Fixing college campuses with political scientist Danielle Allen (Transcript)
ReThinking with Adam Grant
Fixing college campuses with political scientist Danielle Allen
September 3, 2024
[00:00:00] Danielle Allen:
The goal of an academic institution is free inquiry, finding the best argument on any given question. You can only find the best argument if you're hearing all the different possible perspectives from different sides. So in fact, making space on campus for all to feel included is actually also about making space for all arguments to be made and be possible.
[00:00:24] Adam Grant:
Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.
My guest today is political scientist Danielle Allen. She's a professor of public policy and political philosophy at Harvard. She's won a MacArthur Genius Grant and chaired the Pulitzer Prize Board. She's published numerous books on democracy and race in the United States, and in 2022 she ran for Governor of Massachusetts.
Danielle serves as founder and president of Partners in Democracy, where she focuses on democracy renovation, and she's the most insightful voice I've read on how to fix higher ed.
[00:01:11] Danielle Allen:
I try to help my students make the best argument they possibly can for the moral position that they're taking.
[00:01:24] Adam Grant:
How did you end up in this field?
[00:01:25] Danielle Allen:
Oh gosh. Well, maybe first I should say a bit more about what my field is. When folks ask me what I work on, I always give the same answer. I just say, “Democracy, past, present, and future.” And no question mark at the end of that. So the question would be how I became somebody who is both a professor of Democracy Matters and also actually an advocate for democracy externally to the university. That's a story that's really about family history and personal experience. So I come from a family that has loved and fought for democracy for generations. My granddad helped found one of the first NAACP chapters in northern Florida in the forties.
That was super dangerous work. You know, lynchings were on the rise. On my mom's side, my great-grandparents helped fight for women's right to vote, and I always loved to elevate my great-granddad who, um, marched with suffragettes on Boston Common in 1917. So I'll admit that as a kid growing up in a super civically engaged family, I took democracy's value for granted.
But as I watched my own generation come up in the world, the question of democracy's value got a lot more complicated. So my age cohort sort of has experienced a real set of sort of forks in the road. I have this incredibly privileged role tenured faculty member at Harvard, I have a brother who's a corporate executive, and at the same time I have cousins I grew up with, so kids I used to ride around in the streets playing football with who aren't here any longer.
And for all the hardest things we struggle with as a society, substance use disorder, gun violence, incarceration. So I lost my youngest cousin, Michael in 2009, and that was a real life turning point moment for me where I was like, you know, “Hey, this democracy thing, it's not supposed to be abstractly valuable.” I mean, yes, we love the ideals of freedom and equality, but the truth is, the idea is when we embrace them, it's supposed to deliver a society that makes it possible for every generation to do a bit better than the previous, and even more importantly, for whole cohorts to come up together.
And I realized that what my family was experiencing is really what the whole country has experienced over the course of my lifetime. So my family has experienced what I think of as sort of pulling apart where again, some of us have had great opportunities, others have been trapped in really dark and difficult circumstances, and the 50 plus years of my life coincide with the rise of income inequality and wealth inequality and polarization and mass incarceration and so forth.
So I started banging my head against the question of how we could change those basic dynamics in our democracy. That led me first into work on criminal justice reform, but I was quickly frustrated by the fact that even where there were common sense and cross partisan solutions, you couldn't get them through. So that then led me to what I call democracy renovation work, which is really how can we achieve responsive institutions that permit us as a society to address our greatest struggles, our greatest pain points.
[00:04:09] Adam Grant:
The way that you bridge between academic inquiry and practical policy recommendations is I think a model for social scientists to follow.
I've been reading your Washington Post columns pretty religiously, and I think I first came across them when I got a flurry of calls last fall, just it was the same question over and over again, mostly from alums, “What is going on on Ivy League campuses?” Like and, I had no idea.
I've spent the last couple decades on them. I couldn't make sense of it. Nobody I talked to understood it, and then I started reading your work and light bulbs went off.
[00:04:49] Danielle Allen:
We have so many different challenges we're struggling with, but two for me, are particularly salient when we think about college campuses.
I'm gonna call them the governance challenge, and I'm gonna call it the second one, the diversity challenge. So the governance challenge is one that I believe all of our institutions in society are facing our colleges and universities, all of our schools, our businesses, our political institutions, and what this is amounts to is the fact that conditions for governance, the conditions in which governance occurs, have changed so dramatically in the first quarter of the 21st century.
So what is governance exactly? Governance is the job of steering collective organizations and in order to steer, you both have to sort of bring to the surface the concerns, the pain points that people are experiencing inside that social entity. You have to have deliberative space for generating solutions that will secure legitimacy, and then you have to be able to move those decisions forward in effective and well coordinated ways.
Those acts of governance are all being undermined and eroded by the affordances of technology. So the ways in which we used to come to understand the spread of opinion, the ways in which we used to conduct deliberations, the ways in which we used to sort of make decisions, and then delegate through an institution to pull it off.
All of those things work differently now because of disintermediated communications, because gatekeepers have been eroded in a variety of ways because it's easier for people with the most intense views to coordinate and to produce a sort of much more competitive and partisan dynamic for conversations than when gatekeepers were sort of filtering the information environment.
Even at this sort of very moment where governance itself is becoming unstable because of technology, governance challenges are also harder. For the first time in human history, multiple societies are trying to secure stable democracies in conditions of just immense social heterogeneity. So the US is an example, right, of a massively scaled up multicultural democracy, but so is India, so is Brazil.
We're not alone in this challenge, but it is a new challenge and sort of in the span of human history. And at the moment, I think our pre-existing intellectual paradigms for thinking about people's place in society, how we partner with each other, they're not, again, quite fit for purpose.
So I make the case for an evolution in liberalism to what I call power sharing liberalism as a paradigm that we need to help us think better about how to share power across social difference. We are really struggling on campuses and in society broadly with the questions of social difference, social heterogeneity, how we bridge across lines of difference in division in order to secure stable, partnered social forms.
[00:07:50] Adam Grant:
That makes a lot of sense. And you know, I guess for a lot of people the issues have come to the fore around threats to free speech, around students feeling like they can't raise uncomfortable questions, they're gonna get canceled if they make an unpopular argument, um, debate is being squashed.
I think there's been a lot of hand waving about this. I, I saw a lot of people saying, “We have to do more to protect free speech on campus.” And you said, “Well yes, we need to do that, but we also need to build a culture that's one of respect not of intimidation.” And I'd love to hear you talk about those dual goals and how we might implement them.
[00:08:30] Danielle Allen:
I appreciate the question 'cause it's also, yeah, I gave you a very abstract first answer and you're taking that and bringing it down to the specifics of the time we're living in where there seems to be this trade off between achieving inclusion for students from a diversity of backgrounds on campus and academic freedom. Over the course of the last decade a lot of college campuses have really focused on a goal of inclusion, making it possible for students from very diverse backgrounds to thrive on a college campus.
And that has led to a lot of concern for how we treat each other when people experience offense of various kinds, microaggressions and the like, and those concerns about trying to reduce experiences of being offended or experiencing microaggressions have produced an alternative concern about blocks on academic freedom or free expression. The important point, I think, is that as a conceptual matter, inclusion and academic freedom are in fact, mutually reinforcing. The goal of an academic institution is free inquiry, finding the best argument on any given question. You can only find the best argument if you're hearing all the different possible perspectives from different sides. So in fact, making space on campus for all to feel included is actually also about making space for all arguments to be made and be possible.
We struggle to make this work in practice. Why exactly? People will call out sort of arguments around affirmative action, people will call out arguments around issues of gender identity and so forth, substantive arguments about matters of policy can also be experienced as existentially threatening by people on one or the other side of a political debate.
And that's where we really get into trouble. If we are gonna make political arguments or policy arguments that we know will be experienced by others as existentially threatening, how can we do that in ways that also prove our trustworthiness to them? That we do have a basic commitment to human rights that we're committed to upholding and conversely, how can I hear an argument that I might experience this existentially threatening and give the other person the sort of charitable listening of an expectation that they are going to be respectful of my rights, and that it's my job to really hear the substance, understand where they're coming from, and then find the best way of responding to that substance.
[00:10:48] Adam Grant:
And do you have favorite ways of navigating the two?
[00:10:50] Danielle Allen:
One thing that I will do is I'll often use anonymous surveys at the beginning of a discussion so that people can truly surface their full range of opinions. But at the top of the survey, I always have a first question, which is, “Are you ready to comment on this question in a way that both articulates your view, but also confirms your trustworthiness with regard to other classmates in the room?”
And so people have to sort of check that box before they go on to comment. And the reason I do that is to really make people reflect about, you know, “What will prove my trustworthiness to the other people in this room that I don't actually, you know, intend to endanger them, that I don't desire their endangerment?” Et cetera. So that's one thing I do and that does surface a fuller range of opinions to support discussion. And then I will often just take on the job of ventriloquism the minority viewpoints so that there's space for them to come out with people have necessarily having to do that directly themselves and then I hope to make space over time in the classroom for people with minority viewpoints to feel more comfortable expressing them.
So that's one thing. The other thing I do is ask my students always to address each other by name and to try to repeat back what they think they've heard from a classmate before they respond to it. One is not allowed to respond to an argument before one has confirmed that one has understood it correctly. And the truth is if you use that kind of repeating back exercise, usually people haven't understood each other correctly and you end up really putting a lot of time just into achieving mutual understanding in the first place, which I find quite productive.
[00:12:21] Adam Grant:
I've watched a lot of colleagues fall into the trap, and I've fallen into this trap too of, of assuming that all arguments have validity,
[00:12:28] Danielle Allen:
Right.
[00:12:28] Adam Grant:
Um, wanting to make sure that you know that, that we don't discourage any line of reasoning and knowing, you know, how, just how easily a student can be crushed when the opposition comes from a professor.
I've sometimes overcorrected, um, not challenged students enough, actually. One of my least favorite comments in my student course reviews over the years was, “Professor seems to think every student has a valid opinion.”
[00:12:51] Danielle Allen:
Yep.
[00:12:51] Adam Grant:
And. I actually think that's true. I think every student has a valid opinion. I don't think every opinion is valid, of course.
[00:12:57] Danielle Allen:
Right. Yep.
[00:12:58] Adam Grant:
You took a strong stance on this and you said, “Just as we correct students' math, we can correct their moral reasoning.”
[00:13:06] Danielle Allen:
Yeah. So I do think, you know, moral relativism is something that we have in our sector often fallen into, and I think that's a mistake. The fact that there are moral errors or errors of moral reasoning is clear simply from the fact that any moral argument has a logical structure and logical arguments can have errors in them.
So the notion that there can be errors in moral reasoning is I think straightforward and simple, and one that people should simply start with. One can have a view about good and bad moral argumentation without necessarily thinking that you know the whole truth and it's all written down right here and here's the right answer.
So that's the really important point. I do think that there are moral truths. I think they're very hard to know. I think we are fallible in our effort to know them, and therefore it's our job to articulate the best possible moral argument we can. That means it has to be logically sound, it has to start from valid moral premises, and if we've made a mistake, we wanna be corrected.
So that's really the spirit I bring into the classroom. I try to help my students make the best argument they possibly can for the moral position that they're taking. Again, if there's a sort of error in their premises or in their reasoning, I will point that out and ask them to work on that. So the challenge is sort of the error in the moral premises. For example, the golden rule, treat others as you'd like to be treated, or the do no harm principle that comes out of the Hippocratic Oath and the like, and of course the do no harm principle gets then connected to things like, um, exceptions like for the case of self-defense, et cetera.
But there are a set of sort of basic moral premises of this kind that are widely accepted across societies and across time and place. Um, the premise about human rights, the basic dignity of all human creatures, again, not that there are no debates to be had about those people will make arguments about speciesism and things like that.
Nonetheless, there's a pretty sort of sound body of, you know, broadly agreed upon moral premises that I do think make for good starting points in moral argumentation. They don't deliver the answers in and of themselves to specific policy questions, which is why there's always massive room for debate. But again, then for me, the goal is in some sense to have a similar ethos to a courtroom. We wanna hear the best arguments on both sides, we wanna make sure those arguments are starting from sound, moral premises, that the moral reasoning is sound, and then there will be judgment calls to be made.
And so what I am always trying to do is strengthen my students' capacity for judgment.
[00:15:26] Adam Grant:
One of the impulses I, I often have when I see what seems like a logical error or a moral error or both, is just to try to decimate the argument.
[00:15:34] Danielle Allen:
Mm-Hmm.
[00:15:34] Adam Grant:
And, you know, you, you liken your classroom to a courtroom, sometimes I can be too much of a prosecuting attorney, especially when I'm not in charge of facilitating a dialogue, but I'm actually immersed in a debate and that that usually brings the other person in as their, their most extreme version of a defense attorney.
[00:15:53] Danielle Allen:
Mm-Hmm.
[00:15:54] Adam Grant:
Uh, and fails to actually correct the logical error because it's not recognized to begin with.
[00:15:59] Danielle Allen:
Right.
[00:16:01] Adam Grant:
Uh, you've written about how Socratic questioning is more effective and it can lead people to self-correct ss opposed to needing to be corrected by others. And for me, this really resonates it, it tracks with a lot of the recent research on deep canvassing and political science, on motivational interviewing and psychology, and I, I'm really drawn to the, the idea that the right kinds of questions can puncture what psychologists call the illusion of explanatory depth. Where I, I think I understand something and then you ask me about it, and through hearing myself stumble or through struggling to answer the question, I suddenly realize I don't know what I'm talking about.
[00:16:39] Danielle Allen:
Thank you for drawing the contrast between the courtroom metaphor and Socratic questioning. I think that's a really important contrast, and I think you're right about it, that the courtroom metaphor can sometimes give us the wrong idea about how to have arguments. So the courtroom metaphor is useful because it helps us understand the standard that we wanna hear the best arguments for both sides.
But I agree with you, but from a method point of view, hearing the best arguments from both sides will get there better and more powerfully with Socratic questioning as opposed to with an adversarial structure. Although that said, many of Socrates as interlocutors felt that he was very adversarial in relationship to them, he was always annoying people and making them angry, I guess, which is why he got killed.
So, but at any rate, um, what are our moral obligations to human beings regardless of what they may have done? So there's that sort of line of questioning for starters. For me, also, the question of let's be more precise in identifying where the wrongs are in this and where the various rights are that all parties have in this.
Take the criminal context, for instance. You know, what kinds of responses are appropriate? I think there's lots of ways one can open up the conversation so that one can get both the more complete historical picture of the actual facts on the ground.
Um. A better argued sort of view about the kinds of, uh, rights all humans have and the kinds of protections they deserve, even in context of conflict, and also an alternative picture of approaches to resolving conflicts.
[00:18:12] Adam Grant:
I think the, the way that you take a politically neutral but morally clear stance, I think is, is so compelling and it's really unusual to see.
My idea of doing something is actually to get people to think more deeply about the problems that they're confronting so that they can come up with a more plausible solution and then build a movement that doesn't alienate people or polarize people. Do you have guidance for how to better make that clear?
Because I, I think I'm failing at what you described as establishing my own trustworthiness.
[00:18:43] Danielle Allen:
Right.
[00:18:44] Adam Grant:
I didn't realize that until you said it.
[00:18:45] Danielle Allen:
Right.
[00:18:46] Adam Grant:
Oh, it's actually not the, it's not the question I'm asking. It's the other person's suspicion about my motives and intentions.
[00:18:53] Danielle Allen:
Again, it is important to remember that Socrates did get themselves killed. Okay? So in that regard, it's not easy work to try to help people strengthen their moral reasoning, and people do generally object to the experience.
That would be what the Socratic story teaches us. Nonetheless, it's important and we can find ways to do it more safely than Socrates was able to do. Um. So for starters, and I think what you're experiencing in a sort of very micro way is what and how questions people can engage with. Why questions, you know, why are you saying this? Why are you doing this? Produce defensive reactions.
So first of all, one has to kind of train oneself out of the why questions and just use what and how questions, but also relatedly, we all are engaging with these issues, not only with our heads, but also with our hearts, with our spirits of moral evaluation, with hands that wanna do something.
And so one has to actually respond to all of those parts of a person's being as a part of having the conversation. So I often start by actually trying to feel the emotion behind the question, and I start by acknowledging the emotion. “You sound both, you know, really frustrated and kind of pained by the experiences you've been having and I'm sorry. 'cause like that's lousy. Like that doesn't really feel good. So let's figure out what we can do about that.”
[00:20:11] Adam Grant:
That makes so much sense and I even felt it right here. You're, you're saying hypothetically, “You seem really frustrated.” And I'm like, “Yes, yes, I am frustrated. Thank you for, for recognizing my, my pain and now I'm ready to have you decimate my argument because I know you're trying to help me.”
[00:20:26] Danielle Allen:
Mm mm-hmm.
[00:20:27] Adam Grant:
Uh, so in, in terms of then talking through how to respond, we've seen a lot of protests on campus. Um, and I, I think in the last year I've, I've seen more protests than in all my time on university campuses combined before that. M, my first reaction seeing this is to say “This is a tactic, not a strategy.”
[00:20:48] Danielle Allen:
Mm-Hmm.
[00:20:49] Adam Grant:
And by my read of the evidence, it's a pretty ineffective tactic. There's a, I don't know if you've, you saw this, um, this new paper by Gethin and Pons, but they basically analyzed the 14 major social movements from 2017 to 2022, and they found that none of them had any discernible impact on attitudes or action except for the George Floyd protests.
And they conclude that the other 13 suggests that if you wanna change people's minds, protests are probably not the best way to do it. Um, what are your views? You have much more expertise than I do on the, the effectiveness of protests and then secondly, uh, how would you think about protecting free speech while maintaining respect it, given the possibility of protest.
[00:21:33] Danielle Allen:
Alrighty. I think that was more like a 10 part question, I'll say
[00:21:37] Adam Grant:
You're right.
[00:21:37] Danielle Allen:
If that's all right, I'll do my best. So first, let's talk about social movements and protests in their history and the moment that we're in right now. Protest now is not what protest was in the sixties.
It's actually interesting that it was ac, about when we hit Occupy Wall Street, I believe is when this decade reached the same level of protest activity as pertained in the sixties. So it's helpful just to kind of understand that historical comparison, it, we are in a moment like the sixties and early seventies protest is at that level and higher at this point.
However, there is a really fundamental difference and that fundamental difference is technology. So it's important that technology makes it a lot easier for people to coordinate quickly. Take as an example, the fact that last summer in Union Square, New York, there was a social media influencer who put out an announcement in the morning that he was gonna give out video game consoles in Union Square at noon for free and 2000 people showed up in Union Square.
And so the New York police had the kind of worst crowd control problem they've had in ages. There was all kinds of property damage because people were up on cars and things like that. There were too many people for the space. There had been no crowd permits secured or anything like that.
So that's a flash mob. And the truth of the matter is that flash mobs are a big part of what we're now seeing in protest activity. Again, think of two different images in your head. The march on Washington in the sixties with Martin Luther King. The January 6th insurrection and riot at the Capitol. The March on Washington had hundreds of thousands of people there, 200 or 300,000 people.
Those people were brought there by person to person organizing, telephones, door knocking meetings in church basements, and the like. For the January 6th riot, it was about 2000 people that ended up on Capitol Hill. A much smaller number of people. One of my favorite photos of that event is a guy in the middle of the kind of rioting crowd holding up a cell phone, taking a selfie of himself in the midst of it all.
And I think that really tells the whole story, that coordination is a lot thinner, but it's a lot faster because of social media and technology. And so right now the volume of protests that we're seeing is not actually reflective of a depth of social organizing in that regards, there's a big contrast to the 1960s where it took real social organizing to get the same degree of protest, um, in the streets.
So that's where, again, the governance challenge comes in because now all of our institutions have to govern in a context where there's just a sort of ever running foam on the surface of, you know, kind of protest activity that's possible because of rapid coordination, um, through technology. So just a very different picture for governance than we've had in the past.
Um, so I just think that context is important because it relates to that impact question, are protests impactful? Despite what I've just said, I do actually think that they are impactful. The impacts are different in kind from an earlier day, the earlier day, the impacts would lead into policy, policy frameworks and advancing new legislation and the like.
That's not really what's happening now, but what they do do is move public opinion. So again, take Occupy Wall Street, many people criticize that as not actually yielding concrete policy changes. No, but it did yield a very durable narrative change where we understand the economy is divided into the 1% and everybody else, and a lot of our economic debates and discussions ever since have been conducted in that framework.
So I think something similar is happening now. I do actually think the protests and despite what I've just said about them, have been impactful from the point of view of changing the narrative. The challenge is really the difference between the kind of space that a campus is and the kind of space that a public square is. On a campus, we have a mission, we have an educational mission, a part of that educational mission is building a community where the first role we should all occupy is our academic role, our student role, our faculty role, our staff and supportive education role. We can sometimes lose out of that role and want instead to fully inhabit a civic role.
But that civic role honestly belongs in the public square, sort of in the streets itself rather than in campus. Now, of course, we wanna make space for civic roles on campus too, but in my view, we have to conduct ourselves and our civic roles when we're doing that on campus in ways that align with our student roles or our faculty roles.
That means they have to actually align with supporting the continued viability for others of participation in that educational environment.
[00:26:16] Adam Grant:
Uh, love to do a lightning round. Are you up for it?
[00:26:18] Danielle Allen:
Sure.
[00:26:20] Adam Grant:
What is something that you've rethought lately?
[00:26:22] Danielle Allen:
When all of the current controversies started and people started sharing that they thought there had been this incredible increase of antisemitism on college campuses. I wasn't actually convinced initially, I wasn't something I had personally observed. It wasn't something I understood to be a part of the environment on our college campuses, but I have now been serving on one of the task forces or two of them, actually on our campus, and I can now confirm that there has been a meaningful rise of antisemitism and so it's a real problem.
So I that I definitely have changed my own understanding of the current landscape on our campuses.
[00:27:00] Adam Grant:
What's a prediction you have for the future of education or democracy?
[00:27:04] Danielle Allen:
People are always asking me, “Can we save democracy or can we save higher ed?” And for me, that question is, those are not the right questions because both democracy and a healthy system of higher ed are necessary for our human wellbeing.
So for me it's really a set of how questions, how can we save democracy? How can we save higher ed? So, I believe we will. And I think, you know, I, we have incredible resilience as human beings and so many people are putting their minds to these problems now. But I do think the next 10 years are gonna be hard work as we work to make both democracy and higher ed successful in really transformed demographic and technological conditions.
[00:27:41] Adam Grant:
I could get behind that for sure. Do you have a favorite hot take, an unpopular opinion, a hill you're willing to die on?
[00:27:49] Danielle Allen:
My probably most controversial view comes around issues of how we think about diversity, equity, inclusion, and so forth. My view is we should be using a, a paradigm of pluralism where we're thinking both about the fact that people are diverse in their identities and divergent in their ideologies.
Where all aspects of human difference are pertinent to what we're trying to do on campus. So if you point diversity as much as any sort of ethnic identity or anything else, I've been advocating for that kind of pluralism paradigm or framework for a long time. I do think that the events of the George Floyd summer, sort of pulled many people in the direction of a much more kind of constricted picture of identity. I think it's time for us to open back up to a broad embrace of the concept of pluralism and to support campuses in supporting and activating pluralism for the good of all of us.
[00:28:40] Adam Grant:
You may call that a hot take, but I think it's a necessary step toward overcoming a lot of the, the backlash against DEI or wokeism or pick your, your hot button framing of the issue. Um, and to say, “Actually pluralism requires us to respect all kinds of difference, not the particular categories you've chosen to focus on.”
[00:29:00] Danielle Allen:
Yep. No, I agree. But I mean, I do think it's still controversial and there's a lot of work to do to both define what it means to take pluralism broadly understood seriously, and then what it means on campus.
I mean, it's about really being forward, looking about activating the assets everybody brings to campus, not about rectifying historical wrongs. That contrast, I think, is controversial.
[00:29:23] Adam Grant:
That makes sense. And then what's a question you have for me as a psychologist?
[00:29:27] Danielle Allen:
I suppose as a psychologist I'd, I'd be grateful for any advice you have about how to do a better job of converting abstract answers into answers that connect with people's sort of, common cognitive practices?
[00:29:43] Adam Grant:
Oh, well, you're asking the wrong fellow abstract thinker, I'm afraid. But my colleague, Drew Carton did some research on how to get leaders to deliver more vivid visions and, and basically he and his colleagues found that one of the ways you rise up an organization is by being an abstract thinker because you're good at pattern recognition and strategic thinking, but then at some point you have to articulate what your mission is, and then people are just lost.
They can't touch it and they can't taste it.
[00:30:09] Danielle Allen:
That's right.
[00:30:09] Adam Grant:
And so the, the particular intervention that, that he tested that that was effective was basically just to, to ask you to do a little mental time travel and say, “Imagine that your vision was implemented successfully, or your policy worked. Describe how the world looks different.”
[00:30:25] Danielle Allen:
Mm mm-hmm.
[00:30:26] Adam Grant:
And that kind of painting a picture of the future was enough to take very abstract thinkers and, and force them to be more concrete.
[00:30:33] Danielle Allen:
Nice.
[00:30:33] Adam Grant:
So I've tried that exercise myself and often find it helpful. And I think what it prompts me to do, and this is the second point, is to think about, “Okay, the principle that I'm trying to deliver, what's a quick story or anecdote that I can tell that will illustrate what it looks like?”
[00:30:47] Danielle Allen:
Mm-Hmm. That's perfect. Thank you. Great advice.
[00:30:50] Adam Grant:
Try it at your own risk. You've spoken out really strongly against a culture of accusation. Can you walk us through what's wrong with that approach and what a better alternative looks like?
[00:31:01] Danielle Allen:
Thank you. Yes. So I mean, this relates to what I said about thinking that on campus we should focus on pluralism and activating everybody's assets, not on rectifying historical wrongs.
The pattern of sort of trying to rectify historical wrongs does often generate a kind of culture of accusation. Where, you know, people who are alive now are in various ways asked to carry burdens of past errors and misdeeds, and a culture of accusation can come along with that. It's just very counterproductive.
Accusation never helps anybody start a practice of collaboration. You just can't go from accusation to cooperation. So since our goal on campus is cooperation, being able to build bridges across difference, be taking responsibility for the bonds and bridges that enable our mutual learning and growth, I think that we have to put an accusation to the side and start with, with charitability and generosity the expectation that we are all here, in fact, to work on a common project together for good ends, that we are seeking to improve our ability to share power across lines of difference and the like.
[00:32:08] Adam Grant:
Bring it on. And then finally, you've, you've spent a lot of your career working on democracy renovation. I don't think there's been a time, at least in my lifetime, where we need it more desperately. For those who are interested in democracy renovation, how would you define it and where should we start?
[00:32:28] Danielle Allen:
So democracy renovation is two things. It is reconnecting people to their civic experience, power and responsibility and also redesigning our political institutions so that when people flex their civic muscles, something actually happens on the other end. So the reconnecting people, their civic experience, power and responsibility is sort of straightforward.
I run an organization called Partners in Democracy, and we engage people in deliberative circles about challenges in our democracy and things we might do about them. And then we help them actually connect to advocacy organizations and start getting ready to participate by, for example, contacting their state legislators about issues that they care about and the like.
But at the same time, what we're also doing is diagnosing blockages that prevent our institutions from being responsive and then seeking to reform them. So for example, right now we have massive dysfunction in Congress because of polarization. A good solution to this would be to get rid of party primaries actually as four states have already done, um, and to have a single ballot with all candidates from different parties on that same first ballot.
And then you can have a set of finalists advanced to a second round. But what this then does is all candidates are campaigning to the whole electorate all the time. And so you end up having a more problem solving kind of, of conversation because they're not just trying to appeal to the most extreme partisan base.
You can do that, you get more responsive officials in office. Um, and so then again, when people are actually participating trying to, to speak to their legislators, they have more of a chance of seeing responsiveness happen on the other end. So working on both of those things at the same time is the way to go.
[00:34:03] Adam Grant:
Ideas that are, are gonna work to fix them if we can get enough energy behind behind them. So Danielle, I'm just, I'm a huge fan of your work and your thinking. You model for how all of us should try to operate in the world and, uh, can't wait to see this, the impact you make both on campus and in democracy in the coming years.
[00:34:22] Danielle Allen:
Well, I appreciate it, Adam, and I've enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for asking hard questions and challenging me. I appreciate it.
[00:34:29] Adam Grant:
Delighted to to be on the receiving end of hard answers.
Refusing to hear ideas that you dislike isn't critical thinking, it's confirmation bias. I love Danielle's point that creating space for all arguments is not just vital to critical thinking. It's also essential to inclusion. In my view, a healthy classroom doesn't treat people as fragile and dissenting ideas as threats, it builds students' capacities to learn from respectful disagreement and grow through exposure to diverging views.
Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is part of the TED Audio Collective, and this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley-Ma, and Aja Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact-checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hansdale Sue and Allison Leyton-Brown.
Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winik, Samiah Adams, Roxanne Hai Lash, Banban Cheng, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington Rodgers.
I think you should be running every university.
[00:35:45] Danielle Allen:
Please. Oh my goodness. Ay yay yay.