What Community Colleges Bring to the Civil-Dialogue Push

By Alexander C. Kafka

Hudson County Community College employees come together for its College Service Day, where they had discussions about what students need to persist to graduation and what they need to learn to prepare for the workplace. Photo credit Jersey Pictures.

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.

Fertile Ground

Community colleges are a promising laboratory for such a project, especially diverse colleges like HCCC, a multi-campus, urban institution with one campus in sight of the Statue of Liberty and another near the site of the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.

Eighty-seven percent of its students are non-white. On its Journal Square campus in Jersey City, its North Hudson campus in Union City, or its center in Secaucus, you’ll hear students speaking English, Spanish, Arabic, and a slew of other languages, says the college’s president, Christopher M. Reber. A third of HCCC’s 24,000 combined credit and non-credit students were born in other countries, and 1,500 are learning English as a second language.

Community-college students usually don’t live on campus and have fewer opportunities outside the in-person or virtual classroom to absorb an institution’s culture. On the other hand, they often have substantial life and work experience and have had to bridge cultural chasms. Talking through differences and tough situations? Those are the stories of their lives. But they might not know they’ve learned those skills, or that the skills are in demand, and they might not feel comfortable sharing their stories. That’s what HCCC wants to change.

With diverse student populations, community colleges are a promising laboratory for how to teach students how to have conversations about divisive topics. At the Hudson County Community College, you’ll hear students speaking English, Spanish, Arabic, and other languages, says Christopher M. Reber, the college’s president.

With diverse student populations, community colleges are a promising laboratory for how to teach students how to have conversations about divisive topics. At the Hudson County Community College, you’ll hear students speaking English, Spanish, Arabic, and other languages, says Christopher M. Reber, the college’s president.

Student organizations at Hudson County Community College host a "Friendsgiving" on campus. Students' friends and family members are invited to the annual event. Photo courtesy of Hudson County Community College.

“People’s stories matter. They’re relevant to the content we’re talking about,” says Kade Thurman, the college’s coordinator of sociology and anthropology and an instructor of sociology. Civil discourse isn’t just about being able to speak candidly about Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, ICE raids, and other hot-button issues. It’s about “flattening the hierarchy and really encouraging the students to share.”

“It’s Important,” says Christopher Conzen, executive director of HCCC’s Secaucus Center and its dual-enrollment program, “to be able to have that conversation in the classroom rather than tamping it down or avoiding it.”

Community colleges, by their very nature, are good laboratories for civil dialogue, he says. “As an open-access institution, we are a mirror of our community.” And for the nation’s almost 2 million high-school dual-enrollment students at community colleges — more than a fifth of community colleges’ enrollment — civil-dialogue efforts offer early exposure to conversations across differences, says Conzen. Dual-enrollment students are constructively thrust into discussions with older classmates from across the county and, in many cases, international backgrounds. There is a safety in escaping the peer judgment of those younger students’ K-12 classmates. “They feel a little freer to engage in these conversations,” Conzen says, “because it won’t affect their peer standing. … They get to test out some of the beliefs that they have.”

Such conversations are not limited to social-science and humanities classes, says Citizens & Scholars’ Vinnakota. He recalls the director of a nurse-training program who approached him after a CPCP event. Nurses, she said, constantly make tough decisions from complex variables and communicate them to colleagues, patients, and families in intense situations. “Call that collaborative problem solving and civil discourse,” Vinnakota suggests, and call out to faculty and students that employers actively seek those abilities.

“They feel a little freer to engage in these conversations, because it won’t affect their peer standing. They get to test out some of the beliefs that they have.”

How to Open Minds

How, exactly, might an instructor weave civil-dialogue skills into everyday discussions and activities? Instructors from around the country attend CPCP faculty institutes, then follow up with regular online workshops. Back on campus, they share techniques with colleagues in professional-development activities and test them out in their own classes.

Michael A. DeBlois is a composition and public-speaking instructor at York County Community College, in Maine — part of the seven-college, nine-campus Maine Community College System, which is part of CPCP. DeBlois went to a 2024 CPCP training program in New Jersey for about 50 community-college faculty members and administrators from around the country. Among other activities, they practiced looking for signals that constructive dialogue in a group might be falling apart. The room goes eerily silent, for instance, or students start interrupting each other. That’s when the instructor can switch discussion modes to bring the conversation back into focus and make students feel more comfortable.

DeBlois had always thought of such situations as student interactions he didn’t have much influence over, but he learned that, at least sometimes, an instructor can help steer the conversational ship. For instance, argument and persuasion are fundamental to DeBlois’s syllabi, but instead of having students argue their viewpoints, he might have them map out many possible views on, say, whether AI is, over all, more harmful or helpful. “We end by collaborating, synthesizing, or building upon the different perspectives to create a new idea or a more comprehensive understanding of the issue,” he explains.

Or students might physically line up to represent a spectrum of viewpoints. That shifts their thinking from simple pro-con dichotomies. Part of seeing the viewpoint diversity around them, says DeBlois, is that students don’t worry as much about not being in other people’s ostensible camp. There are no us-versus-them camps, but rather a range of perspectives — and often quickly shifting perspectives at that.

In that kind of discussion, sensitive headline issues come up naturally, says DeBlois, but the instructor needn’t raise them directly at the outset. That risks putting some students on the defensive. Strategies to more gently generate discussion might include reading poetry, says DeBlois, or essays from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, about how perception is affected by gender, ideology, economics, and other factors.

Michael A. DeBlois, a composition and public-speaking instructor at York County Community College, in Maine, went to a 2024 training run by College Presidents for Civic Preparedness. Photo courtesy of York County Community College.

"Students here really crave that kind of civil discourse, that kind of expressivist mode,” says DeBlois. Photo courtesy of York County Community College.

One class discussion on those Berger readings led students to talk about reporting on the war in Gaza. A student said the conversation was bringing out a lot of anxiety for her, but during the next class, DeBlois said, she thanked her classmates for talking the matter through, which she said helped her cope with that anxiety. Unlike a classic debate format, which DeBlois also teaches and which he says has its place, the goal here is not to win but to seek truths together.

However delicately such discussions are generated, some students will feel awkward staking their claim on a matter. They might remain quiet, at least for a while, says DeBlois, and that’s OK. “Give them space and grace,” he advises.

Overall, says DeBlois, “the students here really crave that kind of civil discourse, that kind of expressivist mode.”

Jason Early, 17, is majoring in architectural and engineering design at York County and plans to transfer to the University of Southern Maine and earn a degree in mechanical engineering. “I try to stay out of politics with friends,” he says. But during discussions in DeBlois’s class and others at York County, he and other students have talked about contentious topics with “no heckling at all,” he says. “No one was being like, What are you doing? Stop talking.” In a history course, “you’re obviously going to go through a lot of touchy topics,” he says, “but there was never a time when people got angry.”

In a discussion of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, students stuck to specifics like how much President Harry Truman knew about what harms the bombs would inflict. A discussion about AI “shifted my viewpoint and made it maybe a bit wider,” Early says, allowing that there could be constructive uses for AI in business even if he still thinks it has no place in education. An online discussion in macroeconomics focused on readings contrasting classical and Keynesian economic models. Early wrote a response to a classmate saying, “I like what you did here,” but adding that he disagreed and was more of a Keynesian himself.

Confronted with opposing viewpoints, Early tries to say, “What makes them feel this way? What makes them tick?” Regarding news he finds outrageous, “I think it can be frustrating sometimes. … ‘Why would anyone be agreeing with this?’” But then he tries to understand what formed those views. He thinks to himself, “‘They had good intentions somewhere, I’m sure,’ and try to find those.”

‘A Better Path’

Those regular opportunities to engage in civil dialogue, says David Daigler, president of the Maine Community College System, “are essential skills for the workplace and they’re essential skills for democracy.”

“It’s not about conquering or winning the day,” he says. “It’s about understanding and being understood.”

Looking at civil communication in his politically polarized state in our politically polarized nation, Daigler says, “In the 1860s we couldn’t do that, and it didn’t end well for us, so let’s find a better path this time.”

Rifaya Dubash Khajamohideen, 20, is wrapping up her associate degree in biology at Hudson County Community College and will transfer to the New Jersey Institute of Technology to study forensic science. In her three years at HCCC, she says, she’s seen a chill come over students’ conversations about current events. “I would definitely say there’s been a bit of cautiousness,” she says — a feeling of “I don’t feel safe having this conversation.” Middle-East warfare, politics, Trump — “we’re scared, Would this person do something to me if I bring that up?”

Khajamohideen is president of the student government association and works two jobs — one on campus in enrollment services and one as a customer-service agent at Newark airport. She says that conversational chill is unfortunate. Knowing when and how to engage across differences, she has learned, is a crucial skill for students and in the workplace. She appreciates the college’s push for civil dialogue across varying viewpoints because “they’re teaching you and you’re teaching them.”

Fearfully swerving to avoid forbidden topics is un-American, she says.

“We live in the U.S.A.,” says Khajamohideen. Choose your moments, sure, but “we should be able to speak our minds without thinking about who’s going to harm us in what way.”

“What Community Colleges Bring to the Civil-Dialogue Push” was written by Alexander C. Kafka. The Chronicle is fully responsible for the report’s editorial content. ©2026 by The Chronicle of Higher Education Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced without prior written permission of The Chronicle. For permission requests, contact us at copyright@chronicle.com.