Several concurrent sessions during the 2019 Presidents Institute addressed the themes of civility, inclusion, and viewpoint diversity that
Jonathan Haidt introduced during his plenary address on January 5. Together, these sessions helped participants explore how strong campus leadership and clear academic missions can help shape constructive and thoughtful campus conversations about political, social, and religious differences.
Free Speech Challenges
In a session devoted to “Presidential Strategies for Free Speech Challenges,” Andrea E. Chapdelaine, president of
Hood College (MD), and Zach P. Messitte, president of
Ripon College (WI), described how their institutions responded to specific free speech conflicts that became magnified through social media and attention from outside groups. Emily Chamlee-Wright, president and CEO of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, added a national, cross-sector perspective on developing effective policies to protect free speech on campus.
James H. Mullen, president of Allegheny College (PA), moderated a session on "Presidential Strategies for Free Speech Challenges" with panelists Andrea E. Chapdelaine, president of Hood College (MD); Emily Chamlee-Wright, president and CEO of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University; and Zach P. Messitte, president of Ripon College (WI).
The free speech clash at Hood began in April 2017, when the Hood College Republicans requested and received access to a public space set aside for poster displays by student groups. The display included quotes from conservative organizations regarding abortion and transgender identity as well as images and text that many students—and then faculty and staff members, alumni, and outside commentators—considered offensive or derogatory. Conversely, others, especially outside conservative groups, rushed to defend the campus group, leading to a flurry of media and social media attention from all sides. The outside attention drew focus away from two questions Chapdelaine and her leadership team considered to be crucial: Did the college follow its own policies in allowing the display, and what should they do next?
Chapdelaine reached out immediately to the Republican club (via their faculty advisor) to make sure that they understood why other students considered the posters “a form of harassment.” Also, in a pair of campus-wide communications issued within 48 hours of the poster display, she assured students and others that campus leaders were having discussions with students, administrators, and faculty members to come to a resolution that was consistent with the values of the institution, stating that “as an educational community, our best response is not with the act of taking down a display, but in how to move forward.” Meanwhile, after discussions with the faculty, senior team, and board chair, Chapdelaine decided to let the posters remain on display. At the same time, the college prepared a detailed set of talking points to respond to the overheated media attention.
Chapdelaine drew several lessons from this episode. When a free speech crisis erupts, college presidents need to “communicate as soon as possible and often,” relying on the advice of their communications staff. But they also need to “take as much time to act as possible,” so they can “separate personal reactions and emotions from what is in the best interest of the [institution].” Likewise, “do not make hasty policy changes—do thorough, transparent, and inclusive review when time has passed.” At Hood, this meant a new policy for vetting the factual accuracy of student poster displays prior to approval. And most important, “Let the students lead when possible.” At Hood, this included a campus forum where student leaders debated and passed a resolution about shared expectations for open, respectful discourse on campus and a “positivity campaign” consisting of hundreds of post-it notes around campus espousing self-affirming messages (such as “diversity is what makes us beautiful”). Chapdelaine described these as “the finest hour for our students.”
Messitte described a similar crisis at Ripon, which began in August 2018 as the local chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF)—a national conservative group energized by the recent presidential election—prepared for its annual 9/11 memorial. The memorial, in the form of mid-sized posters to be hung at public locations around campus, was titled “Never Forget” but emphasized images of post-9/11 terrorist violence that many on campus considered inflammatory and intentionally hostile to Muslim students.
The same poster had been displayed in 2017, prompting formal bias complaints but also spirited responses from other students who tacked up “counter-posters” for comments. When Ripon administrators met with campus YAF leaders to discuss how to promote more thoughtful opportunities for students to respond to the posters in 2018, a record of the meeting was shared with the national organization. The episode was reduced to an inaccurate summary on the YAF website that said Ripon administrators prohibited the Ripon YAF students from hanging the flyers. Almost immediately, the statement was picked up and further distorted on conservative social media, then mainstream media, in what Messitte described as the “YAF Social Storm.”
Ripon had already made the decision to allow the poster. Its challenge now was to correct the external falsehoods and defend the college’s reputation as “a moderate campus.” The ambitious plan was to respond to every alumni complaint and as many internet trolls as practicable. The college also reached out proactively to local media, the Associated Press, and Snopes.com, a prominent website for debunking internet myths.
“Don’t let falsehoods stay out there,” Messitte concluded. “There must be a counter-story to every negative story. Free speech, yes—but get the facts right,” whether on campus or off campus. Like Chapdelaine, he urged presidents to “allow students to come to their own conclusions.” At Ripon, this meant that YAF members quickly heard from their own peers how much the episode had damaged the institution’s reputation. Finally, he urged presidents to make sure that campus free speech policies are solid, up to date, and consistently followed.
Chamlee-Wright reiterated the need for effective “time, place, and manner” policies to help defuse free speech conflicts in advance. Drawing on her organization’s national work with public and private institutions, she offered the following advice to participants: First, make sure you articulate to others why colleges and universities must protect freedom of expression and “the truth-seeking enterprise.” Second, prepare principled policies in advance, with input from key stakeholders, “so everyone knows what the rules and guideposts are.” And third, “let content-neutrality be your guiding principle.”
Leading Multifaith Campuses
The increase in religious diversity at American colleges and universities has created new opportunities for interfaith conflict as well as interfaith understanding. This was the theme of a session devoted to “Effective Approaches for Leading Multifaith Campuses.”
Richard L. Dunsworth, president of the University of the Ozarks (AR), chaired a session on “Effective Approaches for Leading the Multifaith Campus” featuring panelists Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core; William J. Craft, president of Concordia College (MN); and Mary Dana Hinton, president of College of Saint Benedict (MN).
Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC), which works with many CIC institutions to help create programs and opportunities that address religious diversity, began the discussion. Patel observed, “When I ask academic administrators what percent of their campus’s new student orientation addresses issues of diversity, the answer is usually a very high number. But when I ask the same question about
religious diversity, the answer ranges from a very small percentage to none at all.” Yet, he noted, most students will encounter an ever-increasing level of religious diversity—not only at college, but throughout their lives. Patel suggested that colleges can prepare students for the world that they will encounter after graduation only if they provide students with information, tools, and resources they need to understand and to relate to people who “orient around religion differently.”
The remainder of the session was constructed as an interview, with Patel asking questions of the two other panelists: William J. Craft, president of
Concordia College (MN), and Mary Dana Hinton, president of the
College of Saint Benedict (MN). Patel asked the panelists to recall what event or moment made religious diversity into a presidential-level concern. Craft responded that the crystalizing moment occurred when he learned that, in the cities where Concordia is located (Moorhead, Minnesota, and Fargo, North Dakota), public school students speak more than 100 different languages. Such linguistic diversity often signals a high level of religious diversity. For Hinton, a number of issues in the news were important motivators: the Muslim travel ban, for example, and the widely varying reactions of different religious groups to LGBTQ issues. But she also discovered that the approach to faith, worship, and religious practice in her own institutional context—Roman Catholic and, more specifically, Benedictine—“did not seem to be resonating with students to the same degree as had previously been the case.” This was true, she said, even for some students who self-identified as Catholic. She recognized that students bring increasingly diverse cultural, linguistic, and stylistic appropriations of their religious traditions to campus. “Some institutions—even those that are grounded in a particular faith tradition—are not always well-equipped to face that reality.”
Patel then asked how each president had redefined the challenges related to religious diversity as a form of opportunity. Hinton observed that an institution’s mission can often serve as an important anchor in these conversations. For example, she noted, “the Benedictine values of hospitality and justice have been important since the college’s founding.” These values, she continued, underscore the need to face religious diversity with an open, welcoming, and equitable stance. She drew an analogy to the college’s past encounters with difference: At the outset of World War I, the Benedictine sisters made it clear that they would accept and educate the children of the German immigrants who had populated the Minnesota countryside, regardless of public animosity toward people of German descent. This, Hinton noted, is similar to the college’s present-day conviction that it should welcome people of any religious faith (or none), regardless of public opinion about people’s specific beliefs.
Craft echoed this sentiment, adding that Concordia College has emphasized a similar point through its Forum on Faith and Life. The key leaders of that initiative, he said, have explained that the college’s commitment to religious diversity is not an exception or caveat in its Lutheran heritage, but rather is undertaken precisely
because of that heritage. Patel affirmed this point, noting that, in his encounters with colleges and universities throughout the country, there is often a positive correlation between the depth of an institution’s grasp of its own faith tradition and its ability to articulate its perspective on religious diversity. “The deeper an institution’s awareness of its own faith-based mission,” he said, “the easier it becomes to have fruitful conversations about interfaith concerns.”
The two presidents concluded the session with descriptions of concrete initiatives that each campus had adopted regarding matters of religious diversity. These included official recognition for student groups that focus on other religious and secular traditions; integration of religious diversity into the curriculum; development of partnerships with local communities, particularly with businesses that recognize the need for graduates who understand cultural and religious diversity; and incorporation of these issues into the institution’s strategic plan. During the question-and-answer period, several other CIC member presidents described additional efforts on their campuses to address religious diversity. In addition, presenters identified a number of resources for campuses, including the NetVUE Scholarly Resources Project book,
Hearing Vocation Differently: Meaning, Purpose, and Identity in the Multi-Faith Academy, recently published by Oxford University Press.
Fostering Diversity and Inclusion
“Diversity and inclusion are terms that are sometimes used too loosely,” but every college and university must “appreciate the beauty that is difference and the challenges that come with difference.” With these words, Keith Taylor, president of
Gannon University (PA), introduced a concurrent session devoted to “Fostering Diversity and Inclusion on Campus.” The three presidential panelists—Vivia Lawton Fowler of
Wesleyan College (GA), Lyle D. Roelofs of Berea College (KY), and Sean M. Decatur of
Kenyon College (OH)—lead very different institutions: a women’s college in the Deep South, a work college in Appalachia, and a rural liberal arts college in a deeply conservative corner of the Midwest. But they offered similar insights about the influence of institutional history and the role of institutional mission in building a campus community that supports diversity and inclusion.
Co-panelist Vivia Lawton Fowler, president of Wesleyan College (GA) discussed how to foster diversity and inclusion on campus.
Fowler started with the story of a newspaper investigation into the painful racial past of her institution that broke in spring 2017, just as she began the transition from provost to president at Wesleyan. From the 19th century, the college had a tradition of adopting a distinctive name for each new undergraduate class. In 1913, the students dubbed themselves the “Ku Klux Klass,” with echoes of the KKK name and some associated elements of racist imagery remaining part of campus tradition and lore until the end of the 20th century. When the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote about this history in 2017, it re-opened old wounds, attracted intense social media attention, and raised doubts among many students, especially students of color, about the college’s commitment to inclusion.
Fowler and the leadership team moved to address this challenge on multiple fronts. First, they helped the reporter prepare an honest account of the KKK legacy, engaged a crisis communications firm to respond to the fallout, and accelerated a plan that was already in the works to prepare a comprehensive, transparent history of the institution. Then they pushed forward a set of curricular and co-curricular initiatives to promote racial healing, built around a model of facilitated conversations about divisive topics developed by the Interactivity Foundation in West Virginia. Wesleyan relied on a similar model of structured dialogue and a variety of other programs to reach out to alumnae who remain deeply connected to the college’s mission to educate women but felt unsettled or even betrayed by the public revelations of a racist past. Meanwhile, the college established three new committees or working groups specifically tasked to examine campus images and traditions for inclusion and to help students develop new traditions; to support racial healing and transformation; and to promote student diversity and inclusion.
Roelofs shared a similarly dramatic story about the history of his institution, which was founded by abolitionists in 1855 as a co-educational and interracial college and remained about half-white/half-black until the end of the 19th century. After 1904, however, the college was forcibly segregated by the state of Kentucky and remained completely white until the Civil Rights era. During that painful era, Berea “lost the knowledge of how to be an integrated institution,” and is still working to fully recover that knowledge and to rebuild a truly interracial community, Roelofs said. Today 28 percent of the students are African American, making Berea one of the most diverse residential liberal arts colleges in the country. Numbers are not the full answer, said Roelofs. He added that fortunately, the college retained a specific commitment to racial equality as part of its mission, which provides a guiding question for contemporary efforts to promote institutional inclusion: “How do you take a diverse student population and make the diversity
matter?”
The key to interracial education at Berea today, said Roelofs, is that “black students and white students have to tackle the issues together.” This includes the curriculum, which features required courses that explore African American history and culture alongside the “history and continuing presence of white allies,” as well as the co-curriculum—such as the inclusive Black Music Ensemble, which provides opportunities for urban black students to share their musical culture with rural white students. Normalizing racially mixed groups on campus, from the president’s cabinet to singing groups, is another important strategy to foster cross-racial allies and assure a “real diversity of perspectives.” Beyond that, Berea has introduced a specific model to facilitate difficult conversations, promote understanding across difference, and help students develop skills for civil discourse. The Berea approach, known as “T.R.U.T.H. (True Racial Understanding Through Honest) Talks,” is based on principles similar to those that inform the Wesleyan approach. As a result, Berea students feel empowered to take the lead in addressing controversial political and social issues on campus.
Decatur also began with the history of Kenyon, which has been a center of liberal arts education in rural Ohio since the 1820s and today is significantly more diverse and more liberal (politically) than the surrounding locality. Like the other panelists, Decatur emphasized the importance of a multi-front approach to building campus communities that supports diversity and inclusion: “it can’t be an isolated responsibility” of the president or chief diversity officer. At Kenyon, this means that every division—from the finance office to the faculty—is expected to develop annual, measurable, concrete diversity and inclusion goals that are explicitly aligned with institutional priorities for the year. One year, for example, the chief financial officer and his staff read Claude Steele’s
Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do as a way to learn more about unconscious bias and improve customer service for students and families from diverse backgrounds. In other areas, the IT staff set out to reprogram campus software systems to accept gender-neutral identities, while faculty members in the natural sciences introduced new pedagogical approaches to address attrition of minority students in the STEM disciplines. “Every part of the institution,” Decatur concluded, “needs to embrace diversity and inclusion as part of the mission.”
Workshop on Viewpoint Diversity

Workshop chair Laura Casamento, president of Utica College (NY), with facilitators Ronald A. Crutcher, president of the University of Richmond (VA); Daniele C. Struppa, president of Chapman University; and Debra Mashek, executive director of Heterodox Academy.
In addition, a workshop on January 5 flowed directly from the Haidt plenary session to explore “Presidential Approaches to Constructive Campus Engagement of Diverse Viewpoints.” Using a case study approach, the workshop was facilitated by Ronald A. Crutcher, president of the
University of Richmond (VA), Debra Mashek, executive director of the Heterodox Academy (which was co-founded by Haidt), and Daniele C. Struppa, president of Chapman University. After remarks by each facilitator, groups of participants considered several case studies about the challenges and opportunities colleges may face when they address issues of viewpoint diversity and open inquiry. The case studies ranged from disinvited speakers to student protests in classrooms to controversial statements by faculty members outside of classrooms. The discussions sought to identify key conceptual and administrative tensions that presidents must navigate in such situations—and how these tensions might be resolved in light of an institution’s mission and values. The workshop also was an opportunity for participants to discuss candidly specific controversies on their own campuses.