Columbia Civic Dialogue Fellowship
What Is the Civic Dialogue Fellowship?
The Civic Dialogue Fellowship is a semester-long program designed to promote open discourse and civil disagreement by bringing together students across the ideological spectrum to have roundtable discussion on the most pressing social issues. It aims to foster a culture of open and respectful disagreement across the Columbia campus by: (1) exposing students to heterodox ideas and people they wouldn’t usually encounter, and (2) creating friendships that bridge ideological divides and humanize the other side. In short, the fellowship aims to be an anti-echo-chamber.
The Need.
At Columbia and beyond, heterodoxy in the classroom has become a rare sight, and disagreement bears an increasing social cost. Fears of being doxxed, canceled or worse pressure students to silence their own opinions. As tensions mount around campus, they are siloed into self-reinforcing echo chambers that dehumanize their fellow classmates. With over half of Columbia students saying they have self-censored in the past month, last year, our school ranked dead last on the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s national free-speech rankings, and to this day it still stagnates near the bottom.
As disagreement becomes tied to fears of backlash and ostracization, it is harder and harder to find spaces where students can openly and genuinely disagree with one another. The recent extreme polarization over Israel and Palestine epitomizes what is missing: a forum for genuine, forward-looking conversations between two opposing sides.
The Civic Dialogue Fellowship provides that space. It rejects orthodoxy, embraces the free exchange of ideas, and cultivates constructive disagreement. Together, we hope to rebrand our school as the bastion of ideological pluralism.
The 2024 Civic Dialogue Fellowship will select 14 students, half of them leaning to the left-of-center and half leaning to the right-of-center. The forum will convene once a week for a two-hour roundtable discussion over free dinner. For twelve weeks in a row, students will meet to discuss some of the most salient and controversial issues of our time. To encourage free expression, the fellowship will operate under Chatham House rules.
The 2024 Fellowship
Interested petitioners are encouraged to apply as soon as possible, as applications are rolling. There is no political litmus test for the fellowship: we expect fellows to embody convictions across the entire ideological galaxy, however we ask that they come open to having their core convictions challenged.
The 2024 fellowship selection committee will shortlist candidates at the end of December, and selected applicants will be invited to interview shortly thereafter. Selection will be made with the goal of creating an ideologically balanced cohort as well as finding students who are seriously committed to respectful cross-partisan dialogue and are ready to devote two hours a week of this goal.
APPLY BEFORE JANUARY 21st, 2023
