How To Put a Country Back Together

Here’s what young people need to know if they are to fix our social fabric.

(Photo by Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images.)

This article is part of a new Persuasion series on the future of universities.

Universities are in crisis—losing public support, shaken by internal divisions, facing angry donors and alumni, and increasingly straying from their core mission of intellectual curiosity and open inquiry. Our series, which is made possible by the generous support of the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, will consist of a collection of longform essays and podcast interviews aimed at helping higher education tackle this crisis. 

In today’s installment, Eboo Patel presents a moving meditation on the art of pluralism. He argues that American colleges should establish dedicated pluralism programs that will foster the skills needed to sew back together our fractured civic sphere. We hope you find it as illuminating as we do!

– Yascha and the Persuasion team.

P.S. Do you know a recent graduate who would value Persuasion’s content? For the next month, we’re offering 35% off annual subscriptions for recent grads.

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The work of pluralism is essential, and it is inspiring, and colleges are perfectly positioned to do it well.

What do we mean by the work of pluralism? What does it mean to do it well? How can colleges lead the way? Let’s consider some cases.

Anne Fadiman’s book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down tells the true story of a little girl in Merced, California who, when she was three months old, began to shake uncontrollably. Her parents, immigrants from Laos, took her to the hospital where a team of highly committed doctors did everything you would expect: stabilize the patient, draw blood, run tests. They diagnosed little Lia with epilepsy and prescribed a complex cocktail of drugs for the parents to administer at set intervals.

Lia’s parents were part of the Hmong community and believed in a faith tradition that, in its simplest terms, would be described as shamanist. They had a different understanding of Lia’s condition based on their religious beliefs. Their view was that an evil spirit had captured Lia’s soul. They also had a cure: The right animals must be sacrificed, in the right ceremonies, with the right religious leaders present, and the souls of those animals traded to this evil spirit in return for Lia’s soul.

Most of the doctors at the Merced Hospital knew little about this Hmong belief and practice. But they were devoted to Lia’s health. What they knew was that Lia’s parents were not giving Lia her medicine. This concerned them deeply.  

Lia’s parents were frustrated too. They believed that some of the hospital’s practices—waking babies up when they are sleeping to run tests, giving medicine that makes babies sluggish, separating children from their parents—actually made Lia’s condition worse. They also disliked the hospital’s cultural practices. In Hmong culture, you speak to the father first. You ask about people’s relatives before launching into conversations on more serious topics.

Lia’s parents did not give Lia the medicine the doctors prescribed. Lia’s condition got worse. The doctors called child protective services and had Lia removed from her parents’ home. It is a tragic story with a tragic ending. Lia fell into a vegetative state and lived that way for the next twenty-six years of her life until her death at the age of 30.

At the end of the book, the author, Anne Fadiman, looks at Lia Lee’s original intake file at the hospital and is taken aback to find that under the category “Religion” the box “none” had been checked. In a way, this one detail symbolizes the entire calamitous story: However good the doctors might have been, their inability to engage constructively with the identity of Lia’s family contributed to the terrible outcome.

Here is a question for higher education leaders: If one of your graduates had been involved in Lia’s case at the Merced hospital—as a doctor, or a nurse, or a social worker, or even an administrative assistant—would they have been able to recognize the distinctive identity of the Lee family and help the doctors and the family communicate across their differences? Could they have saved Lia’s life?

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Eboo Patel on Pluralism

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Let’s consider a different sector of American society.

In April 2022, a high school junior named Sungjoo Yoon wrote a remarkable op-ed for The New York Times about a school board meeting in his hometown of Burbank, California. The Burbank school district had just removed a number of titles from its mandatory curriculum because school officials concluded that they caused harm to students of color. The books included Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.

Yoon had gone to the school board meeting to express his views and to try to understand the views of others. He’d also been tracking the curriculum debate in other communities and knew that lots of schools were taking books off the mandatory reading list—but concerns about racism were not the reason. Rather, in towns like Granbury, Texas, 130 books were removed because of “pervasively vulgar” content—citing a 1982 Supreme Court ruling—which Yoon understood was thinly veiled code for material about gay people.

Yoon had already read some of the books, and thought the school board meeting would be an opportunity to share what he had learned from them. He wanted to hear exactly what disturbed other people about the same books. He wanted to think with others about the differences and similarities of what was taking place in Burbank and Gansbury.

He did not get a chance to do any of that.

Instead, as he describes it, “I witnessed the public forum—made up mostly of parents, administrators and educators—devolve into tribalist dissension. The meeting quickly became a two-sided shouting match pitting supposed ‘freedoms’ against purported ‘justice.’ There was plenty of arguing but no meaningful discussion…”

Here is another question for higher education leaders. Imagine if this high school student, Sungjoo Yoon, wanted university graduates—perhaps team members from a dedicated pluralism program—to come to Burbank to help his divided community talk together. Would the team create the space for students like Sungjoo Yoon to hear the reasoned arguments of responsible people with divergent ideologies seeking to balance competing values? Would they work well with people they might not understand, or even like?

All across the country it is clear that our diversity is turning into a dangerous divisiveness. In the City Council of Teaneck, New Jersey, a community that has long prided itself on its religious diversity, arguments between Muslim and Jews over the war in the Middle East have ground normal business to a halt and led to skirmishes outside the chambers. In Ithaca, New York a controversy over which identities could be cast in what roles in a high school play led to the entire production being canceled. A few hours away, in Lake Luzerne, arguments between the organizers of Drag Queen Story Hour at the local library and opponents of the event wound up getting so fierce that the library closed altogether. “Nation in turmoil,” “inevitable doom,” loose talk of civil war—this is the language that dominates our discourse today.

And this is precisely why we need our universities to foster pluralism. Pluralism is a particular approach to diversity work. It seeks to bring people together, not tear them apart. It strengthens the civic: those spaces and institutions where people of diverse identities and divergent ideologies engage in concrete activities with common aims that guide cooperative relationships. Simply put, pluralism looks to build bridges where others seek to widen divides.

But bridges do not rise from the ground or fall from the sky—people build them. Let me tell you the story of one such person, Luma Mufleh, the central figure in Warren St. John’s book Outcasts United. Luma is a Jordanian immigrant who came to the United States and played soccer at Smith college. After graduation, she found herself barely making ends meet while working in a coffee shop outside of Atlanta. She was estranged from her parents, discouraged and lonely.

One day she took a wrong turn in a nearby suburb called Clarkston, and came across a group of boys kicking a raggedy soccer ball on a patch of asphalt, barefoot. The pure joy that the boys were playing with reminded Luma of better times in her own life. She got out of her car and jumped into the game. 

Luma kept going back to that patch of asphalt to play soccer with the boys, and slowly but surely she started to learn about their lives. It turns out that, during the 1990s, sleepy Clarkston had become a major destination for refugees from around the world: Iraq, Afghanistan, Burundi, Sudan, the Congo and more. They were concentrated in a dilapidated apartment complex called the Lakes, surrounded by drug dealing, misunderstood by teachers, viewed as suspicious by police officers and sneered at by elected officials.

Luma launched a free soccer program called the Fugees and began the slow process of weaving these disparate threads into a larger fabric. Along the way, she had to navigate a range of diversity challenges. The boys came from highly sectarian societies where sticking with your own group and being hostile to others was not only normal but a path to security and resources. Now they were asked to put aside language and religious differences and ethnic rivalries to be part of a diverse team. Most of the boys came from societies in which it was uncommon for women to play soccer, let alone coach boys. Some of them ridiculed Luma, others sought to be inappropriately intimate with her. Virtually all of the boys were from poor, single parent families and had suffered from trauma. Indeed some had literally seen a parent killed before their eyes. Luma had to decide whether to treat them as victims who would fold under pressure or as budding athletes who could overcome adversity to excel.

Luma built the soccer team up until they were competing for championships. This is the promise of pluralism. What does a pluralism leader look like? She looks like Luma.

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Pluralism views identities mostly as a source of inspiration, not as conferring a status of victimization. Pluralism cherishes particularity and resists separating people into flat binaries. Pluralism prioritizes bridging differences and believes that cooperation is almost always better than division. Pluralism seeks to cultivate the wide space between wokeness and whitewashing. It recognizes that Robin DiAngelo on the left and Ron DeSantis on the right are not the only two options on the intellectual landscape.

There are, as we all know, other diversity paradigms. Paradigms that might prioritize calling out Lia Lee’s doctors for being steeped in white supremacy; or labeling one group of people in the Burbank school board meeting the “oppressed” and the other the “oppressor”; or celebrating the closing of the public library in Lake Luzerne as a step towards dismantling dominant power structures; or telling the refugee boys in Clarkstown that their most important identity is being victims of colonialism.   

Let’s gather such approaches into a single category and call it “critique.”

Critique—like football—has a season, and a place. But I believe it is a mistake to believe that critique should be the leading approach at all times and in all places. Consider Lia Lee or the boys on the asphalt in Clarkston. Do we want colleges to produce people who excel at critiquing the hospital for its Western bias in medicine, or people who excel at helping doctors communicate effectively with diverse patients? Do we want college graduates to see those boys kicking around that raggedy soccer ball and lecture them on the devastating effects of colonialism, or do we want them to build a soccer program that shapes them into champions?

Pluralism is one of the great needs of our times. We need a sector of our society to model pluralism, and prepare leaders who can help others apply its key principles. I think higher education is that sector. Where else but a residential college campus do you get a wide range of identities converging in a small physical space? The intellectual resources to learn about various traditions? To explore theories of pluralism? To acquire the skills of bridge-building? Where else do you get the civic space to apply what you are learning at virtually the same time that you are learning it?

Let’s consider how we might put these various pieces together into the architecture of a campus pluralism program.  

First, educators should use case studies like the ones I’ve presented here. This is a tried and true pedagogy in business schools, medicine and law. I would present them to your deans: “Are we producing graduates who the local hospital can rely on?” I would present them to incoming first year students: “Do you want to be the kind of person who can be counted on in this situation?” A good case study requires people to answer questions like: “How would I lead in this situation?” “What choices would I make, and what values undergird those choices?” “Do I have the knowledge and skills to do what needs to be done?”

And then you have to teach that knowledge base and skillset.

You might begin by reading John Inazu’s book Confident Pluralism. For Inazu, pluralism means difference, difference means disagreement, and disagreement requires civility if we are to have a common life together. You might turn to Diana Eck, who founded the Pluralism Project at Harvard University, and who says that pluralism is the energetic engagement of those differences for the constructive end of cooperation.

I would make Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism required reading in my pluralism program. The terms “oppressed” and “oppressor” barely even appear. Rather, he is interested in the particularities of being Ghanian and English, Asante and Amish, Muslim and Maronite. He proposes conversation between the groups, not confrontation; the extended hand, not the raised fist.

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Kwame Anthony Appiah on the Right—and Wrong—Way for Universities to Handle Identity

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You could take a turn to sociology and read Robert Putnam and David Campbell’s American Grace and recognize the importance of civic spaces where people build friendships across identities, and then ask how we might expand and strengthen those in the online era. And then you could dive deeper in the social psychology of the matter by reading the “Robbers Cave” study and learning how easy it is for human beings to tribalize, and also about the cooperative activities that help diverse groups create superordinate identities.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I have no doubt that there are many faculty on university campuses who are experts in these questions. The faculty who do this work need to be involved in designing pluralism programs.

But pluralism is not just a knowledge base—it is also a skill set. In fact, a spate of books has come out quite recently discussing the skills needed to foster pluralism and bridge-building. A partial list includes Peter Coleman’s The Way Out, Monica Guzman’s I Never Thought Of It That Way, Amanda Ripley’s High Conflict, Irshad Manji’s Don’t Label Me, and David Brooks’ How To Know a Person.

The skills they emphasize include:  

• How do you listen so someone else feels heard, not just as a pause between making your own points?

• How do you tell a story that builds a relationship?

• How do you ask a question that opens someone up rather than shuts them down?

• How do you facilitate a dialogue where everyone leaves with a greater understanding of the situation, rather than a heightened suspicion of one another?

• How do you create a space that feels like a potluck supper rather than a melting pot or battlefield—a space where diverse people are invited to bring their best dish to the table, where delicious combinations are created and enriching conversations are had?

Here’s an idea for university leaders: Begin by announcing a President’s Fellowship on Pluralism for ten students a year. Be clear about the orientation, the objectives and the aspiration: “If the school board of Burbank or Granbury calls, you’re the people we’re sending. Better be ready.”

Make it a rigorous and competitive process. Stipend it at $5000 or more per year. Bestow it with prestige. Require the students to take an academic course on pluralism with the readings I sketched above. Give a senior faculty member a course release per term to teach the course and run the fellowship.

And that should be just the beginning.

Universities should articulate a set of public pluralism commitments, something like this: “We are gathering a diverse group of scholars and students. We are shaping our university into an enriching educational environment where people with different identities and ideologies learn from one another, cooperate together, and build the skills to help people beyond the campus do the same.”

Every campus could have a general education course on “How to Build A Diverse Democracy,” and an academic minor on the same. Campus leaders can be trained in bridge-building techniques. Diversity programs can use Appiah’s Ethicist columns from the New York Times Magazine as discussion starters. All of this can be gathered under the roof—physical or metaphorical—of a new Center for Pluralism.

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Higher education can, indeed must, lead the way on pluralism. Now is the time to rise up to meet the challenge of prejudice and polarization and respond with the American promise of pluralism.

The Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre reminds us that the purpose of a campus is to initiate students into the conflicts inherent in any diverse democracy, and prepare them to articulate and order the arguments surrounding those conflicts in a reasonable way. He goes on to say that it is the job of the university to be so excellent at this process—ordering reasonable arguments around conflicts in a civil way—that the rest of the society learns from the campus.

I will state the challenge plainly, one more time. If the chair of a school board or the president of a city council tearing itself apart over identity differences were to come to a university leader and say, “I want to know how different people can learn from one another without coming to blows. Can I spend a week on your campus to see what that looks like?”—if someone asks this, our universities should feel confident that their students are up to the task. Those students should say of their colleges what Howard Thurman once said of his alma mater, Morehouse: that the institution held a crown above his head and expected him, challenged him, to grow tall enough to wear it.

Eboo Patel is the founder of Interfaith America and the author of We Need to Build: Field Notes For Diverse Democracy. He served as an advisor on faith to President Barack Obama.

This essay is adapted from a plenary address made at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities on January 19, 2024.

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