Dean Peter Loewen RED Talk Sepr. 29 at 8 pm ET
My guess is that you are being inundated with information about the upcoming election. And, by the tenor of the messaging, you would think that the world is a binary place—red or blue. In fact, polarization in the US is at an all time high and this polarization increasingly is creeping into daily life, with people choosing what to buy, where to live and whom to date, on political grounds.
To help us make sense of all this, we have scheduled a special RED Talk on Tuesday, September 29th at 8pm; our guest is Peter Loewen, Dean of A&S (and a distinguished political scientist). Peter will be speaking about his course called Disagreement . This course, which is part of a larger campus-wide initiative to teach and engage students in “civics” (remember 7th grade?!), provides students with the tools they need to disagree effectively, especially on social and political topics.
Peter has observed that in the current environment, “there’s an easy playbook now; assume the worst of the other side, demonize them, be unfairly uncritical of your own side. And then enjoy feeling you’re on the right moral side of things. That’s a good, cheap drug. I thought it was important to show students there’s another way to do it. My hope is that students get a sense of not only how to disagree better, but why disagreement is fundamental to democracy, and why so many things over which we disagree are actually really hard problems with multiple ways of understanding them.”
Peter inaugurated this course last year and he will share his thoughts about what both his students and he learned. Please join the conversation. Register by clicking below.
Hope you will join us!
John Foote
PS: Last Fall Peter gave a riveting, insightful and timely talk titled “Reducing Political Polarization“. One of Peter’s slides shows that our ability to relate across the aisle or at the Thanksgiving dinner table is at an all-time low. This chart shows the degree of intersection between the two major US parties over the past 140 years. Between 1923 and 1983 there’s overlap between the parties, meaning that the conservative Dems and liberal Republicans were “on the same page”. Over the past 20 years, however, there’s significant (but not unprecedented) lack of overlap between blues and reds.
