Concourse is one of MIT’s first-year learning communities, and provides an ideal test bed for our Civil Discourse project. The entire class of 40 students attends our speaker series as part of their advising seminar participation. Concourse also devotes some of its regular Friday seminars to the project. In one, the students read excerpts from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, the MIT statement on free expression and academic freedom, and information about the Dorian Abbot episode at MIT. They then discussed the Abbot affair in light of arguments that Mill gives for free speech.
Other seminars are on the Fridays after the speaker events, in which the students will debate the topic of that week. Concourse uses the debate format developed by Braver Angels, which helps students develop the skills to discuss polarized issues productively and with civility. Concourse has three upper-class “debate fellows,” who help plan and conduct the debates to ensure that many different viewpoints are expressed.
Our plan this year is to open the Concourse debates to the wider MIT community. Our project dovetails nicely with the Concourse vision of a liberal education where opposing ideas are heard and argued over, in service of gaining a more nuanced common understanding of the world and humanity’s place within it.
The Concourse experiment will help us determine what works and what doesn’t, and our longer term ambition is to reach all MIT first-year students.
Our debate fellows
I’m a junior majoring in Course 20 (Biological Engineering) and minoring in Course 24 (Philosophy). As well as being a Debate Fellow, I am also a TA for Concourse Seminar, and CC.110 (Becoming Human: Ancient Greek Perspectives on the Good Life). I’m also a member of the Undergraduate Association Student Support and Wellbeing Committee (WellComm). In my free time, I like to do photography, play video games, and learn about philosophy and history. I did competitive speech and debate in high school and have ever since found great pleasure in engaging in respectful, honest, and open discussion of ideas, regardless of differences of opinion. What I find intellectually stimulating about debates and open dialogues is that they require you to not only listen to and engage with others’ opinions, but to confront your own beliefs and why you believe them. Having these kinds of conversations may be difficult or uncomfortable, but necessary in order to understand our fellow humans and bridge the divides we see in our society.
I’m a pre-law senior double-majoring in political science and physics (going into international space law); depending on my mood, home for me is Seal Beach, CA (near LA) or C2 in Burton Conner. Outside of class, I’m the President of MIT’s sorority system, an actor and producer with MIT’s LOST theater group, co-floor chair of Conner 2 (the other floor chair is also in Concourse!), a Burton Conner Rush Chair, a Sustained Dialogues leader, a TA for two Concourse classes, and a chair for MUN! In my free time, you can find me searching for new iced coffee spots, going on long walks, making soap, playing water polo, sticking any poster I can find to my room walls, or hate-reading books to leave scathing Goodreads reviews. Throughout the various communities in which I’m involved, I’ve always valued ideological diversity and respectful exchange of opposing views; I feel that I learn best through reasoned debate and discussion. To that extent, I’m beyond excited to work with you all to address and learn from some of the contentious questions on and beyond campus.
I’m a sophomore majoring in 6-3 (computer science) and 18 (mathematics). Outside of classes, I’m a member of Hillel student board, and one of the leaders of MIT Orthodox Jewish prayer services. Before MIT, I attended Yeshivat Har Etzion, a Talmudic seminary in Israel, where I learned the chavruta methodology—a dialogue and debate-centered style of learning in which students argue about important topics and texts in conjunction with a study partner. Through exposure to passionate and yet civil discourse, I’m beginning to understand its transformative effects in bringing people closer together, and I very much want to help bring that transformative power to others through being one of Concourse’s debate fellows.