Civic Life and Thought Initiative

Transformative Idea’s Civic Life and Thought Initiative partners with the TI Living-Learning Community, TI faculty, Residential Life, The Civil Discourse Project, and other university partners to foster welcoming spaces in our Residence Halls and Classrooms where students can develop the capacity to have meaningful conversations across difference.

Dialogue Groups (DGs) are small groups of 10-12 students who meet weekly for an hour in Transformative Ideas-affiliated Common Rooms in Kilgo Quad. DGs provide a welcoming space where students can experience intellectual friendship as they investigate the questions explored by The Good Life and other TI signature courses. Led by upper-class student Dialogue-Group Leaders (DGLs), DGs promote a culture of active listening, intellectual humility, charity, freedom of thought, and the exchange of reasoned arguments, in the conviction that by this process students will come to better understand their own views about the good life and the views of others. Serving as a DGL is a great way to continue your own intellectual growth while demonstrating to employers that you have the capacity to lead conversations among those with different viewpoints.

Front-Porch Conversations are student-facilitated events which promote intellectual hospitality. Hospitality comes from a Latin word meaning variously “guest,” “host,” “stranger.” Leaders of Front Porch Conversations play “host” in order for “strangers” to become “guests” within an intellectual community. We think of the Dorm’s common room not as a “home” but as a “front porch” where people can step off the “street,” gather for a time to talk, discuss, debate, and laugh, enjoy some food and one another’s company, and then go on with their day. Front Porch Conversations may be informal events organized by the LLC or more structured events that follow a carefully crafted format, designed to invite open, reflective, and civil dialogue on difficult issues (see here for a sample). 

Duke-Arizona Civil Discourse Partnership: These two traditional basketball powerhouses are teaming up to offer our students a forum in which they may develop the capacities to resolve differences through civil discourse, making mistakes, changing, and growing in the process. During the 2024-2025 Academic Year, Arizona’s UA Debate Series and Duke’s Transformative Ideas’ Civic Life and Thought initiative will partner for a home-and-away series of conversations involving students from both campuses on important topics in policy and higher education.

American Identity at a Crossroads?
A seminar at the Sanford School of Public Policy, taught by Nasser Hussain.

How to Think in an Age of Polarization
Taught by John Rose, this course pays special attention to the university, cancel culture, free speech, social media and identity politics. Lively discussion is encouraged.

Duke Immerse Courses on Civil Discourse 
Organized by Stephen Buckley (Sanford) and Sue Wasiolek (Education), these linked courses will enable students to journey through the Fall election cycle with fellow students with different political viewpoints.