In this tense, divided moment for our world, Professor Julia Minson thinks more of us should disagree.
“There’s a fundamental tension that people are living with right now that’s really, really unpleasant,” she explains. That tension, she says, comes up every day—when someone says or does something that doesn’t land well with us, but we’re not sure how to respond.
“Do I confront them about it? Do I tell them that it’s inaccurate, offensive, inappropriate, hurtful? And then does that start a big hoopla? Or do I say nothing, and then I feel like a coward?”
Minson is a decision scientist and professor of public policy at HKS. Sometimes, she says, she sees this tension comes up with the big political issues, like how we feel about immigration or abortion. Sometimes, it’s about interpersonal interactions, such as whether or not to speak up when someone’s being unkind.
Minson wants to help people “advance the conversation without setting the whole thing on fire.” This is the core of her research. It’s also the topic of her recent book, How to Disagree Better, which was published in March and offers evidence-based strategies for approaching conflict.
“This is a very Kennedy School thing,” Minson says. “What’s research that can actually impact people’s daily lives?” She’s clear on what she hopes that impact will be, both at HKS and beyond: “I think we can have more conversations, we can have better conversations, and we can have less drama.”
“Students want to be heard”
Minson is calm when she talks about tension. And she’s unafraid of the bristle of feedback—she solicits it in each class she teaches. Minson places notecards throughout her classroom and welcomes students to write their thoughts on them—maybe it’s a comment they didn’t get to add in class discussion, or a complaint about the lecture or the heat in the room.
She then puts that feedback on the board to address in front of the class, even when it’s negative, contradictory, or challenging. “Every single comment on every single card goes up,” she explains.
Part of the point, she explains, is for students to recognize a concept she addresses in her work: “naive realism,” in which we believe our perspective is the right (and real) one. Naive realism is part of what makes disagreement so hard—we can’t see outside of our own experience.
“People are like, ‘I’m too hot.’ And other people are like, ‘I’m too cold,’” she explains. “People saying, ‘You are going too fast. Talk slower.’ And other people saying, ‘You’re going too slowly.’”
The goal of the cards is more awareness than consensus. Ultimately, Minson says, “students want to be heard.” She wants to hear them—and she wants them to hear one another. A crucial part of disagreement, she explains, is listening: allowing the person you’re talking with to feel and be heard.
“The number one thing people get wrong is assuming that the only point of disagreement is to persuade the other person, or resist being persuaded,” she explains.
The notecards, then, go beyond feedback for Minson; they’re training her class in how to disagree better. And she’s not just equipping her own students with these tools. She’s helping reshape the culture of the entire school.
Tools and touchpoints
Four years ago, former HKS Dean Doug Elmendorf and Professor Erica Chenoweth launched the “Candid and Constructive Conversations” initiative on the recommendation of a committee of faculty, staff, and students. Their goal was to “foster an environment of openness, humility, and respect necessary for the robust exchange of ideas.” The idea behind it was simple: policymakers and public leaders need to lead through disagreement, and the Kennedy School can teach them how.
Today, with support from Dean Jeremy Weinstein, Minson co-leads the initiative with Ranya Brooks, the new director of the School’s Office of Belonging, Community, and Connection.
Brooks, who focuses on the staff-facing side of CCC, wants the HKS community to approach disagreement with curiosity.
“No one goes about the world saying ‘I’m going to do the wrong thing today,’” she explains. “Everybody thinks what they’re doing is right. I find it much more useful to understand why you think that is right.”
And when it comes to the Kennedy School, she says, that’s especially important. “The Kennedy School is in the business of creating, propagating, and applying new knowledge—and that’s an exercise that has inherent friction to it. The CCC is designed to help us convert that friction—which could otherwise be destructive—to the spark of innovation.”
“The number one thing people get wrong is assuming that the only point of disagreement is to persuade the other person, or resist being persuaded.”
In order to tend that spark and “convert” that friction, Minson, Brooks, and their team are working to make healthy disagreement a part of everyday life at HKS. They’re aiming for an institutional shift.
“What we’re trying to change at HKS is the culture of a large organization,” Minson explains. “CCC is a framework which wisely recognizes that to change culture, you’ve got to give people skills. You have to give them examples. You have to give them tools. You have to have touchpoints in multiple places.”
These skills, tools, examples, and touchpoints are especially important at the Kennedy School, where students have such varied experiences, coming to the School from different countries, with different interests, and at different stages of their careers.
“Part of the reason people are here is to build their professional networks—so they don’t want to offend,” Minson explains. “And we have the explicit goal of coming here to get an education and sharpen your intellectual toolkit, but right alongside it is the goal of building relationships. Those two things often feel like they’re at odds with each other.”
Now, students begin unifying those goals at orientation. After all, Brooks explains, “We’re a school. You should be able to challenge—and be challenged.”
Before classes even begin, the School offers workshops on managing disagreements (and separate sessions for faculty on how to host healthy debate in the classroom). All new students at HKS are also required to take an online “Introduction to Constructive Disagreement” module, which provides students with concrete tools for disagreement.
Students learn Minson’s HEAR framework, which helps people be more receptive in disagreements (and in turn, makes them more likely to be heard). Minson explains that they should hedge (H) their point with a recognition of nuance, emphasize agreement (E), or reference common ground, acknowledge (A) their conversation partner’s perspective, and reframe to the positive (R), even if a concept is challenging or painful (such as choosing to say “I appreciate you hearing me out” instead of “you always interrupt me.”)
At the close of the module, students meet “DebateMate,” a chatbot designed to help students practice their conversational receptiveness skills. DebateMate prompts students to engage with divisive topics, such as the death penalty or affirmative action in university admissions, and receive real-time feedback on how they’re approaching potential disagreement.
As students move from orientation through their HKS experience, they get the chance to watch public figures model hard conversations, too. This is part of not just the CCC initiative, but the School’s overall commitment to academic freedom and inquiry. Just as students are encouraged to engage with those they disagree with, the Kennedy School invites political “opponents” and ideological opposites to come together in the same classroom or on the same stage for a healthy discussion in front of students.
As Dean Weinstein recently wrote to the school community, “HKS is proud to be one of the only places in America where students can engage with members of Congress from both ends of the political spectrum … often in the same day or even the same hour.”
Over the past two years alone, the School has invited political guests from across that spectrum, including President Joe Biden, Vice President Mike Pence, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In late 2024, campaign managers of both the Harris and Trump presidential campaigns came together for a frank conversation in the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum.
HKS has also taken on one of the most divisive and challenging issues of our time—the conflict in Gaza—through a series of “Middle East Dialogues” with public servants, intellectuals, and scholars hosted by Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance Tarek Masoud. The School’s Carr-Ryan Center, led by Professor Mathias Risse, Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights, Global Affairs and Philosophy, is also running a series of events called “From Pain to Hope? Israel/Palestine in 2026” that brings together scholars, practitioners, and people directly connected to Israel and Palestine in conversation.
And this past winter, the Institute of Politics invited Republican Governor Spencer Cox and Democratic Congressman Jake Auchincloss to the Forum to discuss moving beyond partisanship to action. Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey introduced the talk, noting that she came to the conversation “not only as a governor who’s interested in protecting her residents, but also as a citizen who cares about our country, the future of democracy, and the problem—the cancer, the toxicity—of extreme polarization.”
Cox and Auchincloss spoke about that toxicity, suggesting that the public was ready for a less inflammatory political debate. “There is absolutely an opportunity to campaign on making politics boring again,” Auchincloss said. Cox agreed, suggesting that if voters want to see a healthier political climate, they can reward politicians who work across the aisle.
If bipartisan collaboration “helps you win elections, people will start doing it,” he explains. The School also launched the “Debate, Debrief, and Dessert” series, a set of conversations between Harvard faculty and outside experts who opposed their views on a given topic—from the best approach to public health emergencies, to the role of diversity in higher education, to tough decisions in U.S. foreign policy.
In March, infectious disease experts Monica Gandhi and Rochelle Walensky came together on campus through the “Debate, Debrief, and Dessert” initiative. Dr. Walensky led the Centers for Disease Control through part of the COVID-19 pandemic. And Dr. Gandhi was a self-described “COVID contrarian,” who refused to shut down her HIV clinic in San Francisco during the lockdowns. The organizers hope to include an event with Jake Sullivan, the Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order, and Michael Anton, a former Trump administration director of policy planning at the State Department, to discuss approaches to U.S. foreign policy (planned for April but postponed). And in September, Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership and Social Justice Cornell William Brooks will join Dr. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, for a conversation on the role of diversity in higher education and American life.
MAGA at Harvard
Disagreement is on deck in classrooms, too.
Stephen Richer is a senior practice fellow at the Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. Last spring, he hosted a popular study group for Harvard students, faculty, and staff called “Reading MAGA at Harvard.” The group aimed to help participants better understand President Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, which has garnered both enormous support and enormous resistance.
Richer made his intentions of open dialogue clear on the course syllabus: “This study group is NOT an effort at political evangelism—to convince you that MAGA is awful or wonderful. I have my thoughts, and I daresay you do (or will) too, but I encourage you to approach the study group with the primary goal of understanding.”
Richer knew his class would likely stir up powerful disagreements and strong emotions. To make sure debate was productive, not just inflammatory, he asked students to think outside their own political boxes. He regularly assigned students to defend or oppose MAGA ideas, regardless of their personal beliefs.
“It’s good intellectual weightlifting to take positions that aren’t necessarily your own and try to defend them,” he explains. He was pleased to see an appetite for this type of exercise. “Just the fact that 90 people registered is telling in itself. They didn’t fight it. They embraced the intellectual challenge.”
Terms of engagement
Each week, Richer and Archon Fung, the Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government at HKS and director of the Ash Center, invite an even broader audience to embrace that intellectual challenge. On their weekly podcast and YouTube livestream “Terms of Engagement,” Fung and Richer explore divisive issues in American politics with perspectives from across the political aisle. They engage here as individuals, not on behalf of the Ash Center, the Kennedy School, or Harvard.
Their episodes—which have included “So, Is It Fascism?,” “What Does January 6 Mean Five Years Later?,” “Just How Powerful Are Protests?,” and “The Fight Over Free Speech”—take on heated issues of democracy, freedom, and safety in the United States.
Fung explains that he and Richer were already having these conversations with students and colleagues. But he and Richer wanted to “make our conversations much more open and accessible … outside of Harvard Yard.”
They wanted to make clear, he says, that “even hot-button items aren’t usually as simple as a one-sentence take.”
To do that, Fung explains, he and Richer are committed to “bringing people on [the show] who are going to dig deeper and maybe get you to see some of the complexity that you didn’t necessarily see before.”
In their episode on the insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, Fung and Richer brought on Mary Clare Jalonick, an Associated Press reporter whose book, Storm at the Capitol, includes first-person accounts from a wide variety of people, from rioters who stormed the Capitol, to members of Congress who hid from those rioters, to police officers who tried to stop the insurrection. Everyone she spoke to, she told Fung and Richer, “has the same general narrative—including the rioters—of what happened. Their motivations and feelings in the moment may differ, but there’s not a lot of contradiction in terms of the basic facts of the day.”
On another episode, Richer modeled engaging with opposing views as he, Fung, and their guest, Jonathan Rauch (a contributing writer to The Atlantic), discussed how to classify the Trump administration’s style of governance. Rauch had been discussing an article he’d written in which he argued the Trump administration had slid into fascism. He pointed to actions like the administration’s deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to American cities, or the president’s attacks on the media.
Richer challenged that. He noted that for many people, “fascism” refers to figures like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, or Pol Pot. “And we obviously don’t have that,” Richer said. It’s not that he disagreed with Rauch, he explained. He wanted to challenge the idea because he was hearing it in his own political “ecosystem,” and he wanted to explore other perspectives.
“Even hot-button items aren’t usually as simple as a one-sentence take.”
“I’m pushing back not because I disagree, but honestly, [because] I recognize I’m a little bit captured by my ecosystem. I’m captured by my lived experience. And so the reason why I want to test this is because it does conform with a lot of what I’m reading, a lot of what I’m seeing.”
This admission allowed Rauch, Richer, and Fung to deepen their conversation, discussing the shifts in fascist leaders over time, and the distinctions between an individual fascist leader or emerging fascist movement and a completely fascist state (as in Nazi Germany).
Fung and Richer have also made a point to invite guests whose views don’t fall neatly along left-right lines, taking on complex issues such as the United States’ capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, the United States’ military action in Iran, and the role of older generations in “making space” for new leaders.
“Trying to figure it out”
As “Terms of Engagement” spreads the power of constructive debate beyond Harvard’s walls, Fung notes that there’s plenty of work to be done.
Fung has been teaching at the Kennedy School for almost 30 years. He says that the student body’s approach to disagreement has shifted over the years. When he arrived at the school in 1999, he says students largely avoided disagreement because they felt it would hinder their future political careers. At that time, he says, students were “very mainstream intellectually and not wanting to color outside the lines at all … because they’re going into these mainstream organizations.”
Later, he said, many students “really hated mainstream institutions because they thought they were unjust in all of these ways.” This could also put a wrench in dialogue, because students were afraid to seem aligned with those institutions. Today, Fung said, students and professors are still finding their footing. “The current moment is very confusing,” he says.
Even so, Fung sees signs that real debate is possible—the type of “better conversations” and “less drama” that Minson names. His students, in particular, give him hope for this. He finds they’re “willing to be challenged and pushed—even asking for it.”
And he says he’s seeing a shift in students’ desire to ask hard questions—that despite the chilling effect of federal scrutiny, the instability of this moment has sparked a productive curiosity.
“We’re all trying to figure it out at this moment—what the lay of the political landscape is and how to be constructive in that landscape,” he explains. “All of those questions are wide open.”
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Illustrations by Davide Bonazzi; portraits by Grace Duval/HPAC and Martha Stewart
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