If there is one sentence I hear more than any other from students, faculty, and administrators alike, it is some version of this: we don't know how to talk to each other anymore. Not across the political aisle. Not across the pew. Not even across the dinner table. We have become a nation of parallel monologues, each of us shouting into our own echo chamber and calling it conversation.
That is why I keep coming back to a program that is quietly doing something radical on 277 college campuses in 46 states. It is called Unify America, and I believe every college and university in this country needs to take a hard look at what it is building.
Unify America's president, Michelle Sobel, frames it this way: the skills required to be an effective citizen and the skills required to be effective at work are the same skills—the capacity to listen, stay curious, and disagree without walking away from the table. That is not a soft, feel-good talking point, but a survival skill for a democracy that has forgotten how to argue in good faith.
Here is how it works. A student signs up for a slot, almost like buying a movie ticket. They are matched with another student from a different part of the country, someone who differs from them politically, geographically, and often generationally in outlook. There is no facilitator hovering in the virtual room. Just two young people and a guided set of questions, walking through issues some of us are too afraid to raise at the Thanksgiving table. Arielle Mizrahi, the organization's director of partnerships, calls it building civic muscle, which is why the flagship initiative is called the Civic Gym. Nobody wakes up wanting a hard conversation with a stranger who disagrees with them about abortion, guns, immigration, or student loan debt forgiveness. But you can be trained to do it, the same way you train a muscle you did not know you had.
The proof is already on our own campuses. Dr. Kenisha Thomas, an associate professor of social work at Florida A&M University, a historically Black college and university, has run this program for three years, and she requires it of her students as a graded assignment rather than treating it as optional extra credit. What she has witnessed says as much about the state of the country as it does about her classroom.
Thomas teaches her students to strip the conversation down to history, data, and facts, because, as she puts it, "politics is not meant to be intentionally aggressive." The results speak for themselves. Roughly 92 percent of faculty who use the program say they would use it again, and more than 80 percent of students say they would recommend it become standard practice on their campus.
There is also a practical case here that no provost or accreditation officer should ignore. Bodies like SACSCOC and the Higher Learning Commission have increasingly tied reaffirmation and student success measures to demonstrated civic learning outcomes. A program like the Unify Challenge does not just build better citizens, it generates the kind of direct, actionable data that institutions need to show to demonstrate that they are fulfilling their broader civic mission, not as a side project, but as core to what accreditation now expects of us.
I think often about the students Thomas described, who walked away from a conversation about abortion or gun rights having discovered, in her words, "that they had more light than they had differences." I think about a young woman from the East Coast matched with a military mother of four in rural Indiana, walking away not converted, but deeply changed. Not because anyone won an argument, but because two human beings decided to stay in the room.
As the nation marks 250 years since its founding, we will hear no shortage of speeches about what America is supposed to be. Unify America is doing the work, one conversation at a time, on campuses from Florida to California. Our colleges and universities were built to be places where young people learn to think. They should also be places where young people learn to talk to one another again, honestly, respectfully, and without fear.
Unify America has built and designed the room. It now falls to the rest of us in higher education to walk through the door.
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Dr. Jamal Watson is a higher education consultant, professor and associate dean of Graduate Studies at Trinity Washington University and the author of this bi-weekly column. Watson is the former executive editor of Diverse: Issues In Higher Education (now The EDU Ledger) and is the author of The Student Debt Crisis: America’s Moral Urgency (Broadleaf Books, 2025).
