Harvard Dialogues

In this workshop, participants thought deeply about how to foster constructive dialogue and establish free and open conversations in Harvard classrooms. Moderator Eric Beerbohm discussed best practices and then opened the conversation to the broader audience. Panelists included Archon Fung (Harvard Kennedy School), Meira Levinson (Harvard Graduate School of Education), and Janet Halley (Harvard Law School).

Harvard Kennedy School Professors Julia Minson and Robert Wilkinson led the HKS community in an all-school workshop on the art and science of engaging across disagreement.

This event followed the PEN America Free Expression Summit and was the first in-person gathering for ICDP leadership and students. It was an opportunity to synthesize key takeaways from fall research efforts, identify the key design questions to be tackled during the spring, and continue to build strong relationships among the group.

Members of the Harvard Chaplains discussed what it means to be a good neighbor and how our responsibility to each other can help build trust and community.

In this special gathering of FAS faculty, Michael Sandel led a discussion of the perils and possibilities of engaging with hard moral and political questions in the classroom and beyond.

The Harvard Radcliffe community gathered for a training program on civil dialogue and constructive disagreement, imparting the skills and confidence to engage in difficult conversations.

PEN America facilitated a day-long summit similar to the program with students, where faculty explored ways to combat censorship, hate, and the spread of disinformation.

This workshop invited graduate students to network with colleagues and collaboratively discuss examples of, and barriers to, civil discourse in both the professional context and the local graduate training context at HMS.

This community dialogue provided an informal space to explore the concept of spaces of conflict and unpack how we talk about them.

This forum, designed to promote and model full, vigorous, and civil discourse on critical and complicated issues featured guest speakers Akhil Amar, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science Yale Law School, and Michael Mukasey, of counsel to a N.Y. law firm, former U.S. Attorney General, and chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

This interactive workshop was an opportunity to practice listening and speaking in ways that promote constructive conversation. Participants left with frameworks for full-spectrum listening and a deeper understanding of the relationship between our intentions as listeners and the impact listening has on relationships and communication.

In this session, HDS students and faculty discussed how to foster dialogue across religious differences to expand their knowledge base and build empathy for those with different perspectives. The group also participated in a case study designed to put ideas into practice.

The School of Engineering and Applied Sciences hosted three in-person, moderated panel discussions featuring faculty discussing a complex and possibly contentious topic in their field: Generative AI—Winners and Losers, The Bionic Human—Societal Challenges and Opportunities at the Frontier of Biomedical Innovation, and Researching Solar Geoengineering—A Necessary Climate Approach or Dangerous Distraction?