How to Reset a Campus Culture
10 Principles for Pivoting Away from a Divisive School Culture
Peter T. Coleman
June 2024
Many colleges and universities are emerging from a historically tumultuous and divisive year.
The good news is that studies show that times of destabilizing crises like these can present ideal conditions for dramatic changes in the course of institutions — unique opportunities for a reset.
Especially when a majority of community stakeholders are exhausted and fed up with the status quo and eager for change. Such crises can also reveal underlying fissures and vulnerabilities in basic functioning — as well as highlight capacities for resilience and hidden bright spots — and therefore present vital opportunities to learn and grow.
However, a necessary condition for navigating out of such times effectively is having a clear sense of an alternative way forward — a pathway out of the patterns that got us here.
This post outlines a approach to resetting the climates and cultures of colleges and universities. The purpose of the proposed reset is to intentionally begin to shift our campuses away from those with more illiberal, divisive and contentious cultures towards communities offering more open, tolerant, and constructive values and norms where we are better able to come together across our differences and benefit from them.
Here are 10 basic principles for addressing entrenched cultural challenges like ours effectively and sustainably:
1. Begin with Intentionality. The challenges facing many campuses today are not business-as-usual, and changing course will greatly benefit from an intentional reset. This could be framed as a full-year challenge or compact with the entire community to take both individual and collective responsibility for creating positive cultural change.
2. Localized, Distributed Leadership is Essential. Given the decentralized nature of many school campuses (departments, schools, affiliates, and so on), all with very different cultures, strengths, and challenges, this initiative would do well to focus both locally at each campus as well as generally at the college or university level.
3. Listen First. Any initiative of this magnitude should begin by listening carefully to the many stakeholders in your community who have been affected by and responding to the crisis over the last year. Ideally, many of the schools have been actively doing so through listening sessions, town halls, surveys, and one-on-one meetings. As much as possible, the concerns and proposed remedies shared should be addressed or integrated into any plans put forward.
4. Articulate a Shared North Star. The leadership of the college or university need to offer their community an aspirational but achievable North star. That is, a clear vision of the type of culture they are hoping to grow and achieve over the next decade. Research on sustainably peaceful communities through history has found that, at their core, they all share a set of basic values, norms and rituals that promote a robust sense of justice and peace.
5. Begin with What is Already Working Locally. Ideally, the listening processes at each school will have helped identify some of the local bright spots of positive deviance already existing (See this list). That is, the people, processes, programs, and policies at each school that are already actively serving to mitigate intolerance, division and destructive conflict, and promote self-awareness, personal responsibility, openness, and constructive management of differences. Supporting and scaling the effects of these good works should be foundational.
6. Socialization is key. Growing a new culture of the school will also require a reboot of basic socialization processes. That is, a critical reexamination of how you onboard new students, staff, faculty, and leadership (including board members) — in order to best leverage these moments of initial conditions or new beginnings to help shape a new culture over time.
7. Ultimately, Focus on Structures of Daily Activities. While inspiring talks, readings, trainings, and encounter groups can help introduce new insights, values and ideas for social interaction and integration, ultimately, sustained change needs to be incorporated into the moment-to-moment flows of university life — through enhancing cross-cutting group structures offered in pre-orientation experiences, intermural activities, and office and dorm arrangements; cooperative learning and constructive controversy classroom pedagogies; intergroup volunteer service opportunities and joint-teaching initiatives, and various other forms of active experience that are thoughtfully designed and, when necessary, facilitated by skilled faculty, RAs, TAs and support staff.
8. Modeling Matters. School leaders at all levels need to walk this talk. We should all be trained and supported to do so and ultimately held accountable. This should include our capacities to reflect, critically, on ourselves, hold significant contradictions about complex topics, manage challenging conversations constructively, support critical but civil forms of debate and humanizing forms of dialogue, and ideally model the importance of critical self-reflection in our activism.
9. When Necessary, Seek Expert Support. It would be important to develop a roster of internal and external experts in areas like constructive dispute resolution, mediation, dialogue facilitation, restorative justice, and organizational development, who can offer evidence-and-experienced based practices and support on an as-needed basis.
10. Learn to learn. The need to reliably and securely track data — on group differences in bias and discrimination, safety and security, inclusion and belonging, hiring and firing, enrollment and funding, and the impact of new remedies on the climate of our schools — cannot be overemphasized. Ultimately, it is the only way that we learn to learn from our inevitable missteps and experiments with potential remedies. Partnering with AI can expedite this.
Clearly, what is happening on many of our campuses today is to a large degree a reflection of the ongoing horrors unfolding in the Middle East, coupled with the win-at-all-costs political ethos of our larger society — an ethos that will only become more inflamed over the next year. Although we can’t affect these sources directly, we can strive to reshape our own culture, and can eventually send new, decent, well-equipped leaders into the broader society to affect positive change.
Peter T. Coleman is a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University and the author most recently of The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization.