Every summer, before arriving on campus, Vanderbilt's incoming class gets an assignment. Last summer, for the first time in 16 years, that task changed. Instead of reading a book, 1,600 first-year students-to-be were asked to go into their community and practice the art of dialogue-to talk to someone who could deepen, broaden and shift their understanding of the world. Then, they had to write a short reflection about the encounter.
The result was perhaps not what you'd expect from homework assigned for summer break. More than 90 percent of the students surveyed found the experience meaningful and enjoyable. They reported that the encounters opened their minds and broadened their perspectives. The new Commodores, many of whom had never conducted an interview before, talked to a wide range of subjects, from CEOs to custodial workers to emergency responders and Olympians.
LEARNING THROUGH LISTENING
Carlota Lopez learned about the capacity for reconciliation and forgiveness by speaking to a Colombian peace advocate who had once been kidnapped by paramilitaries.
"Many of us reject the concept of moral transformation," Lopez wrote in her essay. "But if we refuse to believe that transformation can happen within the mind and soul of one person, how can we hope and fight for progress throughout governments and entire nations?"
Ingrid Flaherty, a self-proclaimed "overthinker," learned about the importance of humor and lightheartedness by connecting with a fellow choir member who was more than 50 years her senior.
Elizabeth Orders, who wrote that she "leans left on many issues," found unexpected political commonalities with a Republican senator from her state.
For Jack Diemar, who grew up going to a Jewish school and spoke with a Catholic priest, "finding spiritual and ethical common ground felt like an unexpectedly hopeful gift in a time of so much religious and political division."
"Finding spiritual and ethical common ground felt like an unexpectedly hopeful gift in a time of so much religious and political division." - Jack Diemar
PATHWAY TO DIALOGUE
Diemar's reaction was, in many ways, what Provost C. Cybele Raver hoped to inspire with the assignment. It created a pathway for an open mind and served as a foundation assignment supporting the goals of Dialogue Vanderbilt, a program started in 2023 and focused on fostering free expression and civil discourse on campus. Dialogue Vanderbilt works to teach students how to practice healthy dialogue habits through curricular and co-curricular workshops, courses and programming like the summer assignment.
A few years ago, faculty (and national surveys) began to notice some telling shifts in the academic and cultural landscape.
"It was becoming more difficult to get students to engage and ask challenging and unorthodox questions or share opinions because they were worried about being ostracized by their peers," says Tiffiny Tung, vice provost for undergraduate education and holder of the Ingram Chair in Anthropology.
Concurrently, isolating effects brought on by COVID were lingering, and digital technology was increasingly encroaching on everyday life.
"Social media tends to put us in reaction mode," says Francesca Schuler, a former nonprofit CEO who was brought in to be executive director of Dialogue Vanderbilt.
Of course, this problem isn't exclusive to Vanderbilt, or even to younger generations. Just turn on any debate talk show, log on to social media or remember the late 2025 legislative impasse that led to the longest government shutdown in United States history: We've seemingly lost the ability to speak civilly and constructively with one another. Division drowns out connection.
"If we can get students comfortable with uncomfortable and novel ideas, or with tackling issues that have a lot of unknowns, think about how much more innovative, confident and creative they can be." - Tiffiny Tung
"Ultimately, we want our students to graduate with skills that we're not seeing reflected elsewhere. We want them to be leaders who can drive impact in the future by working with a broad range of people who may have different perspectives," Schuler says. Vanderbilt students are learning how to collaborate across differences and navigate conflict constructively, she adds-helping them succeed in a complex and changing world. "As we see in the cultural narrative people aren't good at this. We want to make sure our students are great at this."
The summer interview assignment helped ensure that those students begin their college experience with a new perspective on becoming great conversationalists-even when it's uncomfortable.
"Going into college, it's typical that you're going to meet a lot of people that you don't know," Diemar says. "[The summer assignment] definitely helped when communicating with professors, meeting new people and feeling comfortable in uncomfortable environments."
According to student surveys, 85 percent of students said they learned something new about how to talk to
other people, and 75 percent said they changed their perspective on a topic.
"If we can get students comfortable with uncomfortable and novel ideas, or with tackling issues that have a lot of unknowns, think about how much more innovative, confident and creative they can be," Tung says.
ART OF STORYTELLING
Amanda Little, a journalist and a Vanderbilt writer in residence, reviewed hundreds of submissions, attended sessions where hundreds more students discussed their writing experience, and worked closely with 60 students who attended voluntary follow-up workshops to sharpen their interviewing and storytelling skills. At Vanderbilt since 2012, Little says that because this younger generation was raised in a rich and complex media environment-many of them creating content and documenting their lives from an extremely young age-each incoming class she's seen in the past 13 years has had a "deeper and broader capacity for storytelling and citizen journalism."
However, she agrees with Tung that they may not have as much experience with "the act of becoming receptive to, considering and synthesizing other stories with their own."
Enter the summer assignment, designed to help prepare students to not just be workers ready to tackle a career, but citizens prepared to contribute to the fabric of their communities. The submissions were impressive. Little selected and collaborated with 12 students to share their standout essays on the public stage at the Southern Festival of Books in October.
"You give them the tools to have these conversations in the classroom," Tung says. "And of course the hope is that those conversations continue in the dorm room, the dining hall, walking across campus or with their family when they go home for Thanksgiving-talk to that uncle you thought you had nothing in common with."
"It's doing the crunches and the burpees in the intellectual-emotional muscle required to understand people across different lived experiences."
Little says that kind of journalism and dialogue is like "calisthenics for empathy."
"It's doing the crunches and the burpees in the intellectual-emotional muscle required to understand people across different lived experiences," she says, calling the summer assignment a gateway project to Vanderbilt's larger mission of creating well-rounded citizens. "To show up to an interview, to fully listen, to find a way to synthesize and balance facts with the perceptions that they encounter in the telling of a story is, in some ways, the thing that is most required in this political and cultural moment where there's so much distortion of fact and perception."
BUILDING THE SKILLS
Though the students' summer assignment was new, the university's commitment to free expression and civil discourse is not. In fact, Alexander Heard, Vanderbilt's chancellor from 1963 to 1982, a time of immense social change, once said that a "university's obligation is not to protect students from ideas, but rather to expose them to ideas and to help make them capable of handling and, hopefully, having ideas of their own."
More recently, Chancellor Daniel Diermeier has been a vocal advocate for institutional neutrality in response to an increase in polarized politics and protests on campuses across the country. The policy is meant to create a campus environment where, exactly as Heard once said, people can talk freely about ideas. That said, it's all moot if students don't have the skills to do the talking. That's where Dialogue Vanderbilt comes in.
As Executive Director Schuler explains it, Dialogue Vanderbilt acts as a catalyst by providing tools, events and spaces to help students develop healthy dialogue habits. It also is a connector, amplifying many campuswide efforts to encourage and create an ecosystem that promotes civil discourse.
Though the summer assignment kicks things off, the dialogue continues with programming during orientation and throughout the first-year class's six weeks of Vanderbilt Visions. Under Dean Melissa Gresalfi and Director Natalee Erb, Vanderbilt residential colleges ensure that all first-year students have meaningful moments to connect with other students and faculty in weekly VU Visions groups.
These groups of about 20 first-year students meet weekly through the first half of the fall semester to help form strong connections and build networks with classmates across different houses, schools, perspectives and geographical backgrounds. They also connect students with a faculty member and an upper-division student mentor. Visions encourages students to share their questions, ideas and opinions and learn from and with each other.
"Constructive dialogue isn't just a 'nice to have' skill-it's the foundation of what we all do." - Francesca Schuler
"When we first started [Dialogue Vanderbilt two years ago], it was often the same 50 students who would come to the events, discussions and guest lectures," Tung says. "By baking it into the first-year experience with the summer assignment and Vanderbilt Visions, we're reaching more of them."
CULTURE OF FREE EXPRESSION
It's this baked-in quality, Schuler says, that sets Vanderbilt apart from other universities. Through Dialogue Vanderbilt, the university committed to creating a culture of free expression and a campus where civil discourse is practiced every day, inside and outside the classroom. Where other schools might have a one-off dinner or workshop, Vanderbilt has implemented a holistic, practical approach that takes students through the stages of learning how to engage in healthy dialogue-before it sends them out into the community to lead that civil discourse themselves.
Students are an essential part of creating the culture. The Dialogue Vanderbilt Student Advisory Board brings ideas, manages programs and helps ensure that programming is relevant for students. These student leaders also serve as role models on campus. The day after Founders Walk, a time-honored tradition that kicks off students' Vanderbilt journeys, Diermeier hosts a seminar with the first-year class to discuss free expression, chat with the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, The Vanderbilt Hustler, and answer questions from the students.
The learning continues with workshops put on through the Vanderbilt Civil Discourse Lab, where more than 700 students have learned key habits needed to engage in effective dialogue. Workshops are facilitated by students from the new Dialogue Vanderbilt Student Facilitation Fellows program where students are trained to facilitate workshops, so other students see their peers modeling good dialogue habits.
"No matter what career you choose, your work will involve identifying opportunities, solving problems and working with other people to move ideas forward," Schuler says. "Whether you're launching a company, writing policy, designing a product or leading a nonprofit, the fundamentals are the same: define the challenge, set a direction, collaborate, make sound decisions, align people around a plan, execute and then learn from the results. None of that happens in isolation. It requires engaging effectively with people who think differently, bring different expertise and see the world through different lenses. That's why constructive dialogue isn't just a 'nice to have' skill-it's the foundation of what we all do."
Daily practice matters-especially now that our culture and technology often reinforce the opposite of constructive engagement. And not just among students. Many of us are being conditioned into habits that prioritize speed over reflection and reaction over understanding.
"This really comes down to being intentional about how we have conversations," Schuler says. "You think of something at 3 a.m. and immediately post it-that is not an intentional, evidence-based perspective. Then we're all trained to react with an emoji, a thumbs up or thumbs down. That is not engagement; it's reaction. And comment threads often become oneway declarations rather than dialogue." This is why Dialogue Vanderbilt uses the word habits. Dialogue isn't a one-time insight or a set of tips. It's a pattern of behaviors-listening carefully, asking better questions, pausing before responding, testing assumptions-that must be practiced repeatedly until they become instinctive.
A behavior only becomes a habit through repetition. So, in addition to helping students build a conversational engine, Dialogue Vanderbilt gives them the racetrack on which they can practice running it-structured spaces, facilitated conversations and real-world opportunities to apply skills consistently over time.
There are Lunch & Learns, where students are invited to ask questions of a speaker or guest over lunch. In one of these, Schuler remembers a student remarking to a senator, "You're so up on technology for being an old guy." Though Schuler admits the remark required a "little coaching moment" for the student, she says it is a type of progress: "We call it civil discourse intentionally-be respectful, show up with humility. But if you can't say something that's on your mind, you're never going to grow and learn."
There's an "Ask Me Anything" table, where trios of students-one Republican, one Democrat, one Independent-take turns fielding any question a passerby wants to ask, as well as a "Voice of VU Free Expression Wall" where students can share something that's been on their mind.
The "Vandy Speak Easy" provides a phone-free and tech-free space that sanctions, encourages and protects the difficult conversations students often want to have but have no outlet for. And there are more projects in the works to keep building on the groundwork Dialogue Vanderbilt has laid. Seeing civil discourse modeled is part of the learning experience, so in 2026, for America's 250th anniversary, the school has launched a speaker series called 250 Conversations on America: Civil Discourse in Action. All those resources from Dialogue Vanderbilt exist alongside the great work Vanderbilt has done-and continues to do-in its classrooms.
"Faculty are strongly committed to these values," says Sarah Igo, faculty director of Dialogue Vanderbilt and holder of the Andrew Jackson Chair in American History. "When Dialogue Vanderbilt launched two years ago, it was clear that one of the topics most important to our faculty was making their classrooms as vibrant and intellectually vigorous as possible."
Classrooms in general have become a more fraught space as the nation becomes more deeply divided. "We've tried to offer support and opportunities for faculty to learn from each other when faced with challenging situations-for example, when contentious political subjects seep into, or disrupt, class discussions," Igo says. "Many of our faculty are also intentionally structuring their courses to give students practice and skills for entering into those discussions."
"The idea is to help students from the first minute they're on campus, so they start building these habits and using them everywhere."
Dana Nelson, professor of English and holder of the Nancy Perot Chair, has led faculty workshops like "Turning Down the Heat on Difficult Conversations" and a course design seminar called "Teaching Controversy." Among Vanderbilt's new courses is Free Speech and Dangerous Ideas, co-taught by Mario Rewers, senior lecturer of culture, advocacy and leadership, and Jacob Mchangama, research professor of political science. The College of Arts and Science has recently revamped its curriculum, building it around five "core capacities," one of which is expression. It includes discussion-based seminar courses that every first-year student must take in their fall and spring semesters.
Ultimately, all of these efforts embody Vanderbilt's ongoing and vocal commitment amid a time of significant change-particularly in the world of academics and education-to encouraging critical thinking. For what is a great conversation if not an exercise in critical thinking? A great conversation entails listening to different perspectives, synthesizing information and thinking through evidence and the validity of sources.
"We're a key part of developing this next generation of leaders who combine IQ and EQ," Schuler says. "Leaders who act with humility, courage and clarity. Leaders who develop potential in themselves and others, strengthen communities and democracy through real-world impact."
In the grand scheme, it's impossible to unwind the massive cultural and social changes of the past several years.
COVID, social media and the rise of artificial intelligence have all had an impact on students and how they're educated. But what Vanderbilt can do, and can control, is how well they prepare their students to live, and lead, in that world.
"The idea is to help students from the first minute they're on campus, so they start building these habits and using them everywhere," Schuler concludes, "so that when they graduate, they're role models of how to engage with different perspectives effectively.
"I want everyone to want to hire a Vandy grad because our students are both very smart, critical thinkers and amazing team players who can work with others, lead teams and get things done better than anybody else. That's the goal."
- Clay Skipper, BA'12
