)
Let’s agree (on how) to disagree
How ePluribus is teaching students to engage across differences.
Story tags:
)
)
Learning to engage with people who have different opinions may or may not lead to common ground—but that’s not the point, Norm Spaulding says. Design: Jonathan Chaves
Norm Spaulding first noticed the shift around 2010. His law students had become more reluctant to speak up on issues that before would have inspired lively debate.
Privately, some reported feeling condemned or ostracized for expressing their views. He attributed the changes to social media and “the feeling that something you say can be instantaneously disseminated and becomes part of the record of your life.”
Fast forward a decade to the pandemic. By now, Spaulding was hearing from students all across the ideological and identity spectrum about how inhibited they felt.
“They described very powerful, informal social sanctions, like being dropped off a class group list or told people wouldn’t even sit at a table with them,” says Spaulding, who is the Nelson Bowman Sweitzer and Marie B. Sweitzer Professor of Law. “Both within and across groups, students felt they were being monitored on what they were saying, and then collectively shamed. Or else they wanted to share their experiences in the classroom, but didn’t feel they would be heard or recognized.”
The environment was particularly problematic for aspiring lawyers. “To operate in situations where there’s disagreement, they have to be able to have those conversations,” Spaulding says. “To know when their own interests are getting in the way, clouding their judgment—not only with adversaries, but with clients.”
In response, Spaulding created ePluribus, a Stanford Law School initiative designed to help students develop the skills and confidence to engage with people who have different values and opinions. He derived the name from the U.S. motto adopted in 1776: e pluribus unum, or “from many, one.”
“I wanted a name that reflected the remarkable, transformative possibilities of working together under conditions of difference,” Spaulding says, “but without the unum, because collective endeavor across difference can be meaningful and rewarding even if we don’t come away from the encounter in agreement.”
The program’s impact was immediate—so much that Spaulding and Paul Brest, professor emeritus and former law school dean, started to think bigger.
ePluribus skills training has been incorporated into orientation design and offered to faculty who lead discussion seminars taken by every first-year law student. Drawing heavily from ePluribus’s principles of engagement across difference, Spaulding and Brest prepared a report for the office of the university president in 2023 with suggestions for how Stanford could promote more open and inclusive discourse.
As a result of that report—and related research and programming emerging from the School of Humanities and Sciences, the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, the Hoover Institution, and the Democracy Hub—the university is rolling out a university-wide initiative this year.
In addition to promoting the work of Stanford’s schools, centers, institutes, and other nationally recognized programs, the initiative features skills training for residential assistants, student leaders such as the sophomores who teach Frosh 101, and instructors in the Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE) curriculum taken by two-thirds of the entering class every year.
“I wanted a name that reflected the remarkable, transformative possibilities of working together under conditions of difference.”Norm Spaulding
)
The workshops are designed to reinforce students’ abilities as leaders and bridge-builders. Photo: Jess Alvarenga
Spaulding calls it a “soup-to-nuts, 360-degree approach” to reinforcing the basic skills that promote critical inquiry, constructive dialogue, and bridge-building.
“For decades, higher education has assumed that students acquire these skills over time through engagement in a diverse academic environment,” Spaulding says. “But under conditions of polarization it’s not as likely to happen. And so the idea is to deliver these skills as early as possible in a manner that makes them accessible and empowering for students to get the most out of their Stanford experience.”
Foundational to law
The program’s origins are central to its efficacy.
“Law is a mediating device for difference,” wrote Provost Jenny Martinez, then dean of Stanford Law School, in response to law students disrupting a campus speech by Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan in 2023. “Naming perceived harm, exploring it, and debating solutions are the very essence of legal work.”
The skills taught in ePluribus are grounded in decades of research on how to navigate difficult conversations—skills used by mediators at the highest levels of international conflict resolution. But the basic building blocks are simple and teachable.
For students fearing their opinions might be used against them, having a structure in which to express them and hear from the other side has been a welcome respite.
“There’s an enormous hunger for this,” Spaulding says. “We see a very dysfunctional form of conversation modeled in our public discourse now, where both sides are shouting and no one is listening. We see it in everything from Congress down to local school boards. There’s a sense of fatigue with that style of engaging difficult issues, and a hunger for a different pathway.”
)
Why engage the other side?
Learning to engage with people who have different opinions may lead to finding common ground—but that’s not the point, according to Spaulding. ePluribus doesn’t aim to produce agreement or pull the emotion out of what people believe.
“One of the key things we try to bring home in the workshops is that the first goal of engagement in academic life, and in any difficult conversation, is not compromise or giving up beliefs that are dear to you,” says Spaulding. “The goal—once you recognize that there’s difference or disagreement—is simply understanding, getting a better picture of why people believe what they do.”
The program comprises two parts: teaching students how to manage difficult conversations through a series of workshops, and then giving them the opportunity to practice.
The first skill of ePluribus is active listening. That means being fully present and suspending judgment so the speaker feels understood, and seeking clarification to ensure no misunderstandings have taken root.
“That might sound simple,” says Spaulding. “But it takes practice. Happily, there’s a wealth of research showing that just the simple act of ensuring that participants in a disagreement feel heard makes it more likely that they’ll engage in ways that are mutually beneficial.”
Other areas of focus include cognitive bias recognition, conflict de-escalation techniques, emotional intelligence, and repair.
“If you can’t hear another person’s point of view, or if you are so fixed on your own views, then you can’t engage in critical thinking—the most important thing a university can teach its students.”Paul Brest
Having learned these skills, participants practice them in low-stakes settings with simple exercises. In one, members pair up and one person describes an image, while the other draws it—based solely on what they’re hearing.
“They’re almost always comically inaccurate,” Spaulding says. “And there’s wonderful recognition that if these kinds of obstacles to effective communication arise when we’re talking about something that has almost no cultural significance, imagine how likely there is to be misunderstanding once you move to something that’s emotionally or politically charged.”
After some practice, students form smaller reading groups and tackle thornier issues: reproductive rights, gun control, and prison abolition, for instance.
“Students tell me they’re relieved and excited to have a place where they know difficult conversations can happen,” Spaulding says. “The skills are helping them, not just in intellectual engagement but also with their friendships and relationships. It’s deeply rewarding to see.”
ePluribus doesn’t aim to produce agreement or pull the emotion out of what people believe. Photo: Jess Alvarenga
Reframing conflict
Stanford Law School students Hank Sparks, JD ’25, and David Mollenkamp, ’19, JD ’25, grew up in similarly conservative areas. Where Sparks clashed with his upbringing, Mollenkamp adopted the beliefs of those around him. At Stanford, Sparks found himself sometimes pathologizing disagreement, ascribing negative motivations to those with whom he disagreed. Mollenkamp opted to avoid the conversations altogether. Both students came to ePluribus wanting to find a better way.
“It’s humanized me and it’s humanized the people I talk to,” says Hank Sparks, JD ’25. Videos courtesy of Hank Sparks, JD ’25, and David Mollenkamp, ’19, JD ’25
Sparks’ “a-ha!” moment came during a workshop on listening.
“We talked about how to listen not just for someone’s expressed beliefs, but also for the experiences and stories that led them to believe the things they believe,” he says.
Mollenkamp cited a small-group conversation about prison abolition as being particularly transformative.
“I came away feeling that I was able to say something that I believed in without feeling that I was going to be reprimanded for it afterwards.”
)
Greater than the sum of our parts
Given the success of ePluribus’s initial iteration—earlier this year, it received the American Bar Association’s E. Smythe Gambrell Professionalism Award, recognizing innovative professionalism programs at law schools—hopes are high for the broader university initiative. Tensions around the election, geopolitics, and other hot-button issues are running high.
At the heart of the effort is the premise that you don’t have to choose between free speech and inclusion—or for that matter rigorous thinking.
Letting all perspectives be heard is essential to learning how to think about those perspectives, says Brest. “If you can’t hear another person’s point of view, or if you are so fixed on your own views, then you can’t engage in critical thinking—the most important thing a university can teach its students,” he says.
ePluribus is designed to provide the foundations for critical thinking and critical discourse. Photo: Jess Alvarenga
The real power of change in how people think, advocate, and work across difference lies with the underlying skills, Spaulding says, pointing to studies showing that “if you have one or two people in a room who have these skills and disposition, dysfunctional conflict can be de-escalated and transformed into good conflict.”
“The basic skills we teach are clearly relevant to the classroom and academic life, but they can help in any area of civic life, from the dinner table to community organizing to policy analysis,” Spaulding says. “There is transformative power in deepening understanding and in feeling heard—getting past labels, sound bites, and caricature, and tapping into curiosity, especially about things we find wrong.”
)
What’s next
ePluribus skills work is expanding across the university. “This is a really distinctive opportunity for higher education,” Spaulding says. “We’re one of the few institutions left in society that is still really quite integrated in terms of the amount of diversity and the fact that we live together and work together in one place. If we’re going to make headway on polarization, on improving the quality of our discourse, I think it’s going to happen in higher education.”
:focal(1822x155:1823x156))
:focal(1216x1354:1217x1355))
:focal(2849x1496:2850x1497))