As a member of the executive board of Sustained Dialogue, I worked in the fall to recruit participants for the 2009-2010 school year. An e-mail response I received during the process led me to believe that there is confusion and misunderstanding regarding Sustained Dialogue at the University. The author, explaining that Sustained Dialogue could not make a brief presentation at this organization's next meeting to recruit members, wrote:
"I do not believe that any members of [my organization] would be interested in your organization. Nor do I believe that one of our meetings would be a suitable place for anyone to make such a presentation seeing as how it does not flow with my organization's mission."
This e-mail compelled me to clarify, both for its author and the wider University community, what Sustained Dialogue is. Further, I wish to explain why dialogue in general matters for the University and for each student's experience.
So what is Sustained Dialogue? In asking fellow students what they thought SD was, several misconceptions surfaced. Some common trends included "a debate club," "a liberal, anti-conservative organization," and "a group for minorities." Some feared being the "token (fill in the blank)" in the room, while others worried that they weren't "diverse enough." Some even said it seemed like a waste of time.
SD is not a debate club, nor an advocate of any political agenda. As an organization, we create a space for dialogue where we hope participants, through exposure to multiple ideas and perspectives, will challenge, reexamine, and broaden their own. It is imperative to the success of dialogue to have unique and varied perspectives present. Just as the quality of dialogue would be compromised should we confine ourselves within political boundaries, so would it suffer if we had only minority students.
In light of this goal, we intentionally seek students from any and all communities within the student body. Further, we provide a space where those participants can voice their individual ideas rather than feel obligated to speak on behalf of a larger group identity. As an organization, we do not seek blind consensus between the participants, but understanding. We by no means tell people what to think, but hope that dialogue enables them to challenge, complicate, and better understand what they believe.
But why? Why do students commit 90 minutes of their time every week to engage in these dialogues?
The University, like almost any school, is plagued by strained relationships along ethnic, racial, socioeconomic, and religious lines (to name a few). It bears a reputation for being a preppy white school, when in fact only 62 percent of the Class of 2013 is white. The student body responded feebly to a violent hate crime against two gay male students last spring. The school, though ranked the second best public university in the nation, has yet to recognize the African-American Studies program as a department. Wake up, folks. There are problems at our school, and if we care about this place, we need to address them. Sustained Dialogue provides one forum for doing this, enabling students to engage in honest discourse with each other about themselves and their community. That someone might think that the solution lies in limiting communication deeply frustrates me.
Yet these conversations are intended not only to help ameliorate these problems in our community, but also to better us as individuals. College presents an incredible and unique opportunity to live and engage with people from vastly different backgrounds from your own. Exchanging thoughts and ideas with these people will strengthen yours, will broaden your horizons, will open doors. We live in an increasingly global and multifaceted world, and our ability to tolerate, accept and understand different people with different experiences will be priceless. Dialoguing is one of the greatest educational opportunities afforded by a University environment.
I do not mean to promote Sustained Dialogue as an organization, but rather the philosophy that it embodies. I have aimed to clarify what our organization does and to emphasize the overarching importance of dialogue. Yet dialogue is by no means reserved for the forum of SD, especially as our groups can only hold so many participants. It is my most sincere hope that each student at the University will find for themselves the powerful experiences I have had. Whether found in SD, or by simply incorporating dialogue into daily life, these experiences will matter. They matter for our community, and they matter for us.
Pemberton Heath is a second-year in the College of Arts and Sciences.
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