Stop Admitting Students Who Are Anti-Dialogue

Columbia should add an admissions question that screens for ideological humility.

A banner outside the Gaza Solidarity Encampment during Columbia’s admitted students weekend in April (Jackson Cheramie/Columbia Sundial)

Columbia’s administrators have likely spent their summer toiling over a seemingly impossible task: How do we make campus discourse over the Israel-Palestine conflict civil, respectful, and devoid of hate?

In a series of emails, then-University President Minouche Shafik proposed “more clarity about our rules going forward, more training on discrimination issues for everyone,” new programming for student orientations, and an expanded “Dialogue Across Difference” initiative. 

These ideas might sound familiar. Barnard held a “Day of Dialogue” on January 19, which the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) coalition boycotted, marching and chanting outside the event. When Hillary Clinton spoke before a February 9 panel on “preventing and addressing conflict-related sexual violence”, held at the School of International and Public Affairs, students disrupted and walked out of the event.

Past and future attempts at assuaging a hostile campus discourse culture seem to have one excruciatingly obvious thing in common: Students can simply choose to ignore them.

Our school seems to have an abundance of students who not only dismiss attempts at constructive and respectful dialogue, but choose to actively stand against them. We have no reason to expect that students who barricaded themselves in Hamilton Hall or ejected “Zionists” from parts of campus (and students who support such actions) will heed emails, events, and programs sent by unpopular administrators.

Thus, here is the question we should be asking: If one of Columbia’s key values is “to speak and listen with respect,” why does the school admit students who actively do the opposite?

The main reason may be that the school simply hasn’t been actively screening for open-minded students. None of Columbia College and Columbia Engineering’s application questions for admission to the class of 2029 reflect the theme of civil discourse that the administration has been frantically promoting to enrolled students.

Admittedly, one prompt is prefaced with the following statement: “A hallmark of the Columbia experience is being able to learn and thrive in an equitable and inclusive community with a wide range of perspectives.”

Yet rather than ask about how the applicant is able to navigate and tolerate different perspectives, the prompt proceeds to ask the applicant: “Tell us about an aspect of your own perspective, viewpoint or lived experience that is important to you, and describe how it has shaped the way you would learn from and contribute to Columbia's diverse and collaborative community.”

By focusing on an applicant's own points of view, the prompt seems to forget that we learn much more from the varied perspectives of others than from our own preconceived beliefs. The prompt does ask about how prospective students would “learn from” the school community, but it’s framed as a product of one’s “perspective, viewpoint or lived experience” rather than one’s open-mindedness, pluralism, or ideological tolerance. This approach to learning is at odds with John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, a required Core text, in which he argues that engaging with a variety of opinions brings us to a “clearer perception and livelier impression of the truth, produced by its collision with error.”

At a time when ideological humility is in critical shortage on campus, emphasis should shift away from how an applicant’s perspective can contribute to the community. Instead, the emphasis should be on how the various perspectives of the community can help contribute to the applicant’s learning and growth.

Doing so would highlight applicants who listen to and respect others’ views even when they disagree with them, as opposed to applicants who always value their own perspectives above others.

Consider Harvard University, our rival epicenter of hostility, which will now require prospective students to answer the following prompt: “Describe a time when you strongly disagreed with someone about an idea or issue. How did you communicate or engage with this person? What did you learn from this experience?”

This question has several merits. First, it implies that the student was willing to communicate or engage with someone they disagreed with in the first place, something that CUAD protesters and encampment gatekeepers failed to do. While applicants can undoubtedly make up a scenario, those who at least write about a situation where they learned from a disagreement about a serious issue are more likely to practice ideological humility on campus once matriculated.

Second, the question signals that at Harvard, students are expected to have an open mind and learn from their disagreements with others, an age-old mission of Western higher education. At Columbia, the few interactions between pro-Palestine and pro-Israel students have revealed that only a select number seem interested in a genuine learning moment; there are too many examples of Muslim students being called “terrorists” and Jewish students being called “Nazis”. Adding the question would proactively signal that the University prioritizes open discourse in all admitted students, a far cry from the reactive emails from last semester.

Of course, adding one admissions question will not perfectly filter open-minded students from openly hostile ones. But, there are other signals the school can and should look for, such as instances of civil, respectful debate in teacher recommendations or signs of ideological and political diversity in personal essays. Nonetheless, asking the right questions would be a strong first step.

The University can plan all the “dialogue”-focused events it desires, and student groups can host endless debates, but if a substantial portion of the student body will always be fundamentally opposed to respectful debate, there is no meaningful permanent solution. To change the culture of its students, the school must start in the admissions room.

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Nick Baum is a sophomore in the dual degree program between Jewish Theological Seminary and the School of General Studies. He is a staff writer for Sundial.