The Hard Conversations Hub (HCH)
Through the Global Debate Fund, NYU paticipates in competitive debate, community service and HCH dialogic strategies that encourage meaningful dialogues between parties, especially when they appear be deeply divided.
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Many of the world’s greatest crises are traceable to the inability of individuals being able to resolve their differences constructively. With students, faculty and staff from hundreds of countries and countless backgrounds, philosophical and political disagreements at NYU are inevitable. It is impossible to create a campus of leaders without equipping those individuals with the ability to engage with, listen to and navigate those who ideas and starting points may be radically different from their own. Whether those disagreements make a community toxic or healthy comes down to our ability to communicate with each other.
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The Hard Conversations Hub (HCH) utilizes a debate-as-service model to provide members of the NYU Community safe spaces for contentious conversations essential to developing appreciation for each other's perspectives. Debate preparation offers a unique approach to disagreements because it requires participants to switch sides each round arguing against the resolution in one and advocating for it in the next. To excel, debaters must anticipate their opponents' strongest arguments and rebut them with compelling reasoning and evidence. This forces all parties to think deeply about both sides of an issue. It teaches incredible listening skills tied directly to outcomes the participants recognize. You can't refute an argument effectively, if you don’t understand it. While these talks can be frustrating, the potential results justify the investments. The better we know each other's stories, the closer we are to respecting our differences.
To conduct hard conversations, professors, administrators and student groups can choose from a a suite of training options focused on critical thinking, refutation, effective listening, cross examination, research and issue framing.to design a customized structure that encompasses the major drivers of the conflict and empower change agents. Experts are deployed as facilitators and guides or when the parties are too far apart, debaters who can conduct demonstration debates initially to establish baselines for trust and dialogue.
What do Hard Conversations Look like?
Toxic polarization has moved beyond the political arena to impact universities, houses of worship and relationships with family and friends, faculty. Too many exchanges revolve around scoring points rather than advancing the discussion. It is imperative that we learn to disagree better by fostering inquiry not hate. Depolarization research concludes that the most effective strategies develop methods for engaging, listening and cooperating.
Intercollegiate debate uses a switch-side debate model. At each tournament, teams defend both sides of the topic in alternating debates. Success isn't rooted in a team's passions. It comes from extensive research, listening effectively to opposing arguments and framing the most persuasive comparative case for the judges. This model demonstrates a viable framework to disagree without being disagreeable. Applying these dialogic strategies can help university faculty, staff and students navigate divisive issues when differences inevitably arise. Debate research also develops a grammar for faculty to engage students and a vocabulary for everyone on campus to communicate their ideas and emotions better.
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Over the past two decades, Will Baker has led these activities at NYC high schools and middle schools, synagogues, UN NGO conferences in London, Vancouver and Iksan City, South Korea, the Brooklyn Public Library, and even a Wall Street hedge fund. He was the recipient of the Melissa Maxcy Wade Service Award for Debate as a Public Good from Emory University (pictured above) in recognition of his work.
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The model can facilitate IDBE [Inclusion, Debate, Belonging, Equity] activities to assist NYU in creating a grammar for exchanges that facilitates these hard conversations across the entire NYU community. Policy advances are contingent on one person persuading another that they have a good idea worth pursuing and galvanizing support for healing and being better.
NYU CEDA Statement on Injustice
The multi-racial roster of NYU CEDA stands in solidarity with those battling centuries of violence, exploitation and inequities levied against their bodies fueled by a climate of intolerance. Antiquated systems of power embedded in our laws and norms intensify polarization, poverty and the politics of fear weighing heavily on communities nationwide.
Our debaters spend their weekends exploring questions of public policy action on domestic and international issues intermeshed with social, economic and racial injustice using in-depth, well-researched evidence from scholars, journalists and advocates from all sides. Debaters and coaches should use our agency to a) encourage listening and respect even when we may disagree b) hold ourselves and others accountable for how and where we communicate and c) help introduce vocabulary to have hard conversations about injustice that echo demands of the voiceless across America.
The distinction between demonizing and difference makers is sometimes quite small. We are destined to make mistakes along the way. That’s not a reason to hide. It’s a call to listen, illuminate and learn.
Non-black allies remain transfixed by the recurring stories of Tyre Nichols, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tanisha Anderson, Ronald Greene, Trayvon Martin, Kendra James, Ahmaud Arbery, Eric Garner, Atatiana Jefferson, Walter Scott, Philando Castile, Sean Bell, Tony McDade, Michael Brown, Charleena Lyles, Robert Fuller, Tamir Rice and so many others whose lives were brutally cut short, they will need storytellers.
We encourage all NYU teams, departments and organizations, as well as debate programs at other institutions, to devote some of their digital real estate prominently to resistance to injustices. Every small step improves our chances to be heard and create change.
