“What was key was the way we talked with one another, the openness we felt, and the beginning of understanding differing perspectives.”

The comments above were about the discussions held by the Public Conversations Project (PCP) on campus last year. The constructive conversations about the College’s future involved almost 200 participants.

As a result of this positive feedback, the College sought and received a grant of almost $30,000 from the Jessie Ball duPont Fund to continue the campus-wide conversations. Specifically, the grant will cover the expenses of three visits by the PCP staff to train faculty, staff, and students to conduct constructive conversations on their own.

The discussions last year brought together College faculty, staff, trustees, and students in groups of eight to ten. The conversations offered everyone a means of constructively sharing their hopes, expectations, and frustrations related to the College’s decision to go coed and were designed to create a shared sense of trust and purpose.

“Many people spoke of a sense of relief and appreciation at being able to connect with others on campus and talk together about their commitment to the College,” says Dave Joseph, program director for PCP. “The sessions were not focused toward solving problems, but rather toward building trust. We are seeing a greater appreciation on campus of the fact that when trust is low, it’s hard to commit to actions and to get work done.

“We’ve also seen an amazing depth of commitment to the College on the part of everyone on campus,” Joseph says. “It’s our hope that these conversations can help regain a sense of community that will be different from the past but will build on the past.”

PCP is a Watertown, Massachusetts nonprofit group that helps organizations and institutions strengthen relationships, build trust, and constructively address conflicts relating to values and worldviews. It also trains conflict resolution practitioners, educators, clergy, and many others to facilitate such dialogues. It specializes in fostering dialogues about polarizing public issues, with the goal of improving communication, increasing mutual understanding, and shifting participants’ relationships in a constructive direction. The College called in PCP (last year) to help create a safe environment in which members of the community could embark on meaningful conversations about the College.

Recently PCP has trained 19 facilitators among the faculty, staff, and trustees, as well as 14 students—all of whom will be able to lead conversations in the future. (President Klein is one of those who took the training.) These facilitators have begun holding sessions with six or seven people each this year. In each case, PCP consultants helped frame the conversations and provided training and feedback.

“The subject of the first session this year was strengthening community,” says Chair of the PCP Planning Committee and Associate Professor of Philosophy David Schwartz. The committee, in consultation with PCP, will select future topics based on feedback from participants.

Participants say they want to build on the ability to stay connected with people with whom they might otherwise strongly disagree on substantive issues. Also, they say they want to come to some understanding of why others hold these differing positions.