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The Difficult Dialogues Initiative
Academic freedom takes center stage in the multicampus projects from which this issue’s feature articles are drawn.
By Robert M. O'Neil
The Ford Foundation announced its Difficult Dialogues initiative in spring 2005 in response to reports of growing intolerance and efforts to curb academic freedom on U.S. campuses. Program planners anticipated that their invitation to submit proposals, extended to all accredited U.S. institutions of higher education enrolling undergraduates, might draw as many as three hundred applications. In fact, nearly seven hundred institutions responded—almost a quarter of those invited—each forwarding brief statements describing how their college or university would address campus tensions, with special emphasis on promoting pluralism and enhancing academic freedom.
The volume of proposals necessitated recruiting additional preliminary reviewers. Following a first round of reviews, Ford invited 136 institutions to submit much more detailed proposals, from which it planned to select twenty to twenty-five institutions to receive funding. Of the finalists, all but four responded with full submissions; one of those that dropped out at this stage was a New Orleans university that found it impossible to prepare a proposal while trying to recover from Hurricane Katrina. A rigorous process of external review, followed by a final internal stage, resulted in the selection of twenty-seven colleges and universities to receive full funding, which amounted to $100,000 for a two-year period. There were, in addition, sixteen runners-up, each of which received a more modest $10,000 but were eligible to participate in planned regional conferences and other facets of the program.
The uniqueness of Difficult Dialogues was manifest in several ways. The Ford Foundation sponsored a similar competition in 1990, although with two major differences: only a small group of selective institutions were invited to apply, and the 1990 program focused almost exclusively on racial and ethnic tensions. The letter that launched Difficult Dialogues—from Ford’s president, Susan Beresford, and a dozen current and two former university presidents—began by noting rising tensions over Middle Eastern issues on campuses and stressed the importance of protecting, on the college campus of all places, “the expression of a wide diversity of viewpoints” on these and other contentious issues. “In times like these,” wrote the letter’s authors to their fellow presidents and chancellors, “we need to be especially vigilant in maintaining and nurturing a free and open campus environment.”
Above all, the central focus on academic freedom marked Difficult Dialogues as a singular initiative. In their letter, the presidents reminded their colleagues that colleges and universities “bear a special responsibility to protect and respect academic freedom, not only in shaping their own policies, but also in supporting faculty members and students whose freedoms are threatened.” The letter stressed the central ingredient of that freedom: professors’ rights to speak and write freely without institutional constraint or sanction. It also emphasized, however, essential qualifications: “If . . . professors seek to exploit students, coerce the views of students, or display a demonstrable lack of competence in their discipline, their academic colleagues may conclude that their expression exceeds the limits of academic freedom.” This juxtaposition concluded by cautioning that “academic freedom must always be accompanied by academic responsibility.”
The letter became more specific as it developed this central theme, stressing the recent increase in anti-Semitism and anti-Arab or anti-Muslim incidents on too many campuses. Given these hostile forces, as well as the steadily growing diversity of student populations, the presidents called on their fellow campus leaders to “create an atmosphere of mutual respect, in which diversity is examined and seen in the context of a broader set of common values.” As an especially appropriate response to such challenges, the letter urged development of “academic programs to engage students in constructive dialogue around difficult religious, political, racial or ethnic, and cultural issues.” It was in this context that the letter invited submission of responsive proposals.
The very process of crafting proposals invited campus dialogue— occasionally even difficult dialogue—across departmental, disciplinary, and other lines that so often separate and divide academic colleagues. The “teams” that took shape on the successful campuses were diverse, bringing together colleagues who may never have interacted with one another before. What was striking at many of the institutions that ultimately received grants was a realization of the value of such interdependence in the course of achieving a shared and desirable goal. Also remarkable in this respect was the amount of such interaction that the quest for a foundation grant evoked.
The range of grant recipients runs the gamut of American higher education—public and private institutions, two-year and liberal arts colleges, and comprehensive and doctoral universities, spanning the nation from Anchorage to Miami and from Tempe to Hanover. Some programs emphasize racial tensions, and others stress religious conflicts, while Middle East tensions represent a predictably pervasive theme. The specific approaches different institutions selected vary as widely as the types of institutions and the programs of focus. The development of new course offerings is a common element, but workshops, town-gown interactions, overseas study programs, and lecture series also figure prominently in the successful proposals.
The structures of the funded programs are no less diverse than their subjects of focus. No two programs are identical, and in fact they differ much more than one would have predicted. The principal investigator at one doctoral campus is an academic vice provost; at another, it is the chief student affairs officer. At still another, it is a senior English professor, while superficially comparable programs elsewhere are guided by a former law school dean and, in one instance, a senior staff member in the learning resources center. These variations make eminently good sense; they reflect the character and structure of each institution, validating Ford’s early insight that the invitation should not have been sent automatically to a religious studies department or a student affairs office but to whichever office or person could best marshal and aggregate the resources vital to crafting a responsive program. Hence the remarkable diversity and variety in structure, which is quite as impressive as the eclectic array of themes and methods.
Although not all the funded proposals give central emphasis to academic freedom, a substantial number of grantees and runners-up did respond specifically to the challenge of the presidents’ letter by making an institutional commitment to enhance protection for academic freedom. The programs described in the articles that follow reflect a consistently high level of such commitment. Happily, they also reflect the diversity of the participating institutions—from a northeastern liberal arts college to public and private doctoral institutions in the Southeast, to a Midwestern research university, to a community college in the Pacific Northwest. An additional article describes a unique program that was developed at the behest of the national AAUP office at a meeting of the Virginia state conference of the AAUP.
Because many of the Difficult Dialogues programs do not really begin until summer or early fall 2006, it is much too early to offer any assessment. All that can be said at this stage—and this much is vitally important, whatever happens as the program matures—is that both the Ford Foundation and the institutions that sought foundation support recognized to an unprecedented degree the central value of protecting the academic freedom of faculty and students. Whatever else comes from Difficult Dialogues, that much alone would validate the hopes of the program’s sponsors.
O’Neil, guest editor of this issue of Academe, is professor of law and former president of the University of Virginia, where he directs the Thomas Jefferson Center for Protection of Free Expression.
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