Insight Debate and Dialogue cultivates experiences of collective inquiry for students that develop leadership and build civic resilience. We believe young people are courageous and open. This means, among other things, that they will dive into difficult topics with or without the skills to navigate them well. We aim to provide those skills, and in the process empower students to engage difficult topics effectively.

Research suggests there is a pervasive sense on campuses across the nation that students cannot speak their minds without risking serious social sanction. Essentially, students are faced with a choice between independent thought and social belonging. If students don’t learn to engage difficult topics effectively, even and especially when there is disagreement, they cannot serve as the citizens and future leaders we need them to become. A diverse society cannot flourish if people cannot talk through their diversity, a democratic republic cannot succeed if people cannot compromise, and communities falter when leaders cannot work together to solve problems.

No student should have to choose between independent thought and social belonging. Insight Debate and Dialogue creates experiences of collective inquiry designed to make it easier for young people to share their authentic, sometimes-unpopular views, and to navigate the conflict among different views in a way that enables the group to transcend conflict and forge strong bonds. This process develops leadership capacity in students and lays a foundation of civic resilience in the community as a whole.

Leaders of institutions of higher learning recognize that effective conversation is core to their educational mission. Faculty and administrators often tell us that they have tried to create a space for open conversation, but few students have chosen to speak up. In our experience, this tends to be a function of two common mistakes: either the model of dialogue across differences asserts norms that inadvertently suppress the needed conversations; or their approach fails to create a structure that can effectively break through and counteract the silencing effects of current Gen Z speech culture.

Through a decade of hands-on debate and dialogue work on campuses across the nation, Insight Debate and Dialogue has developed models whose techniques address these issues. The result is that we have significant, highly vocal student participation in almost every event. We frequently end events with more students wanting to speak up than time permits (we try to follow up with them afterwards). We are told that significant improvements in participation in classes remain weeks after our departure. This leads us to believe that there is an important underlying hunger for truly open conversation among students – they simply need spaces that make that conversation feel possible.

At Insight Debate and Dialogue, we create those spaces, and we help colleges and universities transform their culture so that the entire campus becomes a space for brave, open, rigorous dialogue. We believe this is essential to building institutions that can achieve their core educational mission, and to building a society that can survive and even thrive through the challenges of the years to come.