By Bolling Lewis ’28 (DCI Fellow)
On February 12th, I, along with six fellow DCI members, packed into a rented Jeep Wagoneer and set out on a daunting goal of bringing deliberation to Duke University. We had been invited to introduce our approach to facilitating constructive deliberations on challenging topics to a university class exploring the challenges and opportunities of pluralism in modern society. Students in the class would be hosting small group discussions at Duke following an upcoming expert roundtable on justice and the rule of law, and we were tasked with putting on an interactive class workshop on how best to organize and facilitate their deliberations.
Since the inception of the Deliberative Citizenship Initiative in 2020, the task of including as many people as possible in the conversation has centered around engaging a small two-thousand-person liberal arts campus. Word of mouth, deliberative forums, and inclusion of dialogue in course materials have all been successful ways to hear new perspectives and experiences from the Davidson community. Yet, such effective methods can be rendered useless in a different environment. Duke, in many ways, is the exact opposite of Davidson, with an almost 18,000-person student body, an emphasis on research, and little exposure to formal deliberation. All the signs pointed to a big question: were the successes we’ve had at Davidson transferrable to other campuses and contexts?
Huddled in the car for our two-hour journey to Durham, we reviewed our plan for the visit. We collectively stressed the importance of emphasizing deliberative dispositions and the realistic challenges of facilitating conversations at another campus. With Professor Bullock, head of the DCI program and our faculty leader for the trip, at the wheel, we discussed the size disparity between the average Davidson and Duke classroom. We realized that we should be prepared for students who may not be as well versed in small-group conversations, given their significantly larger class sizes. With this in mind, we mapped out how we would introduce the principles and practices of deliberative dialogue in a context very different from our own.
Upon arrival, we quickly headed towards the academic buildings and were guided through a maze of hallways to finally arrive at our lecture hall. Once again, the stark contrast between Davidson and Duke was glaring when we arrived in our room. The class seated roughly a hundred students, tightly packed together, in a room roughly three times the size of any Chambers classroom. Still, despite the differences, the Duke students seemed quite receptive to the idea of deliberation. They asked questions and engaged with the practice prompts. Furthermore, they listened attentively to the dispositions we presented in the lecture hall, and after about sixty minutes of presentations (we each presented a different dimension of effective facilitation), we split into breakout groups based on career aspirations to put the ideas into practice.
My breakout session featured mainly pre-law students. The discussion, which centered around welfare, social security, and liberty, went exceptionally well. Despite the fact that no one in the conversation had participated in a structured deliberation before, they all jumped in to provide insights and perspectives about the topics. Some students integrated law-based arguments, while others focused on personal anecdotes. To me, it appeared as if the Duke students were naturals who had simply not had the opportunity to engage in an organized deliberative dialogue. They often wrestled with difficult ideas, including social security reform and efficient government spending, acknowledging that they could not solve everything today, but that the discussion of the issue was an important step forward. There were undoubtedly awkward moments, or periods of silence that created discomfort, but by the end, the conversation felt both casual and purposeful.
When the conversation wrapped up, I joined the reception dinner and discovered that many other DCI Fellows had similar experiences. In spite of the surface-level differences, the Duke students quickly picked up deliberation. Every conversation had its ups and downs, but the core concept of sharing viewpoints in a safe space to listen and learn from others was successfully passed along. On the car ride back to Davidson, we all took turns reflecting on the afternoon at Duke; one of my main takeaways I expressed was how easily a different community picked up the unique skill of deliberation. Personally, it gave me another reason to believe in the DCI mission. In just two hours, another institution fully embraced some of the hardest skills in modern society: listening to others, expressing one’s own beliefs, and disagreeing respectfully.
