COMMIT TO CONNECT: THE PROJECT ON CIVIC DIALOGUE
MICHELLE EDWARDS: Hello, this is Dr. Michelle Edwards. I am the Founder and CEO of the Idari Collective, and you are at the Point of Learning with my friend Peter Horn. As a former school leader in Washington, D.C. I was so pleased to hear that Pete would be having a conversation with folks at the Project on Civic Dialogue at American University. If there's something we need to get better at as citizens, colleagues, friends and neighbors, it's speaking honestly and listening more carefully. I hope you enjoy the show!
PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today's show, the Project on Civic Dialogue at American University.
LARA SCHWARTZ: We are here to give students more tools to keep doing what they want to do, which is solve the world's problems together through dialogue, through canvassing, through civic engagement, through the other work that they do.
[VO]: That’s Lara Schwartz, the founding director of the Project on Civic Dialogue. Thanks to her, we also get to hear how some young dialogue facilitators feel about their work.
ARJUN MISHRA: Especially in today's world where everything is so polarized, entering a space where there is an expectation that you will at least try to humanize and try to listen to another person. It's not meant to change your view in the slightest, but just having an understanding for other people is just so important.
[VO]: They offer some nuts and bolts tactics for exploring shared values.
GRACE MANSON: Well, maybe you have different stances on gun control, but do we agree that we prioritize safety in some sort of way? Okay, if we prioritize safety in some sort of way, do we agree upon something a little bit smaller there? Something a little bit more specific? Do we have something here that we can get to enough of a shared ground where we can then try to navigate dialogue?
[VO]: And some thoughts about the other kinds of discourse we flow through each day.
KHUSHI RAMNANI: I don't think of social media as a place to communicate. It's not something that makes sense to me. It's not where I go to communicate. I go to social media to consume content and to see what the world is doing, but it's not a two-way street.
[02:30]
[VO]: All that and much more, coming right up! Let me tell you, friends, making this episode has been a special treat, not least because it didn’t end up being anything like the episode I thought I’d be making! But it’s so much better … kind of like one of those conversations where you enter with a spirit of humility, listen generously, and allow your mind to be changed. As someone who specializes in helping people have better conversations across differences, I inhaled Lara Hope Schwartz’s 2024 book Try to Love the Questions: From Debate to Dialogue in Classrooms and Life. I reached out to Professor Schwartz, who teaches at American University, hoping we could talk about her excellent book and maybe learn some more about the program she founded and directs at American, called the Project on Civic Dialogue. She accepted my invitation, but suggested that the best way to learn about the Project on Civic Dialogue—or PCD, as you’ll hear it called several times—would be to talk as well with some of the student facilitators who moderate conversations and lead other events that PCD sponsors at the university. There are few things I like better than talking with students about what fires them up, and given that one of the things that fires these young people up is good-faith dialogue, my answer was YES PLEASE! I also lowkey loved that Lara Schwartz is the first professor I’ve ever approached about a book conversation who was like, Maybe instead we showcase some of the amazing students I’m lucky enough to work with! Aight, so let me set the table quickly. Lara Hope Schwartz is a lawyer and former civil rights strategist who teaches in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington D.C., where she is founding director of the Project on Civic Dialogue. Because this episode discusses some of that project’s work, here are a few core principles of PCD: First, dialogue and disagreement are skills that can be learned and must be practiced. (They are not spectator sports). Second, expressive and academic freedom are necessary conditions for dialogue, and understanding these freedoms (and their limits) empowers us to build communities where dialogue thrives. A third key tenet is that civic dialogue is not the mere expression of opinions; it also incorporates rigorous inquiry and requires self-reflection. Before we get into my conversation with the PCD facilitators, I will share as a listener to many podcasts that one of the things that trips me up sometimes when I’m listening to a panel discussion is tracking which guest is saying what, so I want to take a minute to introduce the AU students and alumna individually. First up, Grace Manson has been asking questions literally since she could form a sentence.
[05:36]
GRACE MANSON: My first sentence ever was not what you would expect. No, my mom sewed the nose into my teddy bear. I was pulling it out with my teeth. I take one look at it, I look up at my mom and I go, “Who did it?” So just asking questions and trying to learn what happened. It's just been really something that I've been really interested in.
[VO]: Grace is majoring in Communications, Law, Economics, and Government, a constellation of academic interests known at AU as CLEG. She’s been involved with the Project on Civic Dialogue since her sophomore year.
GRACE MANSON: I really, really enjoy getting to design my own dialogues where I can pick topics that I think I have the skillset to really navigate people through and then trying to hear out diverse voices. I think it is just been really rewarding.
[VO]: Grace was joined by Arjun Mishra who is majoring in Economics and Political Science.
ARJUN MISHRA: A lot of my interest has been mostly just economic justice and what I realized was that a lot of people have the same thoughts and same feelings and same opinions. It's just that they're cut across by arbitrary categories which kind of define how people determine their views. When I started talking to people, actually canvassing for Zohran Mamdani’s campaign in New York, and I was talking to one person about how they felt about pricing because I was there just knocking on doors and talking to people about it. And I was talking to them about how they felt about rental pricing and it was basically the same sentiment that a lot of other New Yorkers have. They were Republican and they obviously would not normally be voting for Zohran, but I think that it cut back to me that people feel the same. They feel the same way about certain problems; they react the same ways. And there is sort of a baseline of humanity behind every person with every view and every conversation. And I think that the more efficiently you can sort of facilitate a dialogue and people feel comfortable and validated in their opinions, it makes it easier for them to sort find a common base.
[VO]: In his free time. Arjun directs a nonprofit called The Surety Initiative, which provides free workshops on financial literacy and public benefits available in D.C. And our third facilitator came to the U.S. from the United Arab Emirates. Khushi Ramnani was a political science major as an AU student with a specialization in comparative politics.
[08:09]
KHUSHI RAMNANI: I come from Dubai, so it was very different and I had no community here whatsoever. And it was a class with Professor Schwartz that she introduced me to this beautiful world of PCD. And at first I was taken aback because I'm notoriously known as a yapper in my family and that's all that I was known as. I did debate, I did trial by jury. I was always talking, talking. But then at PCD, I was asked to sit down and listen. And that was the first time where I actually found myself listening to people and listening for the sake of listening, not to immediately reply. And I caught myself being like, Wait, this is a new experience for you! You have never been quiet in a room and actually paying attention and tuning in on what people are saying without being expected to have an immediate reply. And that shocked me, shocked me—existentially actually. And I was like, there is no way that I can leave this room without signing up. It just had to happen. And then I was stuck and I came back every single day.
[VO]: Khushi started out at PCD as a peer facilitator and ended as the program coordinator. Having graduated last year, she is currently studying for the LSAT. I don’t think you’ll struggle to identify Professor Schwartz or me, who round out the group, so let’s get into my conversation with these facilitators at American University’s Project on Civic Dialogue, recorded with them in D.C. and me in Sunny Buffalo on November 11, 2025.
[09:54]
PETER HORN: Arjun, Grace, Khushi, Lara—thank you so much for joining me. I'd like to start with a question for the student facilitators—and one recent student facilitator, AU alumna Khushi—because of your experience on campus. There's a good deal of concern among pundits and some professors in U.S. schools about the lack of viewpoint diversity on college campuses. So what can you share about your experience as current or recent students about the kinds of opinions either in class or outside of class that you encounter and how much it matches maybe this perception that there's a lack of viewpoint diversity?
ARJUN MISHRA: So I think that when it comes to the idea of a lack of diversity on campus, I think it's even more emphasized these days because of social media culture and because a lot of the viewpoints that people sort of take and run with are viewpoints that are able to spread via social media and social media algorithms. So it can be a little bit difficult to deviate from those points at times because that's sort of what you see over and over again. It's like how when you're writing, your professor might emphasize that if this is a point that you really want to push throughout your paper’s argument, you just want make sure that you're continually repeating it. And it's almost like that effect has taken place in discourse, I think. So I think that when it comes to making any points that deviate with that, students might be a little bit more fearful just in mainstream conversation at times.
KHUSHI RAMNANI: I would agree that yes, it does sometimes become kind of like an echo chamber where people just want to say what other people want to hear. But in my experience, diversity is everywhere. You just have to look hard enough and even if it's the slightest nuance, you just have to ask the right questions and then people will show that and they will reveal, even if it's in the slightest bit. People always have a unique perspective on any type of political controversy or whatever is going on in the world. Yeah, I think you just have—I think that was what I recognize with PCD was when you open the forum, people tend to agree and everything, but then you go a little bit deeper and you say, Oh wait, maybe you look at it slightly different than the way that I do or the way that I've been trained to look at it. I like asking people why they think that way or just to push it more on them to think introspectively, or something that Professor Schwartz taught me was confirming what you're hearing and saying and rephrasing it in your way and then saying, Is that right? Am I saying that right? And then people will be like, Well, no, actually I meant this. And then they'll start adding more as you kind of act as a mirror for them and then they keep going deeper and deeper. It's very therapeutic almost.
PETER HORN: And that exchange begins by having that person feel like they've been heard because you say their idea and then you go forward.
KHUSHI RAMNANI: Yes.
PETER HORN: I'm sorry, Grace. Go ahead, please.
GRACE MANSON: Oh, you're good. I was just going to say that I agree. One thing that's been really interesting to me both through PCD and then I guess where I got the inspiration for this question comes more from the student journalism side of things is one question that I like to ask to get someone to talk a little bit more about why they have a certain idea, especially if it's an idea that I think makes no sense to the way that I tend to think or my ideals, I might ask something along the lines of, Tell me a little bit more about how you came to that—get them to talk a bit about the process through which they arrived at that idea.
LARA SCHWARTZ: And a great thing about Grace's approach with asking people how they came to a position is that it's another way of doing what we call Moving from Positions to Interests—a position being what you say you want and the interest is why you want it, the things behind it. So when you ask that question Tell me how you came to this position, it tends to be like an actual evidence-based depolarization technique. But it's also fascinating because when you ask people how they came into a position, you find out what really concerns them and matters to them, which could be completely different than what the sort of partisan options on the table in the political system are. And it also can be very humanizing because if you're facilitating a group of multiple people, when you hear that the person with an interesting or confusing or outlying position shares actually the same concerns as everyone else in the room, it can be an “aha moment” of common ground.
[15:13]
PETER HORN: Professor Schwartz, speaking of partisan political polarization, you've asserted that it's much easier to get a great education as a conservative student at American University than as a liberal one—as a conservative student as opposed to a liberal student at this school that I think skews liberal: that's the point of that assertion. Could you say a little bit more about why you feel that way?
LARA SCHWARTZ: Sure. I mean, and it'll be interesting to hear from my student colleagues and alumna colleague here. I talk about “the gift of being an outlier.” And I think if a lot of people in the room agree with you—or as Khushi said, they agree with you on the surface, and then when you get deeper, there's so much richness and diversity of opinion—it can be a little easy. You might not find yourself having to engage in self-reflection, having to spend a lot of time defending the default things that you say. And you might, if you're quite in the majority, not hear a ton of positions and viewpoints and claims that feel particularly challenging to you. If you come in and you have kind of an outlier approach, you are much more likely to, in any given conversation or any given engagement, find yourself possibly taking yourself to task for your views. Now I think if I had the book to write again—I still think it's a good book—I think I probably wouldn't use “liberal” and “conservative,” because one of the things that had started to happen by the time I was writing this book and then by the time it was published and today a couple of years later, is that I don't feel that the descriptions liberal and conservative really meet the moment or really meet the question of how we think and how we disagree with one another anymore. I think there are all kinds of rifts and differences that don't track kind of a liberal-conservative ideological spectrum or even a partisan binary. And I think this is why I agree with Khushi’s assertion of on the surface there might be a bunch of agreement, but there's actually so much diversity of viewpoint and it comes up in different ways: Students who were raised in the suburbs and aren't used to public protests where they live versus students grew up in an urban area. Students from rural areas who have more experience with guns or more experience relying on fossil fuel for transportation than people in urban areas. There are so many kinds of divides. Generation is one of the biggest divides. So at American University, the bulk of the faculty and students probably vote the same way, like a majority, but the divide in political sensibilities between the Gen X, old faculty like myself with our better musical tastes and worse political ideas and the young, wiser Zoomer [Gen Z, born 1997-2012] current students, they don't necessarily track Red and Blue in a way. And we can see that now. I mean if you say like, “Oh, everybody agrees— they're a Democrat,” that sounds silly. So I do think being an outlier, and that can be—I grew up a Jewish person in majority non-Jewish spaces, and grew up the sort of sole progressive in a profoundly conservative and religious family. I think being an outlier always gives you that kind of different viewpoint, whether you're me or Tocqueville, but it's particularly true on college campuses as well. And I think one of the things that's been interesting about the Project on Civic Dialogue is that often I get students who are really committed moderates who are fascinated by the idea of doing this dialogue work because they're more likely to be a bit turned off by the apparent existence of the only options being like: Be very interested in the AU Dems OR the College Republicans. And they're like, I'm not sure this describes what I'm inquiring about and interested in right now. And so one thing I would say to people running dialogue programs on campuses is don't fall into the trap of thinking that you have sort of a bucket of Red and Blue marbles. People aren't like that. People aren't really Red or Blue, there isn't a paradigmatic Liberal or Conservative. And if we don't, to use a fancy word, reify that, we can find that richness and diversity that my colleagues here were talking about.
[20:31]
PETER HORN: I would like to ask each of you about, just so we get a little sense for the texture of what it's like when you're in there facilitating, if there's a vivid anecdote of a time that was just “money,” that was “dope on the floor and magic on the mic” [hoary reference to M.C. Hammer’s 1990 “U Can’t Touch This”] as Lara and I would put it back in the early ‘90s, or that went badly for you that you learned from, or it felt like the wheels were coming off but you got something out of it.
ARJUN MISHRA: I can start because I actually had my first high from facilitating a couple of days ago, and mine was on the question of what is human legality? So what determines the bounds of what makes a person able to participate in basically a legal system or have a certain amount of rights?
PETER HORN: I'm sorry—did this arise from the designation that sometimes people are called “illegals”?
ARJUN MISHRA: Yes. “Illegals” is a part of it. And then also some other people, like asylum seekers for example, might just have less rights for certain periods of time. But the conversation was meant to sort of steer people around how do we make these determinations? How do we determine why these people are allowed certain rights and other people aren't? And the way we started the conversation was we started off by giving a little bit of context as how different viewpoints over time led to different designations of who got to immigrate to the us and then we started by asking people, Why do you think that certain people held these views? And I think that that was a good place to start because it had people just sort of connect their views to why they think someone else might've thought a certain way. And it questioned them to think about why they thought in a certain way. And I think that that really got even people that were a little bit quieter to really participate because I think that when you start off by asking somebody, I dunno a really big and loaded question, it can make it very difficult to start, but when you start by asking smaller things—why do you think this person might've done that in a certain context? So you're starting off with a smaller question, it makes it easier to scale. It's a bigger question of how do we as a society determine who is allowed in and what public goods and services they have access to.
KHUSHI RAMNANI: My first high from PCD was when we had a Disagree with a Professor [event] with our very beloved Professor Boyle. Professor Boyle knows how to work a room and he just stood there and he said the most outrageous sentences back to back and you could see everyone shocked and being like, This is my moment! I get to disagree with a professor! That's crazy! And it was like you saw everyone click and it was incredible. Everybody got so excited. It was one of those moments that a student and a professor were equal and no one saw Professor Boyle as a professor. It felt like you were allowed to heckle the comedian without being punished or kicked out of the room and it was incredible.
PETER HORN: I just want to interject to clarify, this is a regular event that PCD does: Disagree with a Professor, right?
LARA SCHWARTZ: Yeah, this is one of our kind of signature offerings.
PETER HORN: And does the professor begin with kind of an argument or a claim and then it's like one-on-one or is it a group? What's the format for this event?
LARA SCHWARTZ: So the format is we ask the professor to speak for no more than 10 minutes and to take a position either that they hold or that they can represent with integrity. So we've had faculty
who—I think Professor Boyle has defended capital punishment just from a principled basis, regardless of his opinion. So they do that for up to 10 minutes and then facilitate sort of a Socratic dialogue with the students. When I do it, I'm like, All right, come at me! Your turn! And the idea is both to get the students disagreeing with the professor and practicing that skill and then hopefully as well disagreeing with each other. And then we do usually reserve the last 10 to 15 minutes for reflection on what has happened here and how we can bring this back to our classrooms or the other spaces that we're in.
[25:40]
PETER HORN: Thank you. Thank you. And so Khushi, in this situation with Professor Boyle, were you facilitating that feedback session, or what was your role in the mix?
KHUSHI RAMNANI: Yeah, I was a facilitator, but I think this was one of my first roles as Program Coordinator as well. So I kind of took a backseat, I put the room together, arranged for the food and the coffee and everything. And then I had multiple other peer facilitators who were given the module—I think it was on juvenile justice. And so we had kind of a basic background that they knew about, that this is what Professor Boyle was going to speak on and they had a few interjecting questions prepared, but then they were also asked to go with the flow build on the conversation.
PETER HORN: And were there any cameras in an effort to turn especially heated things into viral video moments later on?
KHUSHI RAMNANI [chuckling]: I don't know about viral moments, but I think there was a camera—I can't remember.
LARA SCHWARTZ: Well that one, if I'm thinking about that juvenile justice one, we had kind of an unusual Disagree with a Prof session because Judy Woodruff was there and doing a piece for PBS, which we don't usually do. They're not usually televised; they're usually just a room full of people. But that one included an interested journalist who wanted to know more about what we do. And so I think Khushi set it up to be a little bit different from our usual, with some facilitators present to do breakout discussions if needed and kind of bring out all of the different things that PCD does.
PETER HORN: How many students would typically show up to an event like that? Or does it vary widely?
LARA SCHWARTZ: I mean, a small one would be 10 or 15; a big one would be 30 or 40. They've really varied. So we've had some smaller ones. We did a Disagree with Each Other event earlier in the year where it was myself and another faculty member. We disagreed with each other about the concept of “electability” and then facilitated with the students, and I think we had 15, but sometimes something hits such a nerve that you'll have a huge amount. Back when AU was doing some policies to limit student protest and expression, we had a Disagree with a Policy session and it was overflowing into the hallway where we had a hundred people. So it'll depend. We tend to think that particularly for student facilitated events, the sort of sweet spot if Grace or Arjun or Khushi or one of our other facilitators is running a dialogue, we think that six to 15 people is the real sweet spot for a deep and meaningful dialogue. I've had great ones with three or four sometimes when we have one of these professor-facilitated events or an outside speaker, we've done teach-ins on things like tariffs and Constitutional failure, then we might expect to have 50 or 60 people there. So it really depends upon the format. But I think for your audience who are designing student-led dialogues, I think our students would say they've had really great discussions when you have around half dozen to a dozen people, you can do something really meaningful.
GRACE MANSON: Yeah, I definitely agree. And I think also to answer your question, I think there was a dialogue that I had very recently that Professor Schwartz, you were there for with [name of secondary school], and I'm really happy with how that one went specifically. So I brought in a dialogue that I facilitated last semester during finals season, just wanted to do something chill. So I talked about or had people talk about the ethics of Mr. Beast. And so because I was bringing dialogue into a group of high schoolers, I figured this is probably one of the more accessible ground-level things where everybody already has a baseline. So we can use this to then talk about different issues. And—
[29:56]
PETER HORN: So this is a nice point, generationally, to interject. Because there will be some in our audience who did not have a familiarity with Mr. Beast, can you hum a few bars?
GRACE MANSON: Absolutely, yes, yes, yes. Okay. So Mr. Beast is perhaps, I think he is the top-subscribed YouTube channel, and then he also has other YouTube channels, like he a gaming channel, philanthropy channel, whatever. And of his channels, I think a couple of those are also within the top 10. He makes an absurd amount of money online. This is his living and this is the living of many people who work for him. And so a lot of his content appeals directly to children. He did a spinoff of Squid Game, but with people. He started out with just these challenges like staying awake for 24 hours on a live stream and just chatting with people and it just kind of snowballed and snowballed. So he's been very, very popular with the younger generation, but then also college students are aware of him because every so often something that he does will go viral and then we all hear about it and it's a meme.
So I chose that. I chose to kind of revive that dialogue because one, it was, I think one of my best attended because everybody wants to just yap about Mr. Beast for an hour instead of studying for finals and two, because I knew that it would be probably easier to talk about than say policing in the school system. And so I loved that dialogue with [name of secondary school] because I am very used to the AU community, facilitating with them, and I'd never done something with an outside community, and so I wasn't sure what to expect insofar as a lot of the people who show up to these PCD dialogues have also been taking specific AU classes, and I might already know them and I might know what to expect. And so it was really, really interesting to see a pretty diverse set of viewpoints and people who were really passionate to engage in it. So I think just for me, that dialogue itself didn't have a specific “aha moment” that sticks out to me so much as it was just one of those things where I was really happy to see there was this way where people could talk about more serious issues, but you don't have to talk about the issue itself. I don't have to bring up economic policy to talk about economic disparities because Mr. Beast, there's a way to talk about that through him. You don't have to talk about power relations by bringing up this political issue because you can talk about it through an example through Mr. Beast. And so I found it to be a really interesting vehicle through which to approach these issues with the high school population.
PETER HORN: I think it's a wonderful example. Lots of people when they're trying to develop students' skills with these dialogue practices will want to stay away—I think wisely—you want to stay away from the most controversial, contentious issues at the outset as you're discovering that you have the capacity to do this. I think that's a smart thing, but there has to be also real interest in what it is that you're talking about. And so I think sometimes people in a very good-natured way, we will use an example like, Is a hot dog a sandwich? Let's talk about this. And it is just very hard to get fired up about that, even if you're a third-grader. So it's a wonderful example. I've put communications technology, like cell phones in the classroom, in that genre because everybody's got a feeling about it and everybody has some views if you've been near a cell phone, but also it's not politically partisan and charged in the way that say, the War in Gaza or reproductive freedom might be.
[34:10]
MICHELLE EDWARDS: Hello friends, it’s me again, Dr. Michelle, to sweeten your ad break with my glorious voice. You might expect me to tell you that if you enjoy this conversation and want to support the project of this podcast to share great ideas about what and how and why we learn, you should click the link on the show page to learn how to contribute monthly or with a one-time gift. Well, surprise! I won’t even mention that donation button on the show page, because there are other ways you can help the show that involve ZERO dollars. Support is support, am I right? You can also help by rating, or even better reviewing the show in your podcast app of choice. It only takes a minute, costs no money, and helps other people find it more easily. You can also share an episode with someone you know who might enjoy it: also free, and it also helps get the word out. But maybe you’re not quite sure how to do all that. I see you. Just click the link on the show page to join the newsletter list, and then when Pete emails you about a new episode, you write him back and ask for help. He’ll love to hear from you. Thanks for all the ways you support this show, including continuing to listen. All right, back to the show!
[35:37]
PETER HORN: I wanted to ask, since we're on the online topic, or since online has come up through Mr. Beast, who really connects to everything. Let's be honest about that! What do you think about how much—I'm going to stay away from giving the vibe of These kids on their phones these days because we're all on our phones. But there is a certain amount of time in our daily rhythm that's devoted to online communication through social media and so forth. I'm personally grateful—I'll just lay my cards on the table—I'm grateful to other podcasters and columnists and people who will go on X [Twitter] and tell me what kinds of things I need to pay attention to, because I can't spend any time there without losing my mind. But the difference in the quality of what happens when you have people together in a room talking about an idea versus what would happen in a comment thread or when things could get popping online. What is it like for you? The difference of doing this in an unmediated way, that is to say being there in shared space, physically present, being able to see the other people as opposed to online space?
LARA SCHWARTZ: Might I slightly challenge the premise, in true PCD spirit?
PETER HORN: Please!
LARA SCHWARTZ: I do want to draw a distinction between just “online” versus “social media,” because I think the real difference—and I'm interested to hear what my colleagues think—isn't necessarily being in person versus being in a Zoom room, although that does pose challenges. I think the difference is having a shared purpose versus being in a place for people to just hurl takes. I'm hopeful that if there are educators that find themselves teaching on Zoom, or teaching asynchronously, that they don't lose heart because I think it's actually possible to build community in remote learning and online learning. But from my perspective, social media is very different from that. But I'd love you to feel free to “disagree with a professor” also!
KHUSHI RAMNANI: I don't think of social media as a place to communicate. It's not something that makes sense to me. It's not where I go to communicate. I go to social media to consume content and to see what the world is doing, but it's not a two-way street. The comments are a war zone! It's not fun. It can be funny. Yes. I mean yes, it can be hilarious and it often is hilarious, but it's not something that I think actively about like, Oh, this is where I am seeing the general idea of This is what people are thinking. No, people don't actually think that way. The comments are now a place where people can kind of become a screenshot and they're excited about that. Let me say the most ludicrous thing possible so I can collect laughs or I can collect likes and I can agitate someone or I can shock someone or I can make fun of someone. It's not something that you're doing with the right intentions in the sense to communicate. You're not expecting someone to respond to that. And when people make comments, they're not actually doing it to the person that posted.
PETER HORN: Right. There's a performative dimension.
KHUSHI RAMNANI: Right. Yeah, that's what I'm trying to get at. And I think communication only happens online in private group chats now, and those private group chats have to remain very private because you know the other person, and you know it's not anonymous, and I think that's what PCD kind of encapsulates: where you have to see this person again. That accountability does not exist online.
GRACE MANSON: Yeah, I mean, so half-agree with you. I definitely agree that social media is not a hotbed of productive dialogue. I do think that social media has become today's public square, and so I think we do need to kind of acknowledge that level of it. I mean, do I think it's the best platform for public square? Yes and no, because I think it has its benefits and I think it has its pitfalls. I really do agree with Khushi’s idea of there being a performative aspect of the comment section. I think that definitely rings true. I think if you look at any comment section of any video that's gotten say more than a thousand likes, you'll see a whole bunch of different dialogues going on. You'll see someone being like, this video sucks and you'll get the I love this video. Then you'll also get the interesting dialogues in between where it's someone trolling and then someone taking that very, very seriously and then someone taking the opposite side of that very, very seriously. And you get a third person who's like, actually both of those people are trolling, so you're not going to something productive there. But I do think that there's still some sort of value in communication over social media. I find that that is still how I keep in touch with some of my friends who, say, might not live in the country, and so it might be a little bit more difficult over normal text message. I think there's still some value to it, but also I have a hard time trying to reconcile with the balance of this is great, but it's also really, really bad internally. And I find myself definitely siding with you, Khushi, on it being a slippery slope.
ARJUN MISHRA: I think that we're here in the Project on Civic Dialogue and what Khushi said that really stood out to me was the one-way street. Social media is not a place for dialogue. It's a place for monologue. And when you're seeing someone post on Twitter or Instagram, or I've been using Substack a lot recently because I guess I'm nerdy about certain things and I have nerdy economists posting their opinions on there. But I think that that just really shows that this isn't a place even in the comment section where you're going to see a bunch of productive conversation. Even if someone is disagreeing, you're just going to have someone attacking them or you're not going to have someone be like, Okay, why? It's impossible to really understand that context, because I think that social media dehumanizes other people. So then the mode of conversation or the mode of understanding is just changed entirely. So when we talk about Professor Schwartz talking about Zoom conversations versus some guy on X—I should call it Twitter, not X, I don't do that—but I think that it just rapidly changes the form because I don't know, on X, I'm like—I actually don't even know my X handle, but I'm just my X handle—Twitter handle, sorry! Twitter handle. And here I'm Arjun with the face and with facial expressions and another person, and if you just looked at me on the street, you are not going to go and be like, there's not a massive label on me now that you've attached. So I think that it's just a very, it's a lot easier to simplify identities, which is I think a really major thing in dialogue because again, I think it comes back to the idea of context and understanding. And without those things it's just like, I don't know. There's a term that's used a lot in my generation now, called “rage baiting” on social media—
[VO]: As you might guess, if you're lucky enough not to know, “rage baiting” describes intentionally provoking anger and outrage to increase online engagement and ultimately profits. The term is regrettably popular enough that as I record this, it's on the short list of three candidates for the Oxford University Press 2025 Word of the Year [UPDATE, 12/2/25: it has won].
ARJUN MISHRA: The incentive structure of social media if you actually want to continue using it as a form of conversation and dialogue is you just want to make sure that you're getting those reactions to your content. And it's just like how people started talking about online or even print journalism is like you don't necessarily see Fox News doesn't have the incentive to produce what's the most accurate. They have the incentive to produce whatever continues to expand their viewer base and viewer consistency and loyalty.
[45:15]
PETER HORN: I want to shift gears to something very hopeful indeed. And these are some words actually by Khushi, who's with us, that are featured on the homepage of the PCD website. And so there's a lovely pull-quote there that says, “Our commitment is to listen. To hold the flame of our voices in a shared space, and commit to connect and actively participate in a deliberate and intelligent manner.” You said these words, right Khushi, or wrote them?
KHUSHI RAMNANI: That was the first time I've ever been quoted … to me. That felt so special.
PETER HORN: How did it feel?
KHUSHI RAMNANI: It felt great.
PETER HORN: Good, good, good! Well, I want to tell you what I love about it. I'm going to go further, so we'll ride that feeling. I love the metaphor of “the flame of our voices” because of course flames can warm and illuminate, but they can also burn and wound. So your commitment is to hold that flame in shared space and connect. And so I wanted to ask each of you, and this is an all-play, so Professor Schwartz, please get in on this as well, but what would you most like people to understand about what's necessary in order to begin to do this sort of work? So either what kinds of dispositions or skills do you consider to be most important? Or if there's just one piece of advice that you would like folks to take away from this conversation about dialogue, what is it?
KHUSHI RAMNANI: I think the most important thing when it comes to dialogue is offering the space, whether that be physical or online or whatever. Just giving someone the validation that they're heard and that someone is listening that can avoid the extremities that we see so often nowadays. And you never know who needs that, and you never know what someone else is going through. You genuinely do not know anything about anyone. And when you open that space up and you have that courage to listen to people, it can change lives. I don't know. It could go from something so small and it can grow to something so big overnight. It could take time. Whatever it is, it causes change. And that's something that's so special and that's something that's so rare.
ARJUN MISHRA: I mean, I'd be on the same page with that. I think that the entire idea of dialogue in the first place, the reason you would enter a space like a PCD room—some people might enter it just wanting to get their own opinions out because they have so many opinions on a certain issue. And doing that, sometimes you might already come with the base assumption that if someone believes in this certain view, you just can't talk to them or you just don't respect them anymore. And I think that one of the most important things—especially in today's world where everything is so polarized, that entering a space where there is an expectation that you will at least try to humanize and try to listen to another person. It's not meant to change your view in the slightest, but just having an understanding for other people—I feel like that's just the point I keep on coming back to—is just so important because you can't build things in a society where you have multiple views and so many different issues that are being debated, but just only two political parties to represent you without at least first understanding how we can find a middle ground. And you can't find a middle ground if you just don't understand the other person. And you only see them for, I don’t know, this big overarching view or policy point. So when you're just able to hash out the smaller points in conversation, I think it just opens a lot of other smaller doors. You're like, Okay, maybe we're not so different in this area. And suppose you are super, super different. I think that you can at least understand that this person is a human that is thinking and thinking because they have a sense of reasoning. And I think that that still helps, at least to a slight degree.
[49:57]
GRACE MANSON: Yeah, no, I want to pull on you talking about the finding similarities. I think it’s really important, especially if you find yourself in a situation where, whether it be the entire room is super divided or just even, there are some people who really cannot find middle or common ground. One thing that I always think back to is, for any Full House [sitcom broadcast 1987-1995] devotees here, I think with this one scene—I think it was with D.J. and Stephanie, I don't know—they're both in these chairs and they can't agree on anything. And then there's somebody there trying to facilitate some sort of agreement—I don't remember who. And so every time that they agree upon something, they move their chairs closer and closer together until they're finally agreeing upon some sort of complaint they have about the facilitator. It's a funny moment, not entirely the point, don't get people to agree on something they don't like about you! But I think even if you can try to move the needle a little bit and say you have two people who are talking about something political and they just don't see eye to eye at all, taking a step back and be like, Okay, well maybe you have different stances on gun control, but do we agree that we want X, that we prioritize safety in some sort of way? Okay, if we prioritize safety in some sort of way, do we agree upon something a little bit smaller there? Something a little bit more specific? Do we have something here that we can get to enough of a shared ground where we can then try to navigate dialogue?
PETER HORN: Yeah, and that kind of—I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. Were you finished, Grace? GRACE MANSON: Yes.
PETER HORN: And that sort of comes full circle to the idea of trying to surface interests rather than focusing on just the positions that are on the surface. Is there something deeper than this that subtends it that we can agree on? Like safety.
LARA SCHWARTZ: And finding values. In the facilitator course, the practice of identifying values of people in the room, so the opponents and proponents of having armed campus police or having gun regulations will cite safety as the thing that they care about. I think that's a really hard thing for people to get their head around is we are such a polarized society, but for the most part, we're not divided between people who like good things and people who like bad things, where people who believe we like good things and have radically different ideas about how to achieve good things. As Arjun said, sometimes our ideas of how to achieve good things aren't that different. And when we have animosity, political animosity, it's actually about what we think culturally of another political movement and not the actual solutions that they have to problems. So you might consider yourself a dyed-in-the-wool Republican or a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat and think that the price of groceries is incredibly important to you and you want someone to do something about that. But those Republicans drive big gas-guzzling trucks and those Democrats eat tofu and I don't like them. These aren't disagreements. They're cultural alignments. And so my thing for anybody who—
PETER HORN: Do you know how much tofu you can fit in a gas-guzzling truck?
LARA SCHWARTZ: You can fit a lot, you can fit a lot!
PETER HORN: There's a way to do this!
LARA SCHWARTZ: It's nice. It's square, so you can pack it into the bed of your F-150.
PETER HORN: One hundred percent. That’s what I’m thinking.
ARJUN MISHRA: You can fit it in perfectly.
LARA SCHWARTZ: What I would say—the two things for people wanting to create dialogues, particularly in schools: So thing one is that. Don't design dialogues where it has to be bipartisan. It’s nonpartisan. People are not in their DNA, in their fingerprints, a member of a political party. And more and more people, including young people, aren't a member of either of the two major parties. So if you think you're trying to facilitate a conversation between Republicans and Democrats, or liberals and conservatives, teach people to churn butter while you're at it! You might be a little bit behind where this generation is. So I think not reinforcing divisions that are artificial and ever-shifting and changing is really important—just coming into the room as people. But the other thing for your listeners who are educators and who are going to do this dialogue work in schools, kindly—I'm going to say something really radical here—
PETER HORN: I love it …
LARA SCHWARTZ: Respect students. A lot of what passes for or what promotes itself as “dialogue work”—we call it the Dialogue Industrial Complex. If you ask these people what problem they're solving, the problem they're solving is Kids Today. They don't agree with me on the Middle East and they don't agree with me on a million things and they don't agree with me on that guy who wants to be Mayor of New York. Who does he think he is? The winner of the election. And if you think kids today are the problem, maybe take a beat and ask, Is this educational? If the problem you think the problem you're solving is What Kids Think, that's not dialogue. That might be indoctrination. And also the youngs can smell it on you if they think what you're trying to do is set up a situation where they calm the heck down and don't have an encampment or don't vote for the guy you don't like. And so yielding the floor over to students, letting them lead the conversations, design the conversations, empowering them to have the conversation they want to have. I didn't get to see Arjun’s dialogue because I want to be out of those rooms so that they can really freely have these conversations. And it requires trusting and respecting these people. We've got kind of a social compact here that there are standards and expectations for good dialogue facilitation, and when they achieve those, when they show they can do that, we say, Great, I'm getting out of your way and I'm not here to solve the problem of students who actually aren't a problem. We're here to give students more tools to keep doing what they want to do, which is solve the world's problems together through dialogue, through canvassing, through civic engagement, through the other work that they do. And I just think that students will come to your dialogue programs if they feel that it's empowering them and giving them the tools to shape the world that's theirs to inherit, and they won't if they feel kind of scolded or like you're trying to moderate them in some way. These kinds of dialogues do have the effect of yielding incredibly nuanced positions. And so I don't see us as a hotbed of radicalism because people who work together tend to come up with pretty reasonable approaches, but it just does require, I think, really trusting students to do that work and believing that they can do the work and that they have something worthwhile to say.
[57:25]
That’s it for today’s show! You’ve probably had your fill of Thanksgiving specials by the time you hear this, but I’m truly grateful for the chance to speak with people committed to such important work. My great thanks to Grace Manson, Arjun Mishra, Khushi Ramnani, and Lara Schwartz from the Project on Civic Dialogue in the School of Public Affairs at American University for joining me to talk about how we can talk and listen and disagree better. A producing credit goes to PCD Program Coordinator Rahul Kirkhope for all his logistical support in recent weeks. If you happen to be shopping for any gifts this month and don’t know what to get one of the college students, teachers, or other dialogue lovers in your life, I cannot recommend any book more highly in this bewildering moment than Lara’s Try to Love the Questions: From Debate to Dialogue in Classrooms and Life. Check the link on the show page. You’ll also find information related to the incurable touring habits of Shayfer James, who must be thanked as always for furnishing instrumental versions of his beautiful songs for use in this episode—and yes, good people of the Spotify legal team, I do have explicit permission to use them! Finally, thanks to you for listening, rating, reviewing, and sharing this show. Dr. Michelle is absolutely right: if you don’t know how to do any of that, I’m happy to explain, because it really does help the show reach more interested listeners. Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, mixed, and mastered by me right here in Sunny Buffalo, New York. I’m Peter Horn, and I’ll be back at you in 2026 with a fresh slate of episodes all about what and how and why we learn. To each of you, all my best wishes for warm and happy holidays. More light is on the way!
