Every fall, campuses make big investments in time, effort and resources to help students learn to engage across differences. Orientation introduces dialogue norms, syllabi spell out discussion expectations, and speaker series promise hard conversations handled well. But students take their real cues from somewhere else. They watch whether the leaders around them actually do what is being asked of students, and when the answer is no, the gap may teach more than the programming.

An institution can declare that dialogue matters, fund workshops, and print values on the website. But students also need to see those values enacted by the people who hold authority over them. The distance between the declaration and the enactment is often the difference between a one-off program and a genuine culture of dialogue.

What modeling actually means

Modeling is what closes that distance. Our report Building Cultures of Constructive Dialogue: A Blueprint for Campus Leaders defines it as leaders "actively demonstrating the behaviors they hope to see in students", and it works at two levels: leadership practices, such as clear, transparent, and consistent communication, and genuine listening and thoughtful response to pushback, and programmatic experiences where administration, staff, and faculty do the demonstrating in front of students. What holds the two together is alignment between what an institution says and what its people do, or in the report's terms, "consistent modeling that aligns stated values with practiced behaviors.”

The distinction is easy to lose. Announcing that the campus values open inquiry is a rhetorical commitment. Fielding a tough question at a speaker event with curiosity rather than defensiveness is modeling, and the report is clear that only the second one carries an institution beyond rhetorical commitments to meaningful culture change. The report names the failure mode directly: what one leader called a "crisis of misalignment between stated and practiced values,” which is what students detect the moment the words and the behavior come apart.

Modeling carries this weight because culture does not travel through declarations. Seth Godin, a best-selling author on culture and leadership, defines culture as the shared understanding that "people like us do things like this,” and students infer that understanding from behavior just as much as, if not more than, they do from mission statements. Modelled behavior has a time and place, and it starts in the coming weeks. Few stretches of the year concentrate more visible leadership behavior than the first six weeks of fall, when convocation, orientation, first class sessions, and the semester's opening speaker events arrive in quick succession. If you stand in front of students this August, you are already demonstrating how your campus handles disagreement. The question is what lesson they take away.

Stepping back is not the same as stepping in

None of this is incidental to the harder work of culture change. Institutions arrive at that work by many different paths, but the foundations turn out to be consistent, and modeling is one of them. Drawing on our partnerships with over 100 colleges and universities and 20 qualitative interviews with campus leaders, the Blueprint report names Evidence of Modeling one of four prerequisites for a culture of constructive dialogue.

Leaders rarely refuse to model dialogue, but all too often they mistake restraint for modeling itself, assuming that the best way to make room for students is to step out of the way.

The University of Chicago learned how costly that assumption can be. Staff there had deliberately stayed silent during speaker events, reasoning that their silence would open space for students to participate. The reasoning held until a practice seminar with prominent Republican political commentator Karl Rove, when the discussion turned to immigration and students hesitated to bring their own perspectives into the debate. The silence meant to empower them had instead left them without a model for how to enter a hard conversation.

Purvi Patel, then director of civic and campus engagement, describes the moment the approach flipped:

"We had assumed that stepping back would create more space for our brilliant students to engage. However, we came to realize this passive approach meant we weren't modeling crucial skills for challenging dialogue. . . . By stepping in to demonstrate how to respectfully challenge a speaker with personal experience–sharing my own story as a child of immigrants–we showed students a powerful way to engage."

While Patel discovered the impact of modelling in a single seminar, most leaders will have to look for opportunities with intention. Fortunately, chances to step in do not need to be rare or dramatic; they can be ordinary and scheduled, folded into the events already on the fall calendar. The first six weeks hold four concrete opportunities to model dialogue, each spanning a different layer of campus leadership.

Four modeling moments in the first six weeks

Presidents and senior leaders set the tone before classes begin. Welcome and convocation remarks that include a personal story of engaging across difference moves these remarks from the realm of declaration to modeling.

Faculty carry that signal into the room. First-week norm-setting is a familiar tactic, but a more powerful one is less common: voicing intellectual humility out loud and naming where you changed your mind. When a student raises a dissenting view, meet it with genuine curiosity and respect, ask the question that takes it seriously, and steel-man, rather than straw-man it.

Student affairs and orientation teams extend the reach of both. By recruiting and training peer leaders and orientation guides to model dialogue in informal spaces, they place the behavior exactly where students spend most of their time, which is also where formal programming rarely follows.

Speaker events are where it becomes public. Formats built so that tough questions get grappled with openly, and staff who participate rather than stay silent, turn a single event into a demonstration for the whole room. The Chicago story is the cautionary version of this opportunity.

Audit what students will actually see

Knowing where modeling could or should happen is one part of the solution. The other is knowing where and how modelling is already happening.

Ask yourself three questions. Do our stated values show up in how people actually act and make decisions on campus? Where is dialogue modeled by different members of the institution, not merely talked about? And which high-visibility moments, from convocation to first classes, currently have no modeling built into them at all?

An honest audit tells you whether that is happening, and it forms part of looking for the broader signals that a dialogue culture is taking hold.

Start now

Most of what sustains a dialogue culture is genuinely slow. Transformation runs through planning cycles, budgets, and committees, and typically takes three to five years to hold. Modeling is the exception to all of it. It needs no budget line, no task force, and no approval process, which makes it the one prerequisite any individual can act on from the first day of the term.

Ready to put these ideas into practice?
Whether you're planning for the coming academic year or thinking about longer-term culture change, CDI's Partnerships team can help you explore what constructive dialogue could look like on your campus.