Interfaith America’s vice president of higher education strategy, said that while there is a story of increased divisiveness and polarization on college campuses that mirrors the national landscape, “it’s not the full story.”

There has been “a dramatic increased interest” from students, faculty, staff and administrators in bridging divides in constructive ways, in part because of fatigue over protests and disagreements about issues like the war in Gaza and abortion, she said. “We’re seeing a real hunger for changing the culture and creating communities where people are really equipped with the skills to engage productively across divides.”

On the retreat’s final day, Kevine Niyogushima, a Bellarmine sophomore studying communications, said she hadn’t expected to open up as much as she did, or learn so much about herself.

“I have gotten deeper knowledge about myself than I even knew, and then listening to people, listening to understand … it’s stronger now,” said Niyogushima, who immigrated to the U.S. from Tanzania when she was 19. She was introduced to the program during a history of education course she took her freshman year taught by Adams, the chief DEI officer. After a friend who participated last year told her “it was life-changing,” she decided to sign up.

Niyogushima said that, on campus, she often talks only to close friends who share her background because she worries her English isn’t good enough or that her experience of immigrating to the United States sets her apart from others.

“This would make me want to reach out and just listen to everybody’s story. I feel like I would be more open to connecting with more people than just the people that I am close to,” she said.

Contact the story author Javeria Salman at 212-678-3455 or salman [at] hechingerreport.org.

This story about the Bridging the Gap program was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.