Higher education doesn’t have a shortage of civil discourse programming. Campuses across the country host debate societies, dialogue workshops, bridge-building student organizations, and faculty-led seminars on deliberation and disagreement.

What’s missing isn’t interest or activity. It’s coordination.

At most institutions, these efforts tend to emerge organically and operate in silos. A political science department develops a deliberation exercise. A student affairs office launches a dialogue series. A faculty learning community experiments with structured disagreement in the classroom. Each is valuable, but few are connected to each other or to a broader institutional strategy. The result is a landscape of promising practices that rarely reach the scale needed.

CDI is working with the University of North Carolina System to help champions of constructive dialogue find each other and expand their work. The goal is to strengthen existing dialogue efforts and increase their reach impact. Together, we’ve launched a coordinated effort to bolster constructive dialogue across all 16 of UNC’s public higher education institutions. This represents one of the most expansive system-level efforts of its kind at a U.S. public university system, and the lessons emerging from this work have implications for any institution or system grappling with similar challenges.

Why campus-by-campus approaches don’t always scale

The case for teaching students to engage across differences is well established. A 2022 survey of UNC System students, led by a group of university faculty, found that students across the political spectrum wanted more opportunities for constructive engagement with people who think differently. Self-censorship in class was driven more by concerns about peer reaction than by anything faculty were doing. Instructors were generally seen as handling political discussions effectively. The gap was between students, and the barrier wasn’t hostility, but hesitation and anxiety.

These findings aren’t unique to North Carolina. They echo national patterns documented by the Knight Foundation, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and others. The challenge is clear, but what’s less studied is why the solutions don't always scale.

Part of the answer is structural. Dialogue programming tends to live in one of three places on a campus: student affairs, a specific academic department, or an external partnership with an organization. Each entry point has strengths, but each also has limits. Student affairs programming often struggles to reach students who don’t self-select into it. Departmental efforts are deep but narrow. External partnerships can introduce frameworks and training, but they depend on campus champions who may move on.

UNC’s campuses illustrate this well. Before our partnership launched, at least a dozen institutions had active dialogue programs, from BridgeUSA chapters at UNCG and NC State to the Barnes Family Foundation’s College Debates and Discourse Alliance at several campuses to faculty-led task forces on constructive dialogue at UNC Charlotte. This work is real, impactful, and ongoing. The vision for a system-level collaboration is to connect the key stakeholders already doing this work well and add new layers of connectivity and support.

Why a system-level approach changes the equation

Three reasons why working at the system level matters.

First, it creates a learning network.

A single campus can develop an effective dialogue program, but it can’t easily benchmark its approach against peers, share practices across disciplinary and institutional lines, or identify which interventions transfer to different campus contexts. A system can.

Our partnership with SCHEV in Virginia showed this clearly. Across a cohort of 12 institutions that included HBCUs, community colleges, and research universities, campuses that might never have compared notes began sharing what was working and adapting each other’s approaches. The leadership convening in the UNC partnership is designed to build exactly this kind of cross-institutional connective tissue.

Second, it generates system-wide data.

Diagnostics and Perspectives analytics produce a shared evidence base that no single campus could generate on its own. When you can compare patterns across institutions serving very different student populations, you learn things about what works that a single-site pilot can’t reveal. In the UNC partnership, this diagnostic work will span 16 institutions ranging from historically Black universities to research flagships to regional campuses serving rural communities.

Third, it signals institutional priority.

When system leadership publicly commits to constructive dialogue as an academic value and follows through with funded programming, professional development, and a formal call to participate across every institution, that sends a different message than a single campus launching a pilot.

It tells faculty, staff, and students that this work is part of the mission.

We’ve seen this dynamic at CUNY, where system-level commitment helped campus teams move dialogue work from the margins into institutional planning, and in Virginia, where SCHEV’s sustained partnership helped campuses like William & Mary scale Perspectives from a pilot to a component of freshman orientation.

Designing for a system, not just a campus

CDI’s approach to campus culture change is organized around five pillars: leadership commitment, curriculum and pedagogy, co-curricular experience, policies and structures, and measurement and organizational learning. On a single campus, advancing all five is ambitious. But a system-level partnership makes it possible to engage them together.

The UNC System is uniquely positioned for this work. Its 16 institutions span HBCUs, research flagships, regional universities, and campuses serving rural communities, and the System has a demonstrated commitment to civic learning and preparing North Carolina graduates for democratic participation.

The System Office has simultaneously launched its own faculty-facing initiatives, including funded course development stipends and an inaugural cross-institutional convening, while partnering with CDI and other organizations like Braver Angels to strengthen dialogue programming through complementary channels. CDI’s work is one part of a broader, coordinated investment the UNC System is making across its institutions. Taken together, these investments signal that constructive dialogue is an institutional priority.

From the outset, CDI and UNC aligned on a principle that shaped every phase of our partnership: start with listening. The System was committed to avoiding top-down mandates, and instead designed a process where faculty, students, and campus leaders would help shape what this work becomes. In January 2026, CDI led a workshop with student leaders from the UNC Association of Student Governments to learn what students are actually experiencing across campuses. Through the spring, a leadership convening will connect faculty stakeholders who are advancing dialogue work across disciplines and institutions. Through the fall, CDI will partner with student affairs leaders at opt-in campuses to pilot Perspectives, our evidence-based blended learning program, with student groups. And in parallel, CDI will conduct diagnostics across participating institutions to surface what’s already working, where coordination opportunities exist, and what conditions support or inhibit constructive dialogue.

Each of these steps would be valuable on a single campus. Across a system, they compound. Campuses learn from each other, diagnostics reveal patterns that no single-site evaluation can, and faculty doing this work in isolation become part of a learning network. By January 2027, CDI and the UNC System will have findings and pilot data system-wide to inform the partnership’s next phase.

Early lessons from this work

CDI has worked with more than 150 institutions across more than 30 states, and we’ve refined our approach through multiple system-level partnerships. Each system brings a different scale, institutional mix, and set of priorities. But they all share a willingness to invest in constructive dialogue as a system-level commitment rather than leaving it to individual campuses. The UNC partnership builds on what we’ve learned from that work, but the underlying design principles we’re applying aren’t unique to this context:

• Engage with students and faculty to help build the vision.

• Use structured listening, not just surveys, to learn what’s actually happening on campuses.

• Leverage diagnostics to capture what’s already working rather than implying a deficit.

• Invest in connecting existing efforts before creating new ones.

• Treat constructive dialogue as an academic competency, not a co-curricular add-on detached from the classroom.

The question we’re now testing together is whether a public university system can make constructive dialogue a mission priority and not just a programmatic one. The early results suggest the answer is yes, but it’s heavily reliant on commitment and approach.

We’re continuing to learn alongside partners across the country. If you’re exploring how to strengthen dialogue at scale—whether across a campus or an entire system—we’d welcome the opportunity to connect.