Campus Dialogues Program

Tensions among people from different religious communities -- stemming from differing beliefs, from distinct perspectives, and from misunderstandings -- have contributed to increased levels of political violence and terrorism around the world. In turn, the justification of violence and terrorist acts taken in the name of religion has served to intensify the tensions among and across groups. Such circumstances create the potential for a vicious cycle of hostility between groups and individual members of groups. The Campus Dialogues Program is designed to support the development, implementation, and refinement of programs aimed at reducing intergroup tensions among university students of different religions in the United States. The project focuses on affecting the attitudes, beliefs and behaviors of university students in an effort to help foster at an early age habits of intergroup acceptance and cooperation among future leaders and decision-makers.

This program supports a range of activities designed to decrease biases among students from different religious traditions, and to train facilitators at each campus who will support these programs. Programs include retreats involving students from different faith traditions, dinner series for campus leaders from different religious communities, collaborative community-service projects, and development of multimedia arts programs focused on fostering respect for different traditions. Extensive evaluations are conducted for each campus program in order to assess program impact on participating individuals and on the broader campus communities, and to identify key process characteristics in programs that influence the effect of the programs. Finally, the lessons learned throughout this project about how to design and deliver programs that enhance understanding and foster constructive cooperation will be systematically disseminated to college campuses across the country.

The Campus Dialogues Program is directed by Jeffrey Summit of Tufts University and Jonathan Wilkenfeld of the University of  Maryland. The partner campuses -- Tufts University, Wellesley College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brandeis University, and the University of Maryland -- offer programs that build on the past successes of each campus and look to offer these programs to a wider pool of students

For more information about this program, contact Jeffrey Summit at jsummit@tufts.edu or Jonathan Wilkenfeld at jwilkenf@gvpt.umd.edu.

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