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For years, Stanford Graduate School of Business political economy professor Ken Shotts has invited students in his Leading with Values course — co-taught with his colleague Neil Malhotra — to suggest improvements midway through the term. And every year, he says, the most common response is the same: “More disagreement, more divergent opinions.”

GSB students are eager to share and hear “more divergent opinions,” says Professor Ken Shotts. | Elena Zhukova
“There’s usually a fair amount of disagreement in the class, but students recognize it’s really valuable, and they want more of it. So why doesn’t that happen naturally?” Shotts, the David S. and Ann M. Barlow Professor of Political Economy, asks before quickly answering his own question: “If you say something that’s out of step with what others in the room think, you worry that people might draw bad inferences about you.”
What Shotts describes is a pervasive problem throughout higher education. At large public universities and small private colleges across the United States, faculty, administrators, and students are grappling with how to provide welcoming campuses for diverse populations while fostering a climate that nourishes vigorous, unfettered discourse.

Ideological divisions that have roiled politics in recent years — amplified by social media — have made higher education a teeming battleground in the culture war. Conservatives have targeted policies aimed at promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion as evidence of “woke” campus politics. Progressives say those complaints are the latest example of efforts to roll back anti-discrimination measures. Meanwhile, “canceling” speakers by shouting them down or disrupting their appearances — including a much-publicized incident at Stanford Law School in March 2023 — has compelled administrators to intervene. And the stakes became even higher when campuses nationwide struggled to reconcile their free speech policies with the turbulence surrounding pro-Palestinian protests related to the Israel-Hamas war.

“There’s usually a fair amount of disagreement in the class, but students recognize it’s really valuable, and they want more of it.” says Professor Ken Shotts, above. | Elena Zhukova
In response to this environment, the GSB, building upon a long-standing commitment to diverse viewpoints, has launched a new effort to get people talking — and listening. Paul Oyer, senior associate dean for academic affairs and the Mary and Rankine Van Anda Entrepreneurial Professor and Professor of Economics, says students’ unwillingness to engage in frank back-and-forth about important topics diminishes their education. “The problem is, you’re stifling the amount that people learn by exchanging ideas,” Oyer says. “We don’t have enough respectful disagreements where students take on hard questions and really ask themselves, ‘Well, am I right about immigration? Am I right about the best way to run a workforce with regard to race or gender?’”

Learning to Talk
Three GSB professors share their tips for constructive classroom discussions.
Good faith: Saumitra Jha, an associate professor of political economy, encourages his students to assume best intentions as their classmates explore ideas that may be unformed or express views that may land awkwardly. Early in his course Managing Politically Conflictual Environments, he told his students, “I’m going to misspeak from time to time. Maybe you will, too.”
Model openness: In Leadership for Society: Daring Dialogues, Brian Lowery tries to model having wide-ranging conversations with guests representing a range of perspectives and political views. “I also try to model not being afraid of disagreement,” says Lowery, the Walter Kenneth Kilpatrick Professor of Organizational Behavior. “It’s not enough to say, ‘I’m going to talk to someone I disagree with,’ and then try to avoid issues where you might disagree.”
Poll positions: While coteaching Leading With Values, Neil Malhotra often conducts anonymous polls of his students. “Then before we start the discussion, we share the results,” says Malhotra, the Edith M. Cornell Professor of Political Economy. “People often think that their views are in the extreme minority, and therefore they’re afraid they’ll be on an island without much social support. But even knowing that 30% of the class shares your view makes you way more open to sharing your perspective with your fellow classmates.”
Peer review: Witnessing a constructive dialogue is helpful for students, Lowery says. The much harder next step is to practice having one. Lowery sets up small discussion groups for his students, “creating an environment where it’s okay for people to have different opinions, and where they’re not trying to find the agreed-upon right answer.”
Focus on facts: In 2016, Jha came up with a way to discuss the upcoming election without it turning into a debate. He asked students in his Strategy Beyond Markets course to pick a financial asset whose price they thought would go up after the election and explain their reasoning. “Focusing on the facts and the consequences for the economy can be something that we have a lot more agreement about, and the conversation becomes much more factual rather than opinionated,” Jha says.
Value values: Malhotra introduces students to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s “moral foundations” theory, which holds that people are not good or bad; they just have different values and priorities. Understanding this, he says, “makes you more open to having discourse because the reason someone disagrees with you is that they’re trying to do the right thing from a different perspective. It also gives you tips on how to persuade people. Instead of using your own moral foundations to convince someone, you use their moral foundations.”
— Dave Gilson
Oyer admits “it’s a hard problem to solve,” and the initiative is still in its early stages. To help understand the problem and to educate students and other stakeholders, the GSB developed a new survey of incoming MBA students to assess their attitudes on various topics. The findings reflected much greater intellectual and ideological diversity than students might assume, says Oyer. A couple of examples: on whether corporations should take race and gender into consideration, a slight majority said yes. Are CEOs paid more than they deserve? Roughly half of the students said yes.
The aggregated data has been shared across the GSB to demonstrate the potential for spirited academic debate — if students can be persuaded to participate. Part of making that happen will be changing a classroom culture that, intentionally or not, dissuades students from engaging with each other.
Undergraduate students tend to worry about the social costs of disagreeing with their classmates, Oyer notes. At the business school, the calculation is somewhat different. “They want their classmates to return their phone call 10 years from now when they want to do business with them,” he says.
Oyer has seen this in his classroom. “I teach a class on labor economics, and I have a day on immigration and the labor market. Everybody’s like, ‘The U.S. should have very open borders and promote giving opportunities to immigrants.’ That view is not very representative of the population more broadly. Also, I’m not sure everybody in the classroom thinks that, but they’re not going to say anything in a room with people from all around the world.”
However, he found that when he asked students to step beyond themselves, they were more willing to take a stand. During a section on labor unions, Oyer simulated a real-life scenario — efforts to unionize at Starbucks — and assigned students to act as union representatives, store managers, and moderator. The remainder played baristas deciding whether to unionize. “The debate was great,” Oyer says. “Part of the reason it was great is that students can be persuaded on a topic like unions. That’s not true with all contentious issues, however.”

Incoming interim Philip H. Knight Professor and Dean Peter DeMarzo, the John McDonald Professor of Finance, is encouraged by what he believes is an already dynamic mix of ideas and perspectives. He points to the recent success of GSB efforts like the Classical Liberalism seminars, a series that aims “to debate ideas and policy issues with rigor, even when doing so may challenge orthodoxy,” along with courses and co-curricular activities that are part of a new Engaging with Differences initiative.
“Our students were able to engage in meaningful and respectful discourse in the wake of the Israel-Hamas conflict,” DeMarzo says. “So, in a sense, we are out in front on these issues.”
Tackling “Forbidden Topics” Without Fear

Associate Professor Saumitra Jha (above, standing) encourages students to assume good faith in discussions. | Elena Zhukova
Fervent advocates of free speech — including organizers of the Classical Liberalism Initiative — are pushing for a wider spectrum of voices and the liberty to talk about difficult subjects without fear of opprobrium. The initiative, which has hosted dozens of speaker events and an academic freedom conference in 2022, was developed by GSB professors Iván Marinovic of accounting, Jeff Zwiebel of finance, and Hoover Institution economist John Cochrane.
In their view, the imposition of intellectual orthodoxy, usually resulting from professors’ biases, has resulted in an alarming erosion of debate in the public square and in the classroom. CLI’s organizers say their initiative — which has brought “canceled” conservative scholars such as Jordan Peterson and Joshua Katz to campus — is an effort to reacquaint faculty and students with the “search for truth” as an educational lodestar.
“I think the state of discourse is completely broken at universities,” says Zwiebel, the James C. Van Horne Professor of Finance. “Students, junior faculty, senior faculty, and staff feel they can’t speak their views on a wide number of topics.”

Students in Saumitra Jha’s course Managing Politically Conflictual Environments. | Elena Zhukova
Zwiebel says that fear of ostracism and career-altering consequences have seeped into research, and not just on matters involving race or gender. “There are all kinds of forbidden topics or forbidden results or forbidden views in research. It’s true about COVID, it’s true about foreign policy, it’s true about Israel, it’s true about election reform.”
“That’s obviously the same concern PhD students have looking at the academic job market,” Zwiebel notes. “I hear MBA and MSx students say similar things, though not quite as strongly.”
Institutions can choose what programs or policies they wish to elevate, Zwiebel asserts, which sends a message about what is valued and what isn’t. “I think all administrators and faculty members understand very clearly the emphasis on DEI — and I’m not trying to criticize DEI here — I’m trying to draw a contrast between how this is emphasized relative to free and open discourse. Administrators and faculty members know that if they were to act in a noninclusive way, they would face very strong consequences. I think very few feel that same way if they were to violate principles of free and open discourse.”
He wants leaders to “speak loudly and clearly and regularly that free speech is the school’s first principle — free and open discourse, learning, exchange of knowledge, discussion, and debate.”
Zwiebel and Deborah Gruenfeld, the Joseph McDonald Professor and Professor of Organizational Behavior, were part of a GSB committee charged with developing ways to help students manage diverse workforces. What emerged from the work was agreement that the notion of diversity and inclusion should include philosophical and ideological differences, Gruenfeld says. “For people who don’t come from the point of view of behavioral science, there is a sense that certain topics are very ideological, that there are progressive researchers who are seeking answers to only certain questions and only certain answers are acceptable. You have to be open to the alternatives,” she says.

There were significant differences of opinion on the committee itself. “Some of the faculty on the committee are very committed to free speech on campus, and some of the staff are very committed to making sure that the spaces are safe for specific kinds of marginalized groups,” according to Gruenfeld. “We were learning from one another about our own positions and where they come from. We all had misconceptions about where our colleagues were and why.
“And then, at some point, we just were thinking of ourselves as educators and not committed to any particular perspective. We could all get behind the idea that it was important to ensure that our MBA students were well educated about the challenges of diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Making the Classroom Safe for Debate

Students in Ken Shotts and Neil Malhotra’s course Leading with Values. | Elena Zhukova
Lecturer Keith Hennessey isn’t waiting around for new policies. Debate is robust in his courses, which he has taught for over a decade. Hennessey has developed techniques to encourage student expression in the classroom, revealing a latent hunger for serious conversations about difficult topics.
Whether the issue is immigration, identity, or politics, students in Hennessey’s courses, such as Freedom, Capitalism, and Democracy, are taught how to challenge each other’s ideas, not each other’s motivations or values. And that is one of the keys to making it work, he says. “I have three rules — the principle of charity, the principle of respect, and the Chatham House rule,” which prohibits disclosing the speaker’s identity outside the group.

Getting Comfortable With Discomfort
A new graduation requirement will push MBA students to move past the awkwardness of debating their peers.
As part of an effort to train students for leadership in an increasingly diverse work world, last year GSB faculty endorsed a new graduation requirement in the MBA curriculum.
Professor Deborah Gruenfeld, a member of the committee that proposed the Engaging with Differences requirement, says the aim is to push students out of their comfort zones and to promote an atmosphere of healthy debate.
“Students are going to be exposed to things they aren’t expecting, that they aren’t comfortable with,” she says. “And there will be spaces in which the expectation is that it’s going to be difficult and that people are expected to voice their viewpoint. Once you’ve created those spaces, and it’s part of what everybody’s doing, maybe it becomes less threatening or less taboo.”
So far, seven courses have been selected for inclusion in the Engaging with Differences lineup, including Diverse Leadership as an Imperative for Impact, taught by lecturer Susan Colby, MBA ’87, and lecturer Scotty McLennan’s Global Business, Religion, and National Culture. Twelve other courses will fulfill half of the requirement.
In addition, says Senior Associate Dean Paul Oyer, there will be a few cocurricular means of fulfilling the requirement, “and we may experiment with some asynchronous online material.”
Cultivating an atmosphere like Hennessey describes creates healthy norms, but that isn’t enough. He also pulls students out of their reticence by demonstrating they aren’t alone. In one exercise, he asks them to answer this question: is a dollar earned better than a dollar transferred? There are always two camps, Hennessey says. “The students will see that even if they’re in the minority, one-third of the people in the room agree with them. And suddenly, they have a lot more courage and jump in and start participating.”
Catalyzing debate in the classroom “takes work,” Hennessey says, because students don’t arrive with much experience in disagreeing with civility. Most of what they’ve seen in mainstream culture is “people throwing mud at each other,” he says. “They’ve never really observed or participated in constructive, intellectually challenging, respectful, charitable debate. “
Alexandra Small, MBA ’24, a teaching assistant for Hennessey, says she admires his ability to articulate both sides of an argument “to the point that it’s intentionally not clear where he stands.”
Hennessey challenges students to examine their perspectives more deeply, an approach that Small says produces new insight and builds empathy. “It helps students realize that the opposing arguments also have substantive support and that people on the other side are also smart. There’s no room for dismissiveness or the assumption of superiority.”
Similarly, on the first day of class, Shotts and Malhotra alert students in Leading with Values that disagreement is welcomed and important. “I tell them very explicitly, ‘You should expect some people to say things you strongly disagree with. You should be willing to say things others in the room might strongly disagree with,’” Shotts says. “And I make the point that it’s useful to have disagreement to clarify one’s thoughts, opinions, and values and to formulate strategy in a world where other people might disagree with you.” Yet the feeling that students don’t argue enough persists.
The most difficult subjects are the most important for students to debate, says Gruenfeld. “Our students are going to leave the GSB and be managers and leaders and running companies, and they’re going to be facing the same kinds of challenges that we’re facing here,” she says. “This is something that’s become more critical in terms of the capabilities that we’re developing in our students, that they can lead in these kinds of environments, and that they have an informed, educated way of understanding what the conflicts are about and how to address them.”

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