Our Board of Trustees has affirmed the educational value of a diverse and fully inclusive campus community, one that is enriched by persons of different backgrounds, points of view, cultures, socioeconomic status, and other diverse characteristics.
Such a diverse campus community fosters a diversity of thought and an intellectual diversity in which members of our campus community can be comfortable in speaking freely about their ideas and thereby contribute to a marketplace of ideas in which people have the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, learn, and discuss any issue while also greatly valuing civility and mutual respect in our discourse.
Resources
- What is Viewpoint Diversity: Heterodox Academy created a short video explaining the importance of viewpoint diversity and confirmation bias. Heterodox Academy is a nonpartisan collaborative of 5,000+ professors, educators, administrators, staff, and students committed to research, open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.
- A Roadmap to Promote Campus Free Expression: This manual was produced by the Bipartisan Policy Center and offers helpful recommendations for college presidents and senior leadership teams, trustees, faculty, athletic directors and coaches, and student affairs staff. (Link provided is the most recent document available, dated November 2021.)
- National Institute for Civil Discourse: A non-partisan organization based at the University of Arizona that promotes healthy and civil political debate.
- Promoting Civil Discourse in Troubling Times: American University provides suggestions for bringing civil discourse to campus classrooms.
- Guidelines for Discussing Difficult or Controversial Topics: University of Michigan offers guidelines to help instructors facilitate classroom discussion around controversial issues.
- Multicultural Education Program: Classroom Tools UC Berkeley provides tools for instructors compiled by its Division of Equity & Inclusion.
- Difficult Conversations: Teaching Tolerance provides a toolkit for facilitating difficult conversations.
- Difficult Dialogues: Vanderbilt University shares this guide for teachers in leading difficult dialogues.
- Classroom Dynamics & Diversity: Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning includes tips for managing challenging conversations.
- The Lost Art of Democratic Debate: Michael Sandel, Professor of Political Philosophy at Harvard, delivers a TED Talk.
- UTC’s Center for Reflective Citizenship: UTC’s College of Health, Education, and Professional Studies is dedicated to the revitalization of civic education in American schools and universities, and the equipping of a new generation of thoughtful citizens for the practice of democracy.