Teaching Civil Discourse in Polarized Times

Following the Hamas attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, two SIPA students from vastly different backgrounds found themselves in the same course. After grappling with some sensitive course material, one invited the other to meet up outside class, and during their conversation, they started sharing their own experiences from the parts of the world they call home. They came to recognize that despite their disparate perspectives, their aspirations for a better future had much in common. For both of them, those goals were what had brought them to SIPA in the first place.

In 2017, The New York Times hired conservative columnist Bret Stephens, whose first column about global warming drew criticism as “classic climate change denialism.” Rather than joining growing calls for Stephens to be fired, Jason Bordoff—founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs—took a different tack, inviting Stephens to Columbia for a substantive conversation with climate experts.

In summer 2025, a group of more than two dozen SIPA students visited Israel on a trek—a student-organized trip that combines sightseeing with meetings with policymakers and business leaders—planned by the SIPA Israel Club. According to Benjamin Kava MIA ’25, an American who was one of the trek’s organizers, “We knew there were going to be differing opinions.” So Kava and the other organizers incorporated “purposeful breaks in the itinerary,” he says, “… so that we could sit and reflect and just talk.”

None of these experiences took place in a SIPA classroom or occurred as part of the School’s public events. And yet, they illustrate how SIPA seeks to foster dialogue and create an environment that values exchange across cultural differences, pedagogies grounded in the academic inquiry and rigorous scholarship that define the School’s classrooms and convening spaces. This approach is also reinforced by students and faculty in everyday interactions and choices: the decision to engage a classmate for a one-on-one conversation, to reach out instead of jumping on a social media bandwagon, to sit and speak with intention among travel mates who may or may not share one’s own views.

These anecdotes—and SIPA’s commitment to civil discourse in the classroom and beyond—stand out all the more during our current political moment, a time of intensifying polarization and partisan discord in the United States, rising tensions between the United States and Global South nations, and protracted conflicts worldwide. Even when such work is difficult, many SIPA students and faculty alike are committed to the principles of constructive engagement and recognize that those principles apply to both cross-cultural dialogue and a robust approach to international relations. As SIPA Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo has put it, “Reaching a political solution requires that we … have difficult conversations, allow ourselves to be a little bit uncomfortable, question our assumptions, and be in a dialogue with people we disagree with.”

For those who study conflict itself, the stakes of these principles are always high. “We study war and peace, and violence, and terrorism, and human rights abuses, and genocide, and with all of these things, we’re always dealing with difficult issues,” says V. Page Fortna, the Harold Brown Professor of US Foreign and Security Policy, who concluded her term as director of SIPA’s Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies in June 2025. “And part of dealing with difficult ideas is making mistakes, saying things that then somebody pushes back on, and then you think, ‘Okay, I see your point. That’s not what I meant to say,’ or ‘I see why I should change my mind.’”

Anyone who researches conflict has to “listen to different sides of the story,” Fortna says, citing her fieldwork in Sri Lanka, where she interviewed both Tamil civilians who had been bombed by the government during the country’s civil war, as well as government ministers who had ordered the bombing.

Fortna, in partnership with Alexander Cooley, a Saltzman Institute executive committee member and the Claire Tow Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, curated a series of discussions about the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine with support from the Columbia provost. In organizing the series, one major concern was, in Fortna’s words, “how we continue to be empathetic members of a community that has diverse and opposing views but not succumb to fear.”

Even when it’s hard, engaging across differences is “what happens in our classrooms. That’s what happens in our seminars. That’s the whole academic endeavor.” —V. Page Fortna

That endeavor isn’t accomplished simply or easily, but according to Jean-Marie Guéhenno, director of SIPA’s Kent Global Leadership Program on Conflict Resolution, “One important role of a university is to take students out of their comfort zone. I believe that in difficult times, we should nurture a sense of ethics so that the students have a good compass as they navigate situations which may confront them—and all of us—with moral dilemmas.” Part of the Kent Program’s process, he says, is to “bring together diplomats with radically different backgrounds, take them out of their professional experience, and confront them with issues that are new to them.” When it comes to teaching conflict resolution, Guéhenno notes, “there is a real risk that the fear of offending could lead to self-censorship. We must not shy away from difficult and controversial issues, and there is nothing wrong with being passionate about them.”

Bridging the Partisan Gap

For the Institute of Global Politics (IGP), which was launched only days before the attacks of October 7, a commitment to cross-viewpoint dialogue and mutually respectful engagement across the political divide was built into its core mission from the very beginning. Former Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew, IGP’s faculty policy director, describes IGP’s founding principles as “bridging the academic world and the world of policymakers so that knowledge and perspective can be shared freely between the two, and promoting civil discourse across a broad range of ideological and political views.”

Lew commends IGP for working since its inception to counter the “many attempts to silo political and ideological views” by annually convening a new cohort of Carnegie Distinguished Fellows whose backgrounds span the political spectrum and who engage meaningfully with students and faculty alike, and by planning programming like its Across the Aisle series, which has featured high-profile conversations between figures such as Democratic New York Governor Kathy Hochul and Republican former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, and former White House Chiefs of Staff Ron Klain, who worked for Joe Biden, and Mick Mulvaney, who served during Donald Trump’s first term. Additional Across the Aisle conversations have included US Senators Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA), speaking about their work as cochairs of the Senate Bipartisan Paid Family Leave Working Group, and Hon. Roy K. Altman, US district judge for the Southern District of Florida and IGP Carnegie Distinguished Fellow, alongside Hon. Steve Higginson, circuit judge for the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, talking about the purpose and function of the judiciary in American democracy.

“Too many people fall into echo chambers, and they do their work with people who are like-minded,” says Lew, who also served as US ambassador to Israel, among other senior government positions, “so we’re working very hard to bring in voices of the right and the left on controversial issues, people who have very different policy views.”

Even if people come out still in disagreement, he says, events like Across the Aisle model a “civil environment where it doesn’t become destructive of basic social norms. … There’s almost a hunger for doing more of this to start repairing the damage in the fabric of our democratic institutions.”

Lew adds that he doesn’t think the academic world is different from society at large in having to battle siloed thinking to get people who disagree to engage in conversation. But, he says, “I think we have a space where we have the ability to address it.”

Historical examples and personal testimony have a role to play as well, as shown in a for-credit IGP workshop conducted by Ghaith al-Omari and Gideon “Gidi” Grinstein in December 2024. They served as the secretaries of the Palestinian and Israeli delegations, respectively, to the Camp David Summit in 2000. The workshop used the permanent-status negotiations for Palestinian statehood as a case study to understand conflict resolution and engage in meaningful dialogue.

The workshop, which was offered again in fall 2025, covered the history of the two-state solution, providing an insider’s perspective on the Camp David Summit. The conveners imparted principles of successful diplomatic negotiations and asked attendees to work in small groups to analyze the implications of contemporary events for the prospect of creating a pathway to a Palestinian state.

“The way the two facilitators shared respectful disagreement publicly was really admirable and very much needed in today’s world. Doing this workshop opened my mind to the fact that there are just so many more ways to see things than I could ever imagine, that it’s not worth labeling my fellow students as anything but my fellow students, even if I disagree with them deeply, and that through constructive dialogue, we can get to a different place.” —Workshop attendee

In fall 2025, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an IGP Carnegie Distinguished Fellow, taught the minicourse Indo-Pacific Security Dynamics: North Korea in Strategic Context. Students examined the North Korean nuclear program within the broader landscape of the Indo-Pacific region and participated in a National Security Council crisis simulation.

S. Khalilullah Anwari MIA ’27 found the experience valuable preparation for understanding how different political perspectives can coexist in public service. “You can never really grasp the complexities of decision-making at that level with such high stakes unless you have actually stepped into it,” he says. “I think the human element behind the strategy was very evident, based on the examples and the anecdotes that Secretary Pompeo was sharing.”

On November 12, 2025, Pompeo and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, chair of IGP’s Faculty Advisory Board, participated in an Across the Aisle conversation, moderated by Dean Keren Yarhi-Milo, as part of the IGP event “The Geopolitical Chessboard: Implications of the Current Global Ferment.” Both secretaries shared insights for students entering careers in public service. Pompeo encouraged them to return to foundational principles and maintain clarity about their mission. Clinton urged students to define their values, resist the narrowing effects of social media, and “overcome the idea that there’s ‘us versus them.’”

Learning to Listen Actively

Transforming disagreement into meaningful dialogue takes philosophical commitment aided by historical examples and personal experience, but it also requires practical skills. Seth Freeman, an adjunct associate professor at SIPA whose teaching on negotiation and conflict management has garnered awards from students, says he trains his students to use a simple method—paraphrase, praise, probe—to “bring courage and curiosity to bear, but to do it in a gentle and loving way.”

First, he explains, “you listen actively—which, by the way, is how hostage negotiators do what they do. … Then you praise; you intentionally flag and share with them something you heard that you can really affirm, that you can truthfully affirm, that’s not trivial. And the third thing you do is you probe, meaning you ask a question to better understand and maybe gently challenge. And then you just do this two or three or four times, and by this time you’ve built such goodwill and you understand the other person well, and you haven’t wandered into some minefield.”

Freeman brought these practical skills to students in October and November 2024 as part of the Leading and Learning Lunch Series, the second iteration of workshops hosted by Jilliene Rodriguez, associate dean for student life and community engagement. His late-October sessions—“How to Talk About Hot Topics with a Classmate, Colleague, Friend, Roommate, Family Member, Adversary” and “How to Talk Politics More Persuasively with Someone You Disagree With”—proved especially timely heading into the 2024 US election season. Professor Yumi Shimabukuro, lecturer in the discipline of international and public affairs, continued the series with “Facilitative Leadership: Guiding Dialogue, Learning, and Collective Action” shortly thereafter.

For Rodriguez, these workshops and symposia throughout the year provide crucial opportunities to facilitate listening. “We’re in here to hear each other,” she says, “and everybody in the room is really here because they care.”

Another important example of this commitment to community dialogue is the SIPA Listening Tables initiative, cosponsored by the SIPA Student Association (SIPASA) and the Community Engagement Leadership (CEL) Cabinet. These gatherings provide a supportive opportunity to hear directly from students and strengthen the shared community at SIPA.

Reflecting on the workshops he led, Freeman echoed the metaphor of hunger offered by Lew: “I think there is a deep hunger for real engagement, a real hunger for going beyond one’s own bubble and for critically thinking and connecting with people.” In a public policy school, Freeman says, “the ability to talk with someone you disagree with about something of importance is not optional. It’s essential.”