DePaul’s Dialogue Collaborative is expanding its discussion-based events to include more student perspectives this year. Students, faculty and staff are invited to an Oct. 28 event in the Student Center that will explore issues related to free speech on college campuses.

The collaborative is entering its second year and encourages healthy disagreement and a respectful exchange of ideas in the DePaul community.

“As we navigate questions of expression, belonging and academic freedom, your voice matters,” the university-wide invitation read. “We encourage you to join us for this important conversation and help shape the dialogue that defines our community.”

Elissa Foster, co-chair of the Dialogue Collaborative’s implementation team, said campus speech was chosen as the topic prior to the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10.

“We don’t want it to be just about Charlie Kirk, but we cannot avoid … not just him but all of the ways in which that killing is being appropriated and storied and reacted to in ways that seem to be threatening to really curtail freedom of expression on campuses,” Foster said.

Aside from the President’s Dialogue Series, the collaborative will continue to host its smaller “Lunch, Listen and Learn” events twice per quarter.

This quarter’s first installment on Oct. 15 will cover “ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, campus protests, threats to academic freedom and other related issues that fill our hearts and heads,” according to DeHub. The second installment will take place on Thursday, Nov. 6.

“The idea is that these are very intimate,” Foster said. “We share our food together and then people get to express what they’re thinking in a supportive way, and listen to each other, and there are definitely moments of difficult dialogue in there.”

This isn’t the first time students have been included in the Dialogue Collaborative’s activities.

The collaborative will also continue its Bridgebuilding Fellowship program for students. It was developed last year in the Division of Mission and Ministry in collaboration with Interfaith America, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization.

Georgianna Torres Reyes, associate vice president for student engagement in the Division of Mission and Ministry, wrote the grant for the program and works with Foster as co-chair of the collaborative’s implementation team. Over 40 student “bridgebuilders” were trained last year, she said.

“I think that it might be a mistake to call all these efforts a response to the crises in our country,” Torres Reyes said. “It’s actually part of a skill set that we hope to offer not just to our students, but our faculty and staff, to function as whole people that are rooted in human dignity for others.”

The desire to humanize dialogue does come at a time when Americans are increasingly pessimistic about political discourse. Nearly six in 10 Americans doubt that it is even possible to lower the temperature of political rhetoric and speech in the U.S., according to a September Quinnipiac poll.

As the holiday season approaches, College of Communication dean Lexa Murphy said she sometimes jokes that dialogic skills can help people navigate political topics at Thanksgiving dinner.

“Rather than ignore it, how can we, through skills, through care, through building relationships, actually engage in that topic and build some understanding?” Murphy said.

Vincent Rinella, a DePaul senior studying psychology, is a former Bridgebuilding Fellow. Rinella said he has had political disagreements with his relatives in the past, and he applied the storytelling techniques and deep listening skills used in the fellowship to those relationships.

“The last time I talked to them was after our Bridgebuilders meeting, and I took it from the different perspective of, ‘OK, I’m not going to try to change your mind right now. Tell me why you believe this, and tell me the story that you have,’” Rinella said.

Focusing on the story that has shaped a person’s views has brought about more productive conversations with his cousin, Rinella said.

“It’s a pivotal difference in how it shapes the conversation, and it definitely helped for me in understanding my cousin, and being able to get places with my cousin, because I know the emotional state, rather than just the argument of statistics or numbers,” Rinella said.

Foster, the co-chair of the implementation team, said dialogue is ultimately not a substitute for debate, and she reiterated its focus on humanizing the people you disagree with.

“It’s too easy to just name-call and say those people are evil, as if there’s some malevolent force from the supernatural that’s landed on them,” Foster said. “It doesn’t ask us to agree. It does ask us to listen and to reflect on what others are saying and to maintain a stance that says, ‘You are human. You have dignity.’”

Murphy, the dean, said she hopes the collaborative’s activities will create a sustainable culture of dialogue on campus: “Ultimately, in the end, I hope what we’ll find is that we have a whole university community that is more connected, that is more compassionate, more able to tackle complex issues together.”

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