by Maureen Turner
Photo credit: Antonio Chicaia
“I’m sort of ancient,” Carl Tricoli, B.A. ’77, says with a laugh, “but I recall that in my college days, a rite of passage was sitting around the Texas Union drinking beer and arguing about whatever aspects of life you were arguing about.”
Those conversations — opportunities to debate big ideas, defend your opinions, hear out the positions of others, and walk away still friends — weren’t just a fun way to pass an evening, Carl says. They were also a key component of what he learned as an undergraduate at The University of Texas at Austin, both inside and outside the classroom: the ability to think analytically and critically.
But today, Carl worries that far too few students experience the sort of open-ended, freewheeling arguments he and his friends enjoyed. “My fear, frankly, looking from the outside, is that people are fearful of expressing their views. There is a hesitancy around real dialogue.” Instead, he says, people hold their tongues to avoid inadvertently offending someone or being excoriated for their opinions — whether in person or, increasingly, on social media platforms, where conflicts spread like wildlife. And that’s a problem not just for individuals. When a society is no longer able to engage in civil discourse, it’s a problem for everyone.
Those concerns prompted Carl and his wife, Tamara, to make a gift to the College of Liberal Arts to create more opportunities for students to engage in these kinds of challenging but invaluable conversations. The Tricolis’ gift provides support for faculty members to develop course material to teach students the basics of civil discourse: active listening, respectful debate and the ability to find common ground when possible and to agree to disagree when not. It also supports speakers, panels and other events where participants can model constructive civil discourse on challenging issues.
You can’t learn to think critically if no one has ever challenged your opinions.
Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies Hina Azam was one of the first faculty members to receive a grant from the Tricolis’ gift. She used the funds to develop new material for her “Introduction to Islam” course, which draws a cross-section of students from across majors.
“It’s so timely. It’s so needed,” Hina says of the opportunity presented by the grant. “I’ve been interested for awhile in issues of democracy and authoritarianism. What does it mean to have an open society? What does it mean to have a free society? What does it mean to have a democratic society? And what does it mean to have a civil society? All of those things are interconnected.”
Hina had been thinking about these big questions within the context of the classroom, where she has witnessed an increasing tendency for students to become easily offended by a difference of opinion and, at the same time, to fear expressing their own opinion. Rather than risk being shamed or scolded for sharing views or asking questions others might deem inappropriate, students simply keep their thoughts to themselves.
“That’s detrimental not only to freedom of expression, but to freedom of inquiry,” Hina says. “When we think of a repressive society, we imagine external forces preventing us from expressing our opinions. But as repressive tendencies become more cultural rather than political in nature — when they become things that we do to ourselves — then it’s no longer outside forces that suppress our opinions, it is our internal psychological situation causing us to self-repress. We start not only curtailing what we say, we start curtailing what we inquire about. And you feel more comfortable being with people who are in the same like-minded identity group or bubble that you are in, because it’s too risky to be around people who are different than you.”
That unwillingness to engage in difficult conversations isn’t limited to students. But, Carl believes, the problem is especially dangerous on college campuses, where young people should be developing crucial skills to prepare them for the rest of their lives. “The foundation of a liberal arts education is that you have your ideas challenged, so that you learn not only how to defend your own ideas but so you continually examine your ideas in light of other new information or other perspectives,” he says. “You can’t learn to think critically if no one has ever challenged your opinions.”