Northwestern receives $20 million gift to create the Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement

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Northwestern receives $20 million gift to create the Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement

Center will address growing polarization by teaching students the tools and skills to build understanding and engage across difference

• Link to: Northwestern Now Story

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Northwestern University Trustee Jennifer Leischner Litowitz '91 and Alec Litowitz ('22, '27 P) have made a $20 million gift in support of the Center for Enlightened Disagreement to accelerate the University's impact on promoting constructive engagement and discourse in an increasingly polarized world.

The Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement will take a comprehensive approach to making enlightened disagreement a fully integrated part of student life, with the potential to reach thousands of Northwestern students across schools and majors each year.

"Our role and responsibility as a university is to expose our students to different viewpoints and provide them with opportunities and training to engage respectfully across difference," said Northwestern President Michael H. Schill. "We are so grateful to the Litowitz family for this transformational gift, which will allow us to make the study and practice of enlightened disagreement a hallmark of the Northwestern experience."

In recognition of the Litowitzes' generosity, the University has renamed the center in their honor. Through a multifaceted approach of research, curriculum, outreach and conversation, the Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement will provide students, community members and organizations with the intellectual and analytical tools and skills to navigate disagreement and harness the power of difference in service of greater understanding, knowledge and progress.

"Exchanging conflicting opinions freely and openly can fuel innovation and change, force us to think critically and push us to expand our worldview," said Jennifer Litowitz. "Alec and I are thrilled that Northwestern is taking the lead in developing evidence-backed methods to teach students how to build understanding that will not only benefit them while at Northwestern, but even more so when they transition into the broader world."

"If we truly want to have meaningful dialogue and navigate across difference, we need to start with a better understanding of ourselves before we can try to understand others," said Alec Litowitz. "The intent of the center is to teach this type of critical thinking to create a foundation of understanding for constructive discussion and debate. The result may not be agreement, but something equally valuable: enlightened disagreement. Jen and I see this gift as an investment in the future of the Northwestern community that will help drive real progress and change."

The Litowitz Center will infuse research principles of logical thinking and enlightened disagreement into the learning goals of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences' first-year College Seminar, a required course taken annually by more than 1,000 incoming students, as well as an integrated part of student life.

Through a partnership with the University's Division of Student Affairs, the Litowitz Center will offer an innovative co-curricular program for students living on campus, with a pilot launching during the upcoming academic year. Sessions will focus on research-backed approaches to cultivating open-mindedness, identifying one's own cognitive biases, working collaboratively with others despite disagreement and more.

The Litowitz Center, originally launched as part of the Kellogg School of Management in February 2024, is based on four interconnected pillars: research, curriculum, outreach and conversation. It is led by Kellogg faculty members Nour Kteily and Eli Finkel '97, who is also a professor of psychology in Weinberg College. Both have extensive experience working to better understand polarization, misperceptions that exist among opposing groups and potential methods to remedy these challenges.

"Our society has become so divided that people avoid talking to others with different views - and when those conversations do happen, they can quickly become toxic," Finkel said. "The goal of the Litowitz Center is to develop research-backed methods that help people embrace differences, allowing for the free exchange of ideas that leads to innovation and expands our worldview."

"Any healthy society requires both a diversity of perspectives and an ability for individuals to express and learn from their differences," Kteily said. "At the same time, our research shows that people often inaccurately characterize the views of those with whom they disagree, assuming that others' beliefs are more extreme than they actually are. We want to provide students with the tools to accurately identify where substantive disagreement exists and the confidence to express their dissent honestly."

This gift continues the Litowitzes' generous philanthropy at Northwestern. Their previous giving established the first-of-its-kind Litowitz Creative Writing Graduate Program at Weinberg College, along with supporting undergraduate student experiences and research. A Northwestern alumna and parent, Jennifer Litowitz serves on the University Board of Trustees, the Weinberg College Board of Visitors and the Parent Leadership Council (with Alec). Jennifer is also director of hospitality for the Litowitz family office, QStar Capital. There she leads strategy and design for projects such as Guildhall Restaurant in Glencoe, Illinois.

Alec Litowitz is the founder and former CEO of Magnetar Capital, a leading alternative asset management firm. Alec currently serves as the founder and managing partner of QStar Capital. His parents are Northwestern alumni: his mother, Bonnie Litowitz '70 MA, '75 PhD, earned graduate and doctoral degrees in linguistics from Weinberg College, and his father, Norman Litowitz '61 MD, earned his medical degree from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Bonnie Litowitz also served as a member of Northwestern's faculty for several years, with appointments in what is now the Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders in the School of Communication as well as the department of linguistics in Weinberg College.