What Community Colleges Bring to the Civil-Dialogue Push

By Alexander C. Kafka

At Hudson County Community College in New Jersey, contentious national topics hit close to home.

Take raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"It's hard to see, especially when these people you're seeing get detained, innocent people as well," says Emily Martinez, 18, an HCCC student living in Bayonne, New Jersey, majoring in criminal justice, and planning eventually to get a master's degree and become a homicide detective. "I pray every day," says Martinez, "that my family is able to return home safely" - all the more so after an HCCC student and her mother were swept up in March by ICE. While the mother was released, the college says, the student is being held at a detention facility in Louisiana.

On social media or at a protest, Martinez, a first-generation Mexican-American college student, will speak her mind on such incidents. "You've got to be the voice for the families that can't speak out," she says.

On campus, however, she's hesitant to dive into these matters with her peers. "If you see me in person, I probably won't say anything." Face to face, there is too much awkward tension around difficult subjects - and the vibe, says Martinez, is "'let's not do this right now.'"

In the last few years, the skills and willingness to have conversations about tough topics have waned, according to students, faculty members, and surveys. Pandemic isolation probably atrophied some of those verbal-engagement muscles, college leaders say, but political violence and ugly, polarized public rhetoric could be bigger factors. Expressing yourself in person, Martinez and other students say, risks hateful and even dangerous reactions.

But ultimately, what's the alternative? Most people don't want to go tromping through life starting arguments, but talking through tense, complicated issues is a skill fundamental not just to democracy but to work and to family and community life. Colleges are trying to teach their students civil-dialogue skills so they can approach thorny issues respectfully and tell their stories and express their beliefs without fear.

So far such formal efforts have mostly been at four-year colleges, especially private liberal-arts colleges, even though 39 percent of all undergraduates and 49 percent of Hispanic undergraduates attend community colleges. HCCC and a handful of other community colleges or community-college systems are trying to change that as members of a consortium called College Presidents for Civic Preparedness, which the group abbreviates as CPCP or, in conversation, "CP Squared."

The coalition of presidents is the brainchild of Rajiv Vinnakota, president of Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation) in Princeton, New Jersey. CPCP started in August 2023 with 14 member institutions and is now at 135 and growing, Vinnakota says.

Every college has pockets of intense civil dialogue occurring in certain classrooms or centers. The key, says Vinnakota, is to make civil dialogue the norm for students. They should practice it regularly from orientation on, throughout curricular and co-curricular life. "We want to make this part of our DNA," he says. It's early days, but CPCP has started to measure the civil-dialogue program's effectiveness through a few select questions in student surveys about campus climate.