The dominant fact of American life today seems to be division.
We are divided politically. We are divided economically. We are divided regionally. We are divided between those who have college degrees and those who do not, between those who uphold traditional values and those who embrace new ways of living, between those who are succeeding in the modern economy and those who fear the changing world is leaving them behind.
But at this time when we take stock of the last year and look ahead to the new one, I am once again reminded that despite all the day-to-day political and cultural arguments and skirmishes, the fact remains that we are all ultimately more alike than we are different. We want to live our lives. We want to build our families. We want to be healthy and happy and fulfilled. We want our children to thrive.
My resolution for the new year—and really this is a resolution for all of us—is to work harder to find that common ground, to meet in the middle, to avoid buzzwords and news media talking points and instead make a genuine effort to treat each other with respect and find solutions together. I want us to work to get past our divisions.
Of course, I have a head start.
Because what I am proposing we all try to do lies at the heart of what higher education does every day. At college and universities, we are in the business of opening minds, searching for truth, avoiding stereotypes, preconceptions, and cant, and finding ways to have productive conversations that often include disagreement but need not be disagreeable.
America’s higher education system is the envy of the world, and that is in no small part because of our long tradition of openness, of debate, of productive engagement. In today’s rapidly changing world and economy, the key thing we teach our students is not expertise in any one field of study—although of course mastery is crucially important—but rather how to think and engine, across disciplines, cultures, ideologies, and ways of thinking.
At its best, higher education brings together widely diverse groups of students—diverse in background and experience, diverse in perspective and politics, diverse in field and discipline—and teaches them to work together and learn from each other to find the best possible solutions.
As a broad society, we need to mirror the best of higher education.
And as individual citizens—as thinkers and leaders and businesspeople and parents—we can do that precisely by doing what those of us in higher education ask of our students:
We should engage in debate and discussion, and we should do so with open minds and thoughtful consideration, always including people with a range of perspectives.
We should listen to what others have to say, and hear them, and we should try to find win-win solutions that take input from all and benefit all.
We should engage with good faith, and we should operate from an initial assumption of good faith from others.
We should remember that there is more we have more in common than that that drives us apart, and we should always seek to find ways to leverage that commonality.
We should model those behaviors to our colleagues and counterparties, and we should insist upon them in our students, children, and employees.
There are countless forces pushing us apart. Cable news thrives on dispute. Social media is designed to keep us engaged by keeping us enraged. Politics is fraught, the so-called tripledemic is now upon us, and many of the stresses of the last few years keep stubbornly hanging on. Layering long-simmering family tensions atop all of that as we gather for holidays can sometimes and paradoxically underline our divisions.
But I really do think with some concerted effort, we can move past that. We teach our students to work together, to live together, to listen to one another. In the new year, it is time for all of us to work hard on doing the same.
