The ability to engage with others in highly divisive times is a particularly timely topic, one that Mónica Guzmán, senior fellow for public practice at Braver Angels, spoke about with first-year students on Tuesday, Sept. 10, at a packed Langford Auditorium.
Guzmán delivered the 18th annual Lawson Lecture, named in honor of the Rev. James Lawson, a renowned civil rights activist, professor, theoretician and pastor. Lawson also served as a Distinguished Professor at Vanderbilt from 2006 to 2009. The Lawson Lecture is hosted by Residential Colleges and is a featured component of Vanderbilt Visions, the extended orientation program for first-year students.
“Lawson continues to remind us of the power to pursue our highest aims of justice, peace and equality when we lean into rather than away from difficult conversations,” said Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs C. Cybele Raver during her introduction of Guzmán. “Mónica’s book underscores this beautifully by giving us practical tools to navigate those conversations.”
Guzmán’s bestselling book, I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times, was selected as the 2024 Campus Reading. The book explores practical techniques that employ curiosity to overcome discord, underscoring the 2024–25 Martha Rivers Ingram Commons programming theme of “Embracing the Debate.” This theme, imperative in an election year, centers constructive conversation and mutual respect in the face of disagreement. All first-year students had read and discussed Guzmán’s book before attending and participating in this fireside chat.
Juniors Ochuwa Garuba and Scout Halligan and sophomore Gerard Monteiro, members of the Dialogue Vanderbilt Student Advisory Board, led the discussion with Guzmán by asking probing questions to get at the heart of the challenges and opportunities of engaging in difficult conversations with curiosity.
Their questions spoke to the real divides felt in our culture and invited Guzmán to illustrate her techniques for deploying curiosity to build bridges, especially in situations where we lack shared understanding. As Garuba asked, “How do we have discourse when we don’t have a shared set of facts?”
“The thing to do is switch from the conversation about what is true to the conversation about what is meaningful,” Guzmán said. “You’ll end up in a place where you begin to build trust because we’re no longer arguing about what is true and what is not true and getting stuck there. Now I’m asking you about you, and that can illuminate so much.”
“There is so much pain around this country that I can see, and so much of what feels like we’re so divided we’re blinded and can’t even see debates for what they really are. It’s very hard for one person to reverse that on their own; it takes a little more extended pluralism,” Guzmán concluded.
The event was co-sponsored by Residential Colleges, Dialogue Vanderbilt and the Open Dialogue Visiting Fellows Program.
About the Programs
Residential Colleges supports the integration of academic experiences in the daily life of students across the university, creating communities and opportunities for learning outside the classroom among a diverse student body. At Vanderbilt, residential colleges are a space where students are supported to curate their sense of self, pursue integrative learning, have dialogue across difference, engage in advocacy, foster their leadership potential and forge global connections. During the first-year experience, all students are assigned to one of 85 Vanderbilt Visions groups. These groups—each of which is made up of about 20 first-year students—meet weekly throughout the first half of the fall semester under the direction of a faculty member and an upper-division student peer mentor, called faculty and student VUceptors. Visions encourages students to express questions, ideas and opinions and learn from and with each other.
Dialogue Vanderbilt is the university’s intentional effort to consistently advance and more deeply imbed the university’s long-held values of free expression, civil discourse and institutional neutrality across campus and beyond.
Vanderbilt Open Dialogue Visiting Fellows Program brings together thought leaders from across the political and ideological spectrum to engage with students, faculty, the public and each other, modeling evidence-based, civil debate. The program aims to inject thoughtful, respectful and reasoned dialogue into our national conversation—at a time when our country needs it most.
