Elizabeth Smith
What do each of the you know, at Dartmouth, we have four divisions, the science division, Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary programs. How do they intersect with the dialog project? What kinds of dialogs should the faculty be having about the future of the liberal arts? The skills of dialog, right? And talking about the future of the liberal arts. Personally, I feel like it’s the liberal arts, particularly humanities and social sciences, that have the greatest potential for engaging in the development of dialog skills, you know, our special topics.

Keith Edwards
Keith, hello and welcome to Student Affairs. Now I’m your host. Keith Edwards, today, I’m joined by Kristi Clemens and Dr Elizabeth Smith, who co direct the dialog project at Dartmouth. This project merged from the past year’s tensions to develop the skills for engaging across differences. We hear from so many of you in our audience about wanting to bridge differences. I’m eager to hear from them about how this has emerged, their approach and what they have learned so far. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and online learning community for 1000s of us work alongside, in or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays to find details about this episode or browse our archives at studentaffairsnow.com This episode is sponsored by Evolve. Evolve helps senior leaders release fear, gain courage and take action for transformational leadership through a personalized cohort based virtual learning experience. And this episode is also sponsored by Symplicity, a true partner. Symplicity supports all aspects of student life with technology platforms that empower institutions to make data driven decisions. As I mentioned, I’m your host. Keith Edwards, my pronouns are he, Him, His. I’m a speaker, author and coach, and I help higher ed leaders and organizations Empower transformation for better tomorrows through better leadership, learning and equity. You can find out more about me at keithedwards.com I’m recording this from my home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is at the intersections of the current and ancestral homelands of both the Dakota in the Ojibwe peoples. Let’s bring our guests in here. Thank you both for joining me for this conversation. Tell us a little bit more about you and Elizabeth, I think we’re going to start with you.

Elizabeth Smith
Well, thank you for having us on Keith. It’s great to be here today to talk about the dialog project. I’m Elizabeth Smith. I’m a professor of Biological Sciences at Dartmouth, and I’m currently serving as dean of the faculty for the Arts and Sciences,

Kristi Clemens
and I’m Kristi Clemens, thanks for having me back on the podcast. I’m here at Dartmouth, and I am now the executive director of dialog initiatives, and I co direct the dialog project with Elizabeth.

Keith Edwards
All right, those are the most concise introductions I think we’ve ever had on the podcast, wonderful. We’ll I think we’ll learn much more about both of you as this kind of evolves. I mentioned this kind of emerged from some of what has happened over the past year. Ish, you can correct me on the timing of that, but I’d love to hear from you about how this project emerged at Dartmouth. Elizabeth, you want to take us back to 2019

Elizabeth Smith
Yeah, so this started as a conversation that I had with some faculty colleagues all the way back to 2019 and we were observing what everyone was observing, which is that dialog seemed to have broken down. We were seeing it particularly in the media, but everyone also noticed it on, for example, social media. But what was most disturbing, I think, is that, you know, as an institution of higher education, you feel like you’re kind of insulated from this breakdown, but we weren’t. Faculty reported having difficulty engaging students in dialog around really important topics, topics that were challenging to discuss, but it actually went even beyond the classroom. You know, I noticed that there was a breakdown of dialog between even faculty members. Reports from faculty meetings not going very well. And then my colleagues in student affairs were also reporting how difficult it was for students to even engage in dialog when they were experienced conflict. And so we were having these conversations. And, you know, we went back even to the roots of defining dialog and what’s the problem we’re trying to fix, and what are some ways that we might be able to fix it. Of course, the pandemic hit, a lot of things were put on hold. We then had a presidential transition at Dartmouth, and it was in talking to our current president, presidency on bylaw. She had had conversations with Kristi, where Kristi had brought up her work on brave spaces, which was something of particular interest to our president. And President biological said, Hey, Elizabeth, you should really talk to Kristi about the dialog project. And sort of you know, it’s been history from there. So I got together. Kristi’s been truly amazing. Has had terrific ideas about how to really make this thing sing. Prior to Kristi’s interjection into the in the project, it was faculty hanging out, having great discussions, but Kristi’s brought just amazing ideas. To the project, and also really spearheaded implementation. So we officially launched, what was it? February of 2024, but we’ve been, you know, thinking about what we might do to tackle this problem for a few years now.

Kristi Clemens
So thank you, Elizabeth, and it’s been so great to work with the faculty side of things. You know, I was observing similar challenges, even in my work in Title Nine that we were, I was seeing these conflicts, these really lower level conflicts that students just couldn’t get past, or faculty or staff. For that matter. It reminded me of my early days as a hall director talking about roommate conflicts, that that’s the kind of level that we were, we were at. And so, you know, you think about, maybe this is just me, but maybe some of your student affairs practitioner listeners, and you remember when you sit around with your student affairs colleagues and say, what if we could redesign everything? What if we could just start from scratch and think about introducing these values? And so I feel like we’re not quite there with the dialog project at Dartmouth, but it’s been a similar experience of, what if we change the way that we talked with our students about engaging with each other? What if we had that permeate through the entire institution, rather than just one little bit or one little corner in a particular office? And so I started thinking about the big picture and what the priorities for the dialog project could be. And there are things that we know are our best practices, active listening, motivational interviewing, creating brave spaces, building empathy. These are skills I think we’ve seen our communities sort of lose over time. I have the privilege of being able to sort of CO direct, and I wouldn’t say co direct, co direct, certainly the dialog project with Elizabeth, but we have a broader Dartmouth dialogs initiative that is really focused on bringing diverse voices out in front of our community to have different conversations at different times, and to exemplify the way that We can have respectful dialog across difference. And so the dialog project specifically talks about the skill building initiatives and the skill building elements that we’ll be bringing in over the next couple of years, but the broader dialog around dialog at Dartmouth, led by our President and other great departments and partners around campus. So I get to sort of watch this play out in a couple of different ways, which has been really interesting to manage. And so I’ve been really excited to have the opportunity to build something from scratch, which we haven’t done in a while, and do that with some really excellent internal and external partners.

Keith Edwards
A couple questions. You mentioned, a few things, active listening, motivational interviewing, brave spaces. So I we you and I previously had a conversation around brave spaces with with Brian Rao, which folks can find on the podcast, but if you can give us the Cliff Notes version, that’d be great,

Kristi Clemens
Sure. So the way that Brian and I speak about brave spaces is particularly in the context of social justice and diversity education that we found as nascent diversity educators and the beginning of our career, creating safe spaces for dialog. Saying this is a safe space. You can say whatever you want, and you don’t have to worry about people being upset. That actually wasn’t serving people who are much part of marginalized communities, people who have to sort of share the share parts of their vulnerable identities over and over again. And so we thought about, you know, what are the How can we set up the space differently so that folks feel more comfortable engaging, it feels more authentic, we reduce the harm that’s potentially caused in this educational environment and so shifting to brave spaces, asking participants to be brave, but also recognize that they have, there’s responsibility for their actions. So it’s an intent versus impact. It’s really the things that we know to be true. I think it was very groundbreaking in 2006 maybe not now, not so much, but encouraging folks to push those learning edges, to to be brave and not just stay in their comfort zone, which that’s the whole purpose of what we’re doing here in education, right is to is to grow young people, not only in the classroom and an institution like Dartmouth, where we have such a high caliber of learning, but to help them be able to be, be great citizens and be able to build something wherever they go.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, I’ll just say there’s a whole conversation on it. But I went to a session Kristi and Brian did in 2007 maybe, and I remember walking out saying to someone I remember who that’s the best conference session I’ve ever been to. And I wouldn’t shut shut up about it. And it is something that I kick off all of my workshops and conversations, whether it’s around equity, inclusion or strategic planning or mindful leadership with Brave spaces. And I think you talk about it all the time for the past almost 20 years. Kristi, so it’s maybe as common knowledge for you, but it is. Still earth shattering for many folks to shift that perspective. The other question I had was, it sounds to me like the Dartmouth dialog is maybe more speakers and events and modeling. I’m thinking bigger scale events and the dialog project is more skill building and putting into practice with students, faculty and staff. Am I understanding that? Right?

Kristi Clemens
That’s exactly right. You know, particularly this this term, as we had an election, as folks are aware, and we’re in New Hampshire, so there’s a lot of interesting things happening here. Really focused a lot on dialog around the elections, and so had speakers to campus like former Vice President Mike Pence, it had a dialog between Donna Brazile and Kelly Kellyanne Conway. So modeling for our community, these are people who might have opinions and beliefs that are really different from yours or from each other, but they can still sit down and have a friendly conversation across those differences. But when we talk about the dialog project as the signature initiative under that Dartmouth dialogs umbrella, it is, how are we teaching, how are we practicing these skills, and how are we thinking about the different areas around campus where we can teach and practice those skills? So it’s not just over in this one little corner of campus, but it’s, it’s really pervasive,

Keith Edwards
sort of funneling this from the need we have in the world that we live in to be better at engaging in these practices of dialog around so many different things, not just elections and political differences, but climate change, and what is the meaning of education, and who are you, and who am I to the people we live with, right? And then we have this Dartmouth dialog, which is modeling this and larger scale events and things like that. And then we have what you described as the signature program there, the dialog project. So let’s focus in on that, because I think that’s the thing that our listeners will really be interested in, what you’ve done, how you’ve done it, and some of the very clear ways you define this. So, so Elizabeth, what is the dialog project at Dartmouth? Yeah,

Elizabeth Smith
you know, once we figured out, okay, what’s the problem that we’re trying to solve, the real challenge was coming up with solutions and ways that we might approach the problem. As I mentioned earlier, everybody recognized what was happening or not happening, as the case may be. But how do we actually teach it? How do we train people to do this? So we started with really simple principles, and I’ll just state them very simply, which is, you learn by observation and you learn by doing. Those are sort of two ways in which people can learn. And so if we just start with that first one learn by observation, one of the things that was just missing from the discourse that you would see in the media was a really good example of productive, constructive and respectful dialog. And so we needed to make sure that we were providing ample opportunity for all members of our community, not just students, to observe the kind of dialog that we wanted people to engage in. The second piece the Learn by Doing well, that’s practice. That’s how you learn. So once you’ve kind of, oh, okay, that’s that’s constructive dialog. I saw that that went really well. How do I do it? So you’ve got to practice. And when you take those two principles, learn by doing, learn by observation. We’re an institution of higher ed, so we can apply those two principles within the classroom structure. So how do you learn by observation and learn by doing within the classroom context. And then, of course, we’re residential college, so there’s a huge amount of programming that happens outside of the classroom. And so you can almost envision that as a four part, you know, a quadrant, if you will, of doing an observation inside the classroom and outside of the classroom. And so as we kind of get into the specifics of the programming and the dialog project, that’s really the scaffold where all of the activities that we’ve planned can be hung is on that scaffold,

Keith Edwards
right? Kristi, what would you add here?

Kristi Clemens
So I think that’s a thinking of the bigger picture and where we started. I mentioned earlier that we set a set of priorities, and the priorities were not intended to gatekeep anything that is dialog project or not dialog project, but to give us a framework to say that. You know, rather than saying these five skills are essential in dialog, we didn’t want to limit ourselves to that. We wanted to say, these are the types of things. And so relationship building, focusing on collective responsibility, the empathy building that I mentioned earlier. And so with all of those, we’ve landed right now on four pillars, or four categories of programs that are offered through the dialog project that we think exists. Amplify these priorities, these pillars may change over time. I think we think of ourselves a little bit like an incubator model that will try some things out. And if something is really successful and it seems like it needs to live somewhere else at the institution, then we’ll transition and do that. But this is where we’ve landed for now. So we have speakers, sort of guest speakers and workshops training. We have the special topic series, and then our partnership with StoryCorps one small step. And so I won’t go into painstaking detail about all of them, but I’ll highlight some of the things that I think are most interesting. So we bring guest speakers to campus, just like everybody else does. But when we bring them, we don’t want them to just do a book talk and sort of do their spiel and then disappear. We invite them to do more in depth workshops. We invite them to meet with small groups of students. And so I’ll use an example. Our first speaker last winter, Dr Mark Brackett from the Yale Center for emotional intelligence, came to campus and did an amazing keynote, but he also did a 90 minute brunch with students to talk about how the use of emotions in navigating difficult dialogs. He met with our senior leadership that was also a 90 minute workshop session, and so really thinking about who are the key partners around campus that would want to engage with this material a little bit more deeply and think about how they can apply it to the work that they’re doing. Our next featured speaker will be Dr Monica Guzman, who’s coming later in in February. We’re excited for her to do the same thing she is said right from the outset that her goal is to be as interactive as possible, and really think about the sort of in conversation models. But again, you know it’s, it’s extrapolating from that here, just come hear somebody do a talk to how can you have a conversation with this person and really apply their research and their learnings to the work that you’re doing? Whether you’re a faculty member, a student leader, you know, a student affairs practitioner. The second category, or the second pillar that I would want to speak about is the special topic series and so and Elizabeth, please jump in, because this is much more in your area. Dartmouth got a lot of positive attention over the past year for our Middle East dialogs, and that was a partnership through our Jewish Studies Department and our Middle East Studies Department. Right after October 7, these two departments, which already had a great working relationship and have co taught classes for years, stepped up and said, we’ve got to do something to help our campus engage in the dialog. And so they immediately looked to action and started planning some workshops and brought in guest speakers. And Elizabeth, you want to say more about some of the specifics on that? Yeah,

Elizabeth Smith
sure. I think what’s really important that Kristi’s mentioning is just as was true for the speaker series, the special topic series, again, it’s not just bringing speakers to campus, and so we called that Middle East dialogs, and we had panel discussions. And I think one of the keys was it was very important to bring different perspectives to the panel. There was also audience participation. There’s it. And we have posted a lot of these panel discussions online, and there were moments where students were kind of getting a little, you know, wanted to kind of shout out a little bit, and it was really fascinating watching the faculty not just interact with the panelists, but how they managed student participation to make sure that we Were really engaging in dialog, linked to the panel discussions as well. Were courses. And so these were kind of more it, if you want to think about it as private events, the panel discussions were open to the public, and so students could engage there, but students could also engage in a more, you know, limited format, where there were, you know, hundreds of people in an auditorium with some of the guest speakers. So there were courses, there were speakers, there were panel discussions, there were all kinds of events related to the special topic. And we’re working on a special topic that we’re going to launch also probably in January. We were just working on the communications around this, which is our next special topic, will be on borders and immigration and so again, in all of this programming around Special Topics, it’s about panels, conferences, but also courses and all kinds of opportunities for people to engage in the topic. And it’s also really critically important as to bring in different perspectives, so not just focus on on one perspective. So we’re really excited about what 2025 is going to hold for us in terms of special topics.

Keith Edwards
Emily, hear about StoryCorps.

Kristi Clemens
Yeah, StoryCorps. Everybody wants to hear about StoryCorps. Um. So everybody knows StoryCorps that they’re, you know you’re have your your NPR driveway moment listening to StoryCorps, which is an oral history project, I think, for for lack of a better category that brings the other people who know and love each other to discuss really, sometimes heartfelt, sometimes difficult topics. About not eight or nine years ago, the one small step initiative was an offshoot of StoryCorps, and so one small step is different because it brings together two people who have very different perspectives and who don’t know each other. So you fill out a questionnaire where you talk about your political perspectives, or your economic perspective, how important religion is in your life, a little bit of your background, and then you’re paired with somebody who has opposite thoughts or in some ways, but there’s some nexus of connection. The whole thought behind one small step is that we really have more in common than we have different. And to find those moments of commonality makes it very difficult to hate up close. And so using the story core methodology and facilitation, bringing two people together to have this conversation. So they’ve done this in a couple of different communities around the country. Dartmouth is the first collegiate partner for one small step, which is really exciting. So we have done now four different recording engagements where one small step staff come to campus and facilitate conversations with our students, faculty, staff, and then they’ve been doing alumni conversations as well. So it’s a full, you know, full, full community moment. We’ve also partnered with them to do some work on workshops. And so they they helped speak with our orientation leaders this summer, and then I co facilitated a workshop with one of the one small step staffers just before Thanksgiving to prepare, help people prepare up students, prepare for winter break and Thanksgiving break and some of the challenging conversations that come from there. The next step, with one small step for us, is to begin to train Dartmouth facilitators in the methodology. And so rather than bringing one small step folks to campus to facilitate those conversations, to actually train our students to be able to do that and see how that goes. And so we’re excited to think about to start doing that, hopefully in our spring term. And then the fourth the fourth pillar is really just our trainings and workshops. And so as one could expect, we’ve got lots of different workshop opportunities. We’re partnering with the constructive dialog Institute. They’re doing great work in this space on various campuses. They have some live offerings and some asynchronous offerings. Something that I’m really proud of is the way that we approach New Student Orientation this year. So I only transitioned into this role full time in the summer, and so we were playing a little bit of catch up. Anyone who works on a college campus knows that number one, the orientation schedule is probably set by February and can’t be moved. And second, everybody’s always trying to cram some more stuff into orientation. And so I didn’t want to do that to my colleagues. And so my approach was, I know that you’re talking about dialog skills in different workshops, different sections of this orientation. Can I offer you some language so that our students, our incoming students, are hearing the same language? I think about this surround sound model if you’re in different spaces and you’re hearing, oh, relationship is important. Empathy building is important. Brave spaces are things that we want to cultivate that will start to become part of the fabric of what you expect your experience to be at Dartmouth, I always think about this project that we want our students to know, that we expect them to engage in difficult dialog, and we’re going to teach you how to do that. So beginning that conversation right at the New Student Orientation is, I think, critical, and then Elizabeth and I were lucky enough to have an opportunity to speak with the whole class. So in two different halves, we have a 1200 student incoming class. Had two separate sections where we presented for an hour on the dialog project. We did an interactive exercise with them, and really had a very enthusiastic group, all things considered, that it was late in the evening in a big space, but they were hungry for it, and that’s what makes me really excited about this new generation of incoming students, that they recognize that things haven’t been going great in the discourse space, and want To be at the forefront of changing it

Keith Edwards
wonderful. Well, that’s a lot about the dialog project, but it’s really good context about what you’ve created, how you’ve done it, both in terms of some of the concepts and ideas, but also some of the practice and implementing and designing. And I’m imagining many folks listening, going, well, we could do something similar to that. That’s a good part. So I think this is really, like you said, an incubator, not just for Dartmouth and not just for your students and all the things they’ll go on to do, but but other folks who are wanting to learn some of this. What have you learned so far in this? I think you said February, we’re recording here in December. So 10 months, what have you learned so far?

Kristi Clemens
Well, I think, you know, I’ve certainly learned that there is an energy and a hunger for this, but we’re at an institution that operates on a quarter system, and so finding the time and space to for folks to engage in this is really challenging. Where what I’m trying to think about for future year plannings. You know, how can this be something that is just a natural part of the fabric of of this institution and not something extra that students have to add on to their already really busy schedule? I think that integration piece is going to be really key for us as we as we think about what this looks like in subsequent years, post sort of year one. I’m sorry, Elizabeth, I cut you off.

Elizabeth Smith
No, that’s, I mean, I agree with everything you said. I you know, it’s, it’s interesting too, thinking about what I’ve learned. Because I’ve also just learned from all the people that we brought in. Like, I learned so much from Mark Brackett when he was here and interacting with him. I’ve learned from our Middle East dialogs, like, there’s that content that it’s not like, because we’re the organizers. We know it all. I mean, I’ve learned so much just by all the people that we’ve brought in and participating in some of the programming. I would totally agree with Kristi. The the hunger is out there and the willingness to participate is out there. It’s been, you know, it’s been interesting watching how different groups participate. I mean, students have a kind of eagerness about something new. As Kristi mentioned when we did this at orientation, we actually had students come up to us and said, You know, I came to Dartmouth because I heard about this. So they kind of came with that at the other end, you might have faculty very, let’s say very senior faculty were like, well, I don’t know. I’m pretty sure we’re doing dialog in my class, you know, which you know, and then having to make some definitions around a conversation. Not every conversation is is exactly what we’re talking about, but people have really started to engage. I think the other thing I’ve come to realize it’s sort of like, you know it, but it’s become more internalized, which is, this is a practice. It’s not a go to a workshop and you’ve got it, just like if you, you know, if you wanted to build muscle and you had a trainer show you how to use the weight machines. Well, you still gotta go and practice. And you know, that’s something that we’ve been thinking a lot about, is how to do that. And I think Kristi mentioned this when she said, sort of, this has got to become part of the fabric of at Dartmouth, not just something like, Oh, I gotta check that off my list, like general education requirements. But this is, in fact, in some ways, hopefully, you know, let’s say 235, years from now. It’s just one of those things that happens naturally. You don’t even notice that you’re learning how to do dialog. It’s not like and go get your dialog training, but it’s got to be incorporated into the community values, and it’s just something that happens naturally as you progress through your time here at Dartmouth, you know the students. We have new students every you know, every year, but we also have faculty and staff coming into our community every year, and I think it’s just really important that we kind of inculcate this practice into what it means to be part of our community.

Keith Edwards
Both of you have mentioned this dynamic that I find really interesting is sort of a broad hunger, a hunger for dialog, a hunger for building bridges, a hunger for finding finding some agreement, even amongst our disagreements. And I’m hearing you talk about that from students even it’s no surprise to me that you heard students say that’s part of why they came to Dartmouth. Is that hunger for that? And then faculty and staff, and we were talking earlier about trustees, so that the hunger is broad, the willingness to engage in it is is varied. And that makes sense, because I think so many of us in higher education, and this gets to the brave space piece, fetishize knowing, having the right answer, you know, being an expert right and to hear students really eager to do this, I think they have a bit of a permission slip to not have all the right answers, to not know, to maybe misstep a little bit, because that’s what they’re there. But others might feel like they really don’t want to put themselves in a position where maybe they’re messy.

Elizabeth Smith
Is that what you’re seeing? Yeah, it’s about making yourself vulnerable. And you know, I think this is what’s interesting about the one small step initiative. You know, in those conversations, you’re making yourself. So vulnerable, but that is a really protected space, and it’s a conversation between two people. It’s not like we’re creating entertainment that’s going to be aired and you know, so it’s a very protected and careful space. You start expanding into the classroom now it’s a little more challenging to make yourself vulnerable in front of your peers and students, and Christina is way more about this than I do the psychology of students and what that means to them. But it’s also true for the faculty. You know, I’ve had faculty come to me and say, Wow, a student said something that just shut down the entire discussion of the class, I had no idea what to do. I didn’t know how to respond. I couldn’t get the dialog going again. I did, you know, they are hungry for that kind of help as well. And just you know, think about I brought up at one point earlier, dynamics at faculty meetings, there’s a real power dynamic there between untenured, you know, assistant professors and full professors and again, that wow, do I really want to speak up and say something when these people are going to be judging my career like we’ve got to get past that. If people are going to have honest, open dialog,

Kristi Clemens
I would say that extends to students, to, you know, one of the reasons that we can think about doing something so large scale, and really that is a culture change, is because we’re a small institution. It’s a small community. And there’s a lot of great relationships that form here. The flip side of that is there, it’s a small community, right? And so, you know, I always used to say, particularly, you know, in Title Nine work, this campus is never so small as when you don’t want to see another person. And so if you have a difficult conversation, if you share something and you’re vulnerable in a way that feels embarrassing or feels exposing in a class or in a club meeting or even just in a residence hall conversation, they have a real concern and a real fear that that information is going to come back to bite them at some point later on, whether it’s when they’re looking for a job or trying to join an organization. And I think that’s a real I think that’s a real fear when I think about what future success could look like, I would want our student body to self correct for that, to say, hey, that’s actually not how we deal with these problems here. We’re not going to put this person’s information on one of our anonymous message boards, but in fact, we’re going to have a conversation. Hey, the thing that you said, I’d like to talk more about that. I don’t agree with it. I’d like to understand where you’re coming from and why this is important to you. And so I think we’ll start to see those effects before we see anything else. So all the assessment that we’re going to do, all of the tracking that we’ve been doing, I think we’ll see student behavior self correct first, and that’ll be the first indicator to me that we’re having some success in this area.

Keith Edwards
Seems like that, that perfectionism and needing, feeling the need to get it right, is a real obstacle, and that willingness to be vulnerable and authentic and even messy and get it wrong and make mistakes, a willingness to do that as part of the journey, I have spent many a night lamenting that dumb thing I said four years ago, and I hope no one Who was there still remembers it, and they’re probably weren’t even listening to me, because they’re worrying about the dumb thing that they said, right? And so it’s a very human thing to make mistakes or or to say something with absolute conviction. And then a few years later ago, I completely disagree with the person who said that along the way.

Elizabeth Smith
Yeah, you know, Keith too, one important distinction that Kristi and I tried to make during the dialog project is distinction between dialog and debate. And so that perfectionism and that need to win that sort of debate right when you’re going to choose a position, and the goal is to win the debate, and really trying to get students to understand that that is totally fine. There’s a place for that. It’s just not what we’re talking about when we’re talking about dialog. And sort of, if we can make that shift a little bit and say This dialog is where you don’t have to have all the answers. You’re not trying to win. You’re trying to understand what that other person’s perspective is, and recognize their perspective and express yours, but it’s not debate. And I think if we can really make those distinctions clear, we can get past some of that winning. You know, perfectionist style of engagement,

Keith Edwards
but it’s so socialized into us from every corner. I mean, I remember realizing in a slam poetry workshop led by students that the way I had been socialized to communicate was watching a Republican and a Democrat belittle each other back and forth on TV. I don’t value that. I don’t like it. Yeah, I’m pretty good at it, unfortunately. Yeah, right, and that’s just so that was so demoralizing to sort of learn. And we see it now we, you know, used to be more about on TV. We see it now on social media. And I was just thinking, Elizabeth, as you were talking, what if instead of presidential debates between candidates, we had presidential dialogs between candidates, but that notion of belittling your opponent and winning is so toxic those

Elizabeth Smith
debates aren’t even actual debates. I mean, Dartmouth has a debate club that’s very well known and is terrific. What they do is not what you see when you watch the presidential debates, right? Yeah, yeah.

Keith Edwards
Well, thanks for sharing some of those insights. I think it’s really helpful, not only for folks who might be thinking about a similar project, but just for folks who are engaging with other human beings along as we go. So I find that really helpful. But I do think that many folks listening might be thinking about a similar kind of project, or might have already been tasked with something similar to that. I’d love to benefit from some of your early wisdom. We’re not even a year in you reminded me, but what do you wish you would have known when you started? If you could go back to before February, what do you wish you would have known, or what would you offer others who are about to begin a similar journey?

Elizabeth Smith
Yeah, you know, one thing I would say is you don’t have to go it alone. And what I mean by that, Kristi mentioned the constructive dialog Institute. There are some great resources out there. You don’t have to start from scratch. And the other thing is, you know, if you just Google dialog and university or college, you’ll find other institutions engaging in this. Everyone sees how important it is we’re all trying to do. You know, what we think is going to contribute to a solution to this lack of dialog. And so everyone that we’ve interacted with has been very generous about, like, talking about, oh, here’s what you’re doing, or here’s what we’re doing, you know, I we’re all sort of just starting. I can imagine, in a future that we have a conference, you know, we invite representatives from other schools that have their own dialog projects, and we all just exchange ideas and share what’s working, what didn’t work. Oh, I did an experiment and that didn’t work. So now we’re going to change course. So anyone who’s considering embarking on this, like I said, you don’t have to go it alone. Find some people who are already doing things and reach out, because people have been very generous to connect.

Kristi Clemens
I agree. I talk with folks and hear from folks you know, weekly who are trying to spin up some sort of dialog initiative on their campus. And just having podcasts isn’t going to help that bring it on. The more the more, the more thoughts the merrier. And honestly, you know, the different perspectives and finding what works and what hasn’t worked, I think, has been really important, something that I’m sort of catching up to now, and what we’re going to course correct for. And to some extent, we’ve had really strong leadership support of this. So from the President, from all the senior leaders from the board, they say, This is great. They’re talking about it all the time, and that is excellent and wonderful and absolutely necessary. I also need students to get on board, and not just the students who opt in. And so I’m thinking about building up a student advisory board to help think about, what are the ways that we can make this attractive to students? How can we build that trust so that they don’t just think it’s, you know, the administration coming in with another idea. Because even though the students are saying, Wow, I really do think this is a great idea, and I do think this is necessary. You know, is this just the administration trying to get us to not protest? No, we’re trying to teach you things, because that’s what we all do here. This is just a different way they’re trying to do it. And so I think bringing bringing the student voices in more directly, we do have students on our steering committee, but I’d like to have a group of just students that I can say, hey, students, can you take a look at this? What do you think is this going to fly? Is this timing going to work? And have some of that be from them, which I think is really useful. And then something else, you know, I think I mentioned when I was talking about orientation, is that, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel or trying to roll in and say, here, here, I’m just going to plop this thing on top of your work, learning more about what folks are doing in this space already and inviting them in to partner, I think has been a great example. I a good we have a in our student wellness area, a trained motivation motivational interviewing facilitator who does this nationally. We partner with her to highlight and elevate those motivational interviewing workshops. But the work is still being done over in that student wellness area. So those types of partnerships, and, you know, I’m, you know, luckily, luckily. I’ve been here at Dartmouth for 15 years in a number of capacities. Elizabeth. Been here for 25 years like we’ve got some cred that we can use for a little while and some connections and awareness of what’s happening institution wide. But finding those, finding those threads and where we can connect those dots, rather than just sort of dumping stuff on top that’s been where our greatest successes have been.

Elizabeth Smith
I think, yeah, I want to build on what Kristi said about key partners, which is, Kristi is a staff member and I’m a faculty member, and us working together on this project, I think has been really important. I see when I look kind of look around at other institutions, they might be primarily faculty led, or maybe primarily staff led. I think if you want to engage the whole community, you need to have that dual leadership. And Kristi just mentioned our steering committee. We have faculty, staff and students on our steering committee, and we all meet together to talk about what we want to do going forward. And, you know, everybody has an equal voice, and talking about, you know, what do we want to do, and also assessment of what’s worked, what you know, what hasn’t worked, or what can we do better next time I think that’s that’s really key. I there’s another point that I wanted to make too, which is, you know, in terms of what kind of advice you would give to other people, is sort of thinking very clearly about what kind of outcomes Kristi has touched on a few sort of what success would look like. So it’s, it’s important to think, what is it? What does success look like? But also what it is not, and I’ve already mentioned, it is not debate. It is also not Kristi, and I will often say, we are not the EMTs of dialog, like, Oh, something bad happened. We’ll

Kristi Clemens
parachute in

Elizabeth Smith
the dialoguers to fix it. This is more preventative maintenance, you know, kind of thing. It’s not a fix when things necessarily go awry that you call in someone to start a dialog like we’re not mediators. So it’s really being clear about what the project is, what you want to accomplish, because that word dialog can quickly expand to be all things to all people. And so if you’re going to start one of these projects, just be clear to draw some boundaries around it. And what is it? What’s your goal? What do you hope to accomplish? And then design programming to do that.

Keith Edwards
Kristi, anything else you would offer others before we move to our final question. I think

Kristi Clemens
you know, we can, we can’t underscore the power of relationships enough that really thinking about who are the people on your campus that have a line into students, have aligned into your faculty, because that they’re going to be the ones that help you get the good word out. I mean, just when you’re when you’re spinning up any new program, figuring out who the folks to tap are and find ways to differentiate it. As Elizabeth said, there are lots of institutions that are trying to do this dialog work. Again, we don’t have those priorities to gatekeep, but to help define what it is that we’re doing in this particular dialog project space, which I think has been we’ve relied on them quite a bit when, when trying to think about, does this fit? Does this not fit? Maybe this this is a great program, but could be better served in a different area of campus. Yeah.

Keith Edwards
Well, we are running out of time, and the podcast is called Student Affairs NOW. And we always like to end on this question of, What are you thinking troubling or pondering now? And if you want to share where folks can connect with you, that would be great as well. So Kristi, what are you troubling now?

Kristi Clemens
Well, you know, we had this election, and it’s going to create some conversations that might be challenging. I’m, you know, I’m interested to see how higher education is impacted by the new administration, thinking about our next special topic as the borders and immigration. Certainly, there’s a reason that we wanted to pick that, given that it’s timely, but also want to be sure that we’re being they’re bringing in multiple perspectives on the issue, and that we’re able to keep individuals safe while we’re having these conversations. So that’s something that I’m thinking a lot about. I’m excited for to continue this into the second year. You know, a lot of this first year for us has been, I don’t know. Let’s see how this works, and as we it becomes really institutionalized, I think we have such great opportunities, and so I’m excited for that people can reach out to me via email. It’s Kristi dot l.clemens@dartmouth.edu or on LinkedIn, pretty easy to find, but I think it’s, you know, we’re all we’re all in it start starting up again in in the in January, and I think there’s, there’s always value in being in community with others. So folks should feel free to reach out, and we can, we can ponder and reflect together.

Keith Edwards
Yeah, wonderful. Thank you for for your generosity. Elizabeth, what is with you now?

Elizabeth Smith
Wow, wow. So much. You know, I’ll sort of take off where Kristi started, and just talk about, and particularly in my role as dean of the faculty, in terms of, you know, being in charge of the faculty who are in charge of the curriculum, which is thinking a lot about, sort of these attacks on higher ed and particularly the liberal arts. In some ways it’s, it’s a perennial question, what is the value of the liberal arts? Um, it seems to have become more acute, uh, recently, and I’ll just put that in the context of the dialog project. What do each of the you know, at Dartmouth, we have four divisions, the science division, Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary programs. How do they intersect with the dialog project? What kinds of dialogs should the faculty be having about the future of the liberal arts? The skills of dialog, right? And talking about the future of the liberal arts. Personally, I feel like it’s the liberal arts, particularly humanities and social sciences, that have the greatest potential for engaging in the development of dialog skills, you know, our special topics. It was our interdisciplinary programs that brought the Middle East dialogs to light. There are a lot of classes in the social sciences and arts and humanities where dialog is the class, you know, and that’s not to say it doesn’t happen in the sciences, it certainly, certainly does. There are plenty of controversial issues in the sciences that we have to talk about, like AI, but I am just really interested in that intersection. Being a dean at a liberal arts college, what is our what is our place in promoting dialog and sort of moving society forward. I think about that a lot. I can be reached because my name is a fairly common name. It’s almost easier to find me on the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences web page at Dartmouth College, but my email is Elizabeth.f.smith@dartmouth.edu

Keith Edwards
Awesome. Well, thank

Elizabeth Smith
you both. Page, I forgot to say that I’m also on LinkedIn. All

Keith Edwards
right, great. Thank you both so much. I really, this has been terrific. You’ve been so helpful in sharing what you’ve done and some lessons learned that others, I think can apply in their work. So really appreciate your willingness to talk about this. I think my impetus for reaching out to you is, I think there are many people working on this, but many of them don’t want to talk about it because they’re a little nervous about how it’s going. And so I really think it’s great that you’re willing to share what you’re doing, what you’re learning, how it’s going along the way. I think that’s really leadership in this space, not only at Dartmouth, but beyond. So thank you both for being here. I also want us, yeah, I also want to thank our sponsors of today’s episode. Both Evolve and Symplicity. Evolve helps senior leaders who value aspire to lead on and want on. Want to unleash their potential for transformational leadership. It’s a program that I help lead, along with my colleagues, doctors Brian Rao and Don Lee, we offer a personalized experience with high impact value the asynchronous content and six individual and six group coaching sessions maximize your learning and growth with a focused time investment, greatly enhancing your ability to lead powerfully for social change. And Symplicity is the global leader in student services technology platforms with state of the art technology that empowers institutions to make data driven decisions specific to their goals, a true partner to the institution. Symplicity supports all aspects of student life, including but not limited to Career Services and Development, Student Conduct and well being, student success and accessibility services to learn more, visit symplicity.com or connect with them on social media. A huge shout out, as always, to our producer, Natalie Ambrosey, who does all the behind the scenes work to make us all look and sound good. We love the support from you our community for these important conversations, you can help us reach even more folks by subscribing to the podcast on YouTube and to our weekly newsletter announcing each new episode and more. If you’re so inclined, you can also leave us a five star review. It really helps these conversations reach more folks. I’m Keith Edwards, thanks again to our fabulous guests today and to everyone who is watching and listening. Make it a great week. Thank you both.

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