Ford Foundation Grant
The Keller Center is proud to announce that it has been awarded a $10,000 Ford Foundation Grant for its proposal, "Difficult Dialogues." Below is a short version of our proposal, together with a link to Prof. Vanessa Baird's first pilot version of this course, which will eventually be team-taught with Prof. Michaele Ferguson.
Proposal: Difficult Dialogues
Project Leaders: Vanessa Baird, Michaele Ferguson, David Mapel
If one had to pick a university in the U.S. where controversy has raged about religious, cultural and political diversity and its relation to academic freedom, it might very well be the University of Colorado, Boulder (CU). In the last year, there has been conflict on campus about abortion and gay rights, incidents involving racist graffiti, charges that one Instructor has been dropped because of left-wing activism and another because of right-wing Christianity, calls from the outside for an “academic bill of rights” and for the reform or abolition of tenure, and of course a veritable firestorm of criticism directed at Prof. Ward Churchill for politically subversive speech and alleged academic misconduct.
All of this represents a more general problem that we seek to address, namely, the failure of the academy to educate everyone involved—students, faculty, and the general public--about the rights and duties of academic freedom, and, more broadly, the role of diversity and disagreement in education. On the one hand, universities are commonly seen as rejecting ethical and especially religious pluralism when it comes to empirical subjects, particularly with respect to the teaching of evolution, but also and more subtly with regard to other bio-medical issues, such as stem cell research. On the other hand, universities are also commonly seen as endorsing pluralism in normative matters, especially morality, religion and politics. Some critics charge that this endorsement of pluralism causes students to become relativists who disengage from debate and disagreement. Other critics charge that this endorsement of pluralism is a sham, hiding an essentially liberal consensus on values. We believe that all of these perceptions are symptomatic of the failure of universities to communicate to their students and to the public the role of pluralism in university life, teaching and research.
Thus, we propose a course that we believe will create long-lasting effects on the University of Colorado campus, well after the term of the grant has ended. This course will be administered by the faculty of the Keller Center for the Study of the First Amendment (Profs. Baird, Ferguson, and Mapel), which is housed in the CU Political Science Department.
We propose to focus on four themes of particular relevance to the CU community, but also to the larger U.S. debate:
The scholarly literature on what causes people to become more tolerant guides all aspects of this proposal. The most important sources of political tolerance are discussions and social networks among diverse groups, and opportunities for those groups to be active in community service. For this reason, our proposal contains elements of these two kinds of activities, both in the course and in events involving the larger university and general community. Peffley and Rohrschneider (2003) and Cigler and Joslyn (2002) find that the most important determinant of democratic learning is democratic action. In other words, when people exercise their civil liberties and rights, they are more likely to support civil liberties and civil rights for others, even for those that they might consider to be their political enemies. According to this logic, having students, faculty, staff, and members of the larger community actively participating will create networks across different kinds of groups on campus, both in and outside of classes, and therefore inspire greater tolerance (Golebiowska 1995, Mutz 2002 and Alba 1978).
Team-Taught Undergraduate Course on “Difficult Dialogues
We will develop an undergraduate course (100 students) to be team-taught by two faculty: one who approaches these topics primarily from a humanistic perspective, the other from a social scientific approach. This course will examine (a) the normative justifications for valuing moral, political and religious pluralism, (b) the justification and limits of pluralism in American jurisprudence, (c) the political psychology of pluralism (e.g. what causes people to hate or tolerate one another), and (d) how these first three questions are specifically related to the four topics listed above.
Students will do more than just learn this material, however; they will engage in active learning (Bonwell and Eison 1991) through one of two course projects. First, they can opt to pursue research into what causes support for tolerance and diversity at CU. With our guidance, they will use the academic literature to design their own experimental research to further our understanding of the determinants of tolerant attitudes. This project enlists students as producers of knowledge about pluralism. Second, they can opt to pursue service learning by finding ways to generate dialogue between diverse groups in the CU or Denver/Boulder community; this project gives students experience with encountering, learning about, and tolerating those who differ from them. We will encourage students to find service opportunities through CU’s Volunteer Clearinghouse. Current research on active learning (Bean 1996, Eyler and Giles 1999) shows that critical reflection on how such course projects inform, converge with, or diverge from studied material contributes to longer-lasting, more profound learning. Thus students will keep a weekly critical reflection journal.
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The LeRoy Keller Center 333 UCB | Boulder, CO 80309-0333 | Phone: 303-492-6662 Email: mapel@colorado.edu |