When I arrived at Emory University as a first-year student in fall 2023, I carried a certain vision of what college would be. I imagined a place where ideas openly clash, where students and professors alike test old texts and radical notions for truth and relevance and where spirited debates deepen students’ understanding of each other and the world. I expected late-night dorm conversations that pushed everyone beyond their comfort zones and classrooms that wholeheartedly welcomed controversial opinions. If any environment were suited to intellectual risk-taking, I felt it should be Emory — one of the top liberal arts universities in the world.
Yet, I soon discovered a campus hesitant to face the political divisions of our time. During my first semester at Emory, I took Jimmy Carter Professor of History Joseph Crespino’s class titled “Great Books: History.” We discussed some of history’s most provocative texts, including Karl Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto,” Charles Darwin’s “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex,” Max Weber’s “Protestant Work Ethic” and Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations.” These works should have challenged us by sparking debates about capitalism versus communism, the role of religion in the West and the dangerous legacy of social Darwinism. But despite our professor’s best efforts to foster discourse, my classmates and I treaded carefully, hyper focused on avoiding offending each other. What could have been a lively intellectual battleground felt more like a carefully choreographed dance around the elephant in the room — our modern political issues that quite literally originated from these texts. There was a pervading sense of fear. No one wanted to say the wrong thing and be canceled, labeled a bigot or, alternatively, dismissed as a left-wing extremist.
A liberal arts education should invite us to test our arguments, risk being wrong and emerge wiser from it. If we neglect this principle, students will simply continue to echo the prevailing opinions of their hometowns and, in many cases, the campus political majority. Worse still, we risk stunting our capacity for civic engagement as the next generation of leaders becomes uneasy with dissent and hesitant to engage with anyone with perceived ideological divides.
In an effort to restore this spirit, Crespino and I created a new one-credit discussion course on political polarization last fall semester. No viewpoint would be off-limits. I knew that without conservative voices — including those of President Donald Trump’s supporters — class conversations would remain incomplete. At first, conservative students approached the class warily, fearing tokenization or ridicule. Progressive students also hesitated, unsure about sharing a room, let alone a candid exchange, with those whom they saw as endorsing policies threatening their rights and dignity.
To break through the initial barriers and walls that we had all constructed, the class began with personal stories rather than political creeds. One student shared how disappearing factories hollowed his hometown, once a thriving community reliant on manufacturing, and his neighborhood struggled under the weight of crime. Another student from Alabama explained the complexities of his family members’ choices to vote for Trump. He noted that, as Black Southerners, their votes were not an endorsement but rather a desperate wager — votes against the institutions they felt had been failing them for decades. The vast majority of the students in the class shared the feeling that established government programs meant to help, provide for and protect Americans were repeatedly falling short. Moreover, it became clear that as we fell deeper into cultural wars on campus, our political conversations had drifted away from these sorts of domestic issues most affecting students and their families.
As we continued to share our stories and experiences in our discussions, the classroom dynamic began to change. We stopped seeing each other as pure caricatures of opposing ideologies and instead started to recognize the individual narratives and experiences that shaped us. With an established sense of empathy, we finally dared to confront tougher questions about economic policy, immigration rhetoric and the fragility of our cherished democracy.
I want to expand this work from our classroom to the whole University. I am now working to establish a new club, Emory’s Union, which will be exclusively dedicated to fostering unfiltered dialogue between students, faculty and other community members. We will work with existing political groups and clubs on campus — including Young Democrats of Emory, Emory College Republicans and Incubate Debate — to invite speakers who challenge our assumptions and stage debates that refuse easy answers. Our goal is to model the kind of discourse that allows American democracy to maintain one of its best qualities — the flexibility to incorporate new ideologies that best serve and represent all Americans.
As a community committed to inquiry and intellectual growth, we must stop mistaking silence for civility and recognize that discomfort and open debate are integral to learning. These conversations may not be comfortable, but they might just be the only way to move forward — together.
Contact Noah Stifelman (27C) at noah.stifelman@emory.edu.
