Episode 126: Mario Rewers and Paul Stob on How Debating Dangerous Ideas Leads to Student Success
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How can colleges and universities design courses that foster constructive debate on controversial topics? What strategies effectively build psychological safety while encouraging students to engage with opposing viewpoints? How does practicing civil discourse prepare students and build skills to navigate complex societal and technological changes? We talk through these with Mario Rewers and Paul Stob, Professors at Vanderbilt University who teach a course called "Free Speech, Dangerous Ideas." Together, they outline actionable approaches for utilizing tech-free spaces, small-group deliberation, and active modeling to cultivate intellectual humility and durable skills for student success.
Navigating Free Speech and Civic Engagement in Modern Higher Education
In higher education today, campus discourse sits at a critical crossroads. While headlines often depict universities as battlegrounds of cancel culture and echo chambers, ground-level realities tell a vastly different story. Today's college students are actively seeking venues to grapple with complex societal issues, test provocative ideas, and engage across political and ideological divides.
To meet this demand, institutions must reconsider how they cultivate civic engagement, open deliberation, and student success. By creating structured, tech-free academic environments where students can practice constructive debate, colleges can transform free speech from a polarized buzzword into an essential foundation for lifelong skill development and democratic participation.
Rethinking Free Speech in Higher Education
Public debates around free speech on campus frequently reduce complex constitutional and philosophical principles to soundbites about culture wars. However, this narrow lens misses the foundational value of open expression in academic and personal development.
Free speech extends beyond political posturing; it encompasses the freedom to question, test intellectual boundaries, and process opposing views. Engaging in open deliberation allows individuals to refine their own identities, understand differing perspectives, and learn to coexist in a pluralistic society. Rather than avoiding difficult conversations, higher education must provide the structural scaffolding that enables students to approach contentious topics with rigor and curiosity.
Fostering Civic Engagement Through Innovative Pedagogy
Creating an environment where students feel comfortable discussing controversial topics requires intentional instructional design. Traditional lecture formats and continuous digital connectivity often hinder authentic, deep dialogue.
To build an optimal environment for civil discourse, academic programs are adopting several key instructional strategies:
Tech-Free Spaces: Removing laptops and smartphones eliminates the fear of being recorded out of context or going viral online, establishing the psychological safety needed for honest exploration.
Small-Group Deliberation: Structuring large classes into small, interactive table groupings encourages quiet or introverted students to participate without the pressure of speaking to an entire auditorium.
Experiential Case Studies: Engaging with real-world scenarios—presented by guest practitioners such as policymakers, lawyers, and community leaders—helps ground theoretical concepts in practical decision-making.
Active Modeling: Instructors serving as facilitators and devil's advocates model intellectual humility and demonstrate how to challenge assumptions constructively.
By blending rigorous history with real-time civic practice, these strategies transform abstract debates into practical lessons in leadership and problem-solving.
Building Durable Skills for Student Success
The ability to navigate disagreement, articulate deeply held beliefs, and listen empathetically to opposing viewpoints represents a vital set of durable skills. In an increasingly automated and polarized world, technical knowledge alone is insufficient for long-term professional and personal achievement.
Practicing open dialogue builds several critical competencies:
Intellectual Humility: Recognizing the limits of one's own knowledge and remaining open to new evidence and perspectives.
Ambiguity Tolerance: Comfortably navigating complex, gray areas where definitive or immediate answers do not exist.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Working effectively alongside individuals who hold fundamentally different values or backgrounds.
Equipping students with these skills prepares them to navigate workplace dynamics, contribute meaningfully to their communities, and lead organizations through complex ethical challenges.
Adapting to Technological and Cultural Shifts
The rapid integration of artificial intelligence and digital media into daily life has reshaped how students interact with information and each other. While technology can solve pure content-retrieval tasks, it cannot replicate the nuanced, face-to-face dynamics of human conversation.
Recent trends reveal a growing desire among students for real-world, in-person engagement. Rather than relying on algorithmic feeds or chat interfaces for interpersonal growth, students are seeking out structured spaces where they can test ideas directly with peers and mentors. Higher education must capitalize on this momentum by offering programs that prioritize experiential learning, ethical reasoning, and community-based application.
Ultimately, a liberal arts education must empower individuals to evaluate societal goals, determine ethical priorities, and direct technology rather than be directed by it. By embedding robust frameworks for free speech and civic engagement into the curriculum, colleges can prepare students to lead thoughtful, connected, and impactful lives.
Episode 126 Transcript
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Mario Rewers: What we're trying to do, I think, is to get students to understand that there are really good political, social, and also personal reasons to think hard about free speech and to engage in open deliberation and to talk to other people. That can be as simple as the fact that, as the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas used to point out, that essentially talking to other people and listening to other people helps you understand who you are and makes you more yourself in some ways. But it's also, the long history of political liberalism, where the idea is that the whole point is that, society consists of people who don't agree with one another. The challenge of living in the modern world is that we have to cooperate with one another, but we also all want different things and believe different things.
Elliot Felix: That was Mario Rewers, professor at Vanderbilt University, who was joined by his colleague Paul Stob for a special conversation we recorded on Vanderbilt's campus to discuss their course, Free Speech, Dangerous Ideas. We had a great conversation about the conversations they're having in class, how it'structured to help students discuss and debate, and hear and learn from Paul, Mario, and guest speakers, develop as people, and build really critical skills in the process. Let's dive in. Welcome to the Connected College podcast. I'm your host, Elliot Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and the way they're organized to enable student success. Join me for insightful interviews with higher ed innovators, sharing the stories, stats, and strategies to create better connected colleges and universities. Welcome, Paul and Mario. I'm so excited about our conversation on free speech and the role that it plays in student success.
Paul Stob: Wonderful. Thank you so much for having us. We're delighted to be here.
Mario Rewers: It's great to be here.
Elliot Felix: Let's start off hearing how you got your start. How'd you guys get started in higher ed, and what are you up to today?
Paul Stob: I got started a long time ago in higher ed. I've been at Vanderbilt now for 17 years and before that I did my PhD at the University of Wisconsin. And my home discipline is communication studies, so I've been around questions of speech and debate and the sort of usefulness of it for a long time now. And since coming to Vanderbilt, I've transitioned from communication studies to a new interdisciplinary program that we have at Vanderbilt called Culture, Advocacy, and Leadership. The best way to describe it is as a kinda civic engagement program. We get students out into the community. We get students doing sort of practicum projects and internship experiences, but they're doing volunteer work as well. They're really trying to test the ideas that we talk about in the classroom out there in the wider world. So that's where I've been spending a lot of my time lately, and it's been a great success because the program has been growing faster than we ever anticipated, which has been great. There's a lot of hunger out there for students when it comes to civic engagement and trying to make a difference in the world.
Elliot Felix: That's awesome. I love the getting out and applying things and testing the theory every day. That's great. Absolutely. To help communities. What could be better than that? Mario, what about you?
Mario Rewers: I've been at Vanderbilt for over 12 years now. I'm from Germany originally. I came to the US to do my PhD. I'm a historian by training, and in the fall of 2021, I taught a history class on the history of free speech. And so teaching a class, our class on dangerous ideas and free speech now is an interesting experience as part of this new program in culture, ethics, and leadership because it gives you an opportunity to use many of those relatively theoretical debates and arguments about historiography and the meaning of free speech in the 18th and 19th centuries, but really apply them to concrete real-life context in the present. So it's been really exciting to kinda revisit things that I developed years ago in the context of a pure history class in the context of this new program now. Again, it's much more outward-focused and present-focused.
Elliot Felix: And present-focused. And the name of the class that you all teach is Dangerous Ideas, right?
Paul Stob: Free Speech: Dangerous Ideas. Okay. And we lean into both parts of the title pretty heavily, right? So it's not just about the history of free speech, although students get some of that history.
Elliot Felix: 'Cause free speech about like vanilla ice cream is probably not so dangerous. That's right. Yeah.
Paul Stob: Not that dangerous. Although, I guess it depends if you're talking to a chocolate person or not.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, or even a strawberry person. Yeah.
Mario Rewers: But vanilla ice, it might be.
Paul Stob: But vanilla ice, it might be dangerous. Then it's all of a sudden very dangerous, yeah.
Elliot Felix: Nice. So tell us a little bit more about this class, Free Speech, Dangerous Ideas.
Paul Stob: So the class is purposefully big. We have about 125 students, which for Vanderbilt University is a pretty big-sized class. But we really wanted that because we want it as a sort of welcoming, big tent, basically, for a lot of different students. We prioritize first-year students, second-year students, and transfer students as a way of coming to Vanderbilt and really trying to find their place amidst this culture. But the way the room is set up, it's really advantageous because it's a big room, but it's not stadium-style seating. We have these small groupings of tables. And so we basically put students together in these groups of six to eight each. And what we really try to do is we issue them these sort of provocations when it comes to new ideas, right? We give them real-world situations. We have them deliberate about those situations and think through how they would handle it. The more controversial, the better, in our understanding of it. And so we have them deliberate about it, and then they share out as a group sort of what they would do. On top of that, we have a lot of visitors to class. So these are people who are politicians or lawyers or comedians or musicians or people who are part of local advocacy organizations. They come to class, and they share with students real issues that they faced in their career, and they set up the particular issue that they're talking about. "Here's a dangerous idea I faced in my work. How would you handle it?" And they give it over to the students to talk about it amongst themselves, and then the students share out the way they would handle it. But then we have the visitor follow up and talk about what really happened. So I'll give you an example. We had last year, and we're gonna have again this year, former mayor of Nashville, Bill Purcell, talk about what he faced when he was in office as the mayor of Nashville, including a situation where they were doing work on the local courthouse and they uncovered a stained glass window display of Moses holding the Ten Commandments. And some of the workers brought it to the mayor's office and said, "Listen, we don't know what to do with this. Is this sort of a thing we can't do anymore 'cause of a separation of church and state issue, or how do we handle this? What should we do?" And the mayor put it to the students and said, basically, "How would you handle this? What would you do with this stained glass statue of Moses, right? Is this a violation of our sort of understanding of civic life these days? It wasn't obviously when they created it, but nowadays, what do we do?" And so they deliberated about it and shared out what they thought. And then finally, the mayor comes back and he talks about what they actually did, which he said, I think his line was something like, "Moses was there when I came into office. Moses is gonna be there when I leave office." And that was the idea that he took.
Elliot Felix: There you go.
Paul Stob: But those are some of the little case studies we give to them.
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Elliot Felix: I love the small groups and the case studies and the visitors. How, in terms of the instructional design of the whole thing, how do you also create the psychological safety or the environment or the norms or the culture so that students can have these deliberations on dangerous ideas?
Mario Rewers: That's a really good question because we know that students are thinking about these issues. They're talking about them to their friends, to their families. What we're trying to create in this class is to give them a venue to do it, but in an academic setting where they can get feedback from people who've spent a lot of time thinking about these issues and dealing with these issues. So in terms of instructional design, we're really leaning into a no-tech approach, into really making sure students have pen and paper, no cell phones, no computers, 'cause we're trying to create an environment in which people can be honest and open without having to be afraid of being recorded, for instance, which we know students are worried about this, and for a good reason too. So this is something we're really, really—
Elliot Felix: Unless there's a podcast involved, yeah. That's right. Then the recording's okay.
Mario Rewers: Unless it's a podcast. Exactly. That's okay. That's true. That's something we're really leaning into, so creating this kind of space in which students feel like they can voice provocative ideas. They can make provocations without having to be worried about going viral online, and that's one element. And in addition to just having guest speakers come in who have this real-life experience, and who also just will share perspectives that neither Paul nor I would share. And so that's another kind of like implicit element in this class that the two of us could talk about many of these issues too. We could present these issues, but having people come in who are not us, who don't share our backgrounds, experiences, and viewpoints makes a big difference too in terms of what students take away from that, in terms of exposing students to perspectives and viewpoints they just oftentimes wouldn't get in their homes, in their kind of like college and social context otherwise.
Paul Stob: I'll also add that Mario and I are really good at being devil's advocates. So while we're having this big discussion, he and I are basically floating around the classroom with some handheld mics, and we will chime in with students or even with our visiting speaker to really try to push the point further. We are really trying to open students up to have really hard, difficult conversations. And we view it as our job not to answer any of these questions, but to push students as almost as far as we can push them when it comes to thinking about these issues.
Mario Rewers: And the nice thing is I think students realize that Paul and I can go there, whatever there means, and it gives them permission to also try to do it in some ways. I think the more that I'm teaching, the longer I'm in this business, the more I realize that 50% of teaching is modeling. Modeling for students what it looks like to be a thoughtful, engaged person in the world. And so just the two of us walking around, prodding people to think a little deeper, think a little harder, also—
Elliot Felix: And challenge each other, I assume. Absolutely. Yeah.
Mario Rewers: And thinking out loud. I think it does a lot just to show students to open up ways of thinking, ways of being in a classroom they might not get otherwise in more traditional classroom settings.
Elliot Felix: How do you draw out the introverts?
Paul Stob: We're not afraid or ashamed of just cold calling on people, just stepping up to them with a microphone. But I also have—I had a long sort of philosophy about introverts in my classes, where if you look engaged even though you're a little bit reticent to speak up, I'm okay with that. I'm okay with you as long as I see you listening and thinking and in small groups talking with the other people at your table, I'm okay with that. I might try to push you a little bit and get you out of there, but I was actually, for somebody who studies communication and talks way too much, I was a pretty introverted student when I was an undergraduate, and so that makes me always wanna protect those students a little. Or not protect them, but create a space for them in a learning environment. So long as you're not distracted and watching things on your phone or whatever like that, I'm okay with that if I see you sort of participating that way.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. That makes sense. When I facilitate retreats or visit campuses, I'm always thinking, how do you make this introvert friendly? And sometimes it's as simple as giving people a moment to think before it's time to speak or asking somebody to jot down some ideas and then have the small group discussion and then have the large group discussion. But, sometimes that like 30 seconds is all you need so that people can form that thought before someone else is in their ear or whatever.
Paul Stob: Absolutely.
Mario Rewers: And there are ways of cold calling on students that does not amount to law school grilling, where your law professor grills you about a particular case. You can ask open-ended questions that invite students to think about something. And I always think there are introverted students who are just looking for permission to say something, where the barrier for them is not actually speaking in public, but it's raising their hand and maybe looking like a try-hard or something like this. So I think sometimes actually calling on someone and asking them an open-ended question gives them permission to actually just say what they want to say, but they wouldn't have raised their hand on their own. I think there's a dynamic too sometimes.
Paul Stob: It's interesting. When we teach this class we cover such a range of topics around free speech and dangerous ideas that we will get to some topic where the quietest student will all of a sudden really wanna participate. They have something to say on this issue, they really wanna speak up and they're comfortable enough at a certain point where they're ready to do it. So you see students just open up. The student who said nothing all semester all of a sudden gets heavily involved in this one particular issue, and it's great to see.
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Elliot Felix: What do you think people misunderstand about free speech on campus?
Mario Rewers: I think that oftentimes, this is partly me coming from a background of not being from the US and also being a historian by training, I think discourse in the United States oftentimes really focuses very narrowly on free speech and campus free speech especially as something that's about cancel culture and wokeness and these sorts of issues. Whereas what I originally intended to do when I was designing my history class on history of free speech was just to open up and let students know how many different issues there are that touch upon the issue of free speech. Everything from 18th century censorship and the ways in which censorship could be really creative, because it challenged people to come up with creative ways of circumventing censorship, to questions of copyright, for instance, intellectual property. Does that amount to censorship? There are many really interesting ways to think about this. I think, personally for me, and I think this is one of the subtexts of this class, I think we try to make students understand that free speech, free expression, is more than just buzzwords and slogans. I think there's a danger because it gets talked about so much in very specific ways that people look at it and think, "Oh, again, these are just slogans, what does it even mean in some ways?" And what we're trying to do, I think, is to get students to understand that there are really good political, social, and also personal reasons to think hard about free speech and to engage in open deliberation and to talk to other people. That can be as simple as the fact that, as the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas used to point out, that essentially talking to other people and listening to other people helps you understand who you are and makes you more yourself in some ways. But it's also, the long history of political liberalism, where the idea is that the whole point is that, society consists of people who don't agree with one another. The challenge of living in the modern world is that we have to cooperate with one another, but we also all want different things and believe different things, and different political regimes have tried to deal with this issue differently, but that's what it comes down to in some ways. How do you deal with the fact that for us to have the nice things we want to have, running water, electricity, higher education, we have to work together and cooperate with people who fundamentally are different from us, who want different things, who don't share our values and opinions. How do we deal with that? And so getting students to understand on a really deep, fundamental level, this is more than just, again, a debate over wokeness or cancel culture. But there's really deep, important questions for just society and the future of society, I think is also one of our kind of implicit goals for this class, to get students to understand, you hear these things all the time. People talk about them on podcasts even. But there's really good reasons why many philosophers in history and many thinkers have grappled with them. They're really important.
Paul Stob: I'll add to that, that there's this caricature of college students floating around right now, that they are fragile snowflakes who don't wanna listen to other sides, right? And there is no doubt a little bit of truth to that. But I would say in general, especially at Vanderbilt, but I think at many other colleges and universities, that's just not true, right? Students wanna have really difficult conversations. They wanna grapple with big, challenging issues. They wanna talk about the hardest things that are happening in society, and they wanna do it with people from across the political aisle, right? They wanna do it with people from different backgrounds and different perspectives. And we just leaned into that and created this class to open up those conversations and to give students a space to do that kind of work, 'cause they really wanna do it.
Mario Rewers: And we know they're doing it, and they're doing it with their friends, and having them in class gives them an academic venue to do it, where Paul and I can, again, push them a little bit here, introduce them to a new idea, a new concept that can help them understand something. So in some ways, it's a way for us to guide something and to provide some input into something they're doing anyway. But we at least think that there's something to be gained from doing it in a classroom setting as opposed to just doing it on social media or in the dorm room at night.
Elliot Felix: In a dorm room. Yeah. It seems like you're giving them some infrastructure, some information, some inspiration about how to have the conversations they want and need to have. And I love the larger lesson around ultimately this is about cooperating and working with, and living with, and learning with other people, and figuring out who you are as a person in the process. And I wonder, is that the role that free speech has in student success? Is it that cooperation and identity piece?
Paul Stob: For us, I think we think about this class, and we think about free speech in general as I'll use a term that I don't really like, but other people use it as well, really a soft skill type of class.
Elliot Felix: Durable skill.
Paul Stob: Durable skill. Thank you. That's always a better word than soft skill. Yeah.
Elliot Felix: An awesome skill.
Paul Stob: Awesome skill for life, right? Yeah. That's what this class is about. It is about giving students the practice developing themselves and speaking their mind, and speaking up, and learning how to articulate their own deeply held beliefs, and then also listen to other people and their deeply held beliefs. And for us, that's really important, right? We will talk with students about the history of free speech. We will talk about famous Supreme Court cases, but we don't test them on any of that. We don't have any tests in this class. What's really important for us is students showing up and participating, and being part of this collective, and being part of this. There are other assignments that they do throughout the class, but this is not a content knowledge class. This is a skills class or a sort of habits class, or a way of developing students. And I think this is amazing training for getting them ready to go out into the, quote-unquote, "real world." Another term I hate, but people understand it when I say it, right? Go out into the real world and be in the job, right? Or be in a civic space, or live in a community, and live in a neighborhood, right? And having this push or pull, this back and forth, this sort of debate in a way where we can debate each other and talk about really hard things, but we don't leave the encounter as enemies. We might have strong differences of opinion, but there's no, hopefully, hatred at the end of that, right? That's the sort of skill and success for life type of thing.
Mario Rewers: There's also one element, and I'm saying this partly because I wear one hat, which is as an instructor. I also wear one hat, which is as an assistant dean in the College of Arts and Science. And so I'll sometimes talk to incoming students and their families and parents, or to the admissions office when they want updates about what's happening in the College of Arts and Science. And I always emphasize to them, which is something that's, I think, hard for us to understand because we work in universities, that one of the magic things about being in college is that I think there are many people who unfortunately are never again surrounded by so many smart, intelligent, dedicated, curious people as during the three or four years that they're in college. And this class is a great way to just make use of the many resources we have on campus, and that includes instructors, that includes just other people on campus who come, have come to class. Chancellor Diermeier came to class last year. He'll be coming again this year. We have all kinds of people coming in. And also it gives students a chance just to engage with other—with their peers in a way they wouldn't otherwise. Again, this is a big class. We have around 130 students, and many of our students, I think, meet people, discover people that they're really interested in and align with, that they just wouldn't have met otherwise. And so it's a great way just like to catalyze resources that are already there, and especially with the human resource, which is the students, the faculty, university leadership.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. And it seems like you're also just aligning, I'm sure intentionally, with lots of best practices, high impact practices, right? Engaging with folks that are different than you, service learning, civic engagement. As you're building these skills, you're checking all these boxes about what we know helps students be successful. So kudos to you on that.
Paul Stob: Hey, we're doing our best. We don't always succeed, but we give it a shot.
What Trends Are Changing Campus Free Speech and Civic Life
Elliot Felix: Paul, your point about students aren't fragile snowflakes but are actually hungry for these kind of conversations that help them develop, I think is so critical. And I was maybe pleasantly unsurprised by the recent Gallup-Lumina report that talked about free speech on campus, and that I think it was upwards of 70% of college students feel like they're comfortable sharing their views, even with people that disagree with them. It seems like we're making headway, and your class is part of the progress we're making.
Paul Stob: Yeah, absolutely. It is amazing to see those statistics. I think there was either different polling or worse polling a few years ago, or maybe it was the cultural moment we were in, right? Right around the pandemic, it was a very difficult sort of situation for a number of different reasons. It really feels like we've shifted a lot of that, and the conversations we're having now in class, on campus, outside of campus, students are taking the charge. They're getting involved, and they really wanna listen to and interact with other people. It's really interesting to see among our students a tech backlash in certain ways. There's a tech backlash against social media, we see that with our students, but also against artificial intelligence. I don't know how widespread it is beyond Vanderbilt or even beyond my sort of narrow corner of Vanderbilt, but it is definitely the case that students are pushing back on some of the things that they know is bad for their social and emotional development, bad for their civic skills, right? That puts them in a sort of problematic place, and so they're leaping at these opportunities to really get involved.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. My kids are eight and 10, and I talk to them all the time about how important it is to be able to engage with other people in person. And if things go the way they've been going, being able to carry on a conversation 10 years from now is gonna seem like they can fly. That would be such a rare skill, but my hope is it's actually not rare, and we rebound, and there are these tech-free spaces. There is this work on developing these skills. And I wonder, how do you see this changing in the future? It sounds like people are more open to having conversations about dangerous ideas, and students are hungry for this kind of challenge. But when you look into your free speech crystal ball, what does it tell you about the future?
Paul Stob: I think it's gonna continue just going in the direction that it's already going in. I think students are gonna continue to pursue dangerous ideas, but also these sort of skills that we've been talking about, right? There's a way in which AI has solved, as in air quotes there, but it solved the content knowledge problem, right? The things that we used to test students on, you can now get at a few prompts and everything. It's not always a good answer. Sometimes it's a terrible answer. Sometimes AI makes things up, as everybody knows, right? But the idea of teaching students history or certain concepts and then testing them on those concepts seems to me a little bit outmoded now, right? But what's not outmoded are these situations where we're pushing students into situations in the classroom or out of the classroom where they have to grapple with real world problems, things that are on the ground. And I think one of the reasons our program, the Program in Culture, Advocacy, and Leadership, is growing so quickly at Vanderbilt is because there are so many students out there who recognize, "I wanna get involved. I wanna make a difference in the world. I wanna try to influence this conversation or that conversation." And I think that's only gonna continue because you can only get that by doing, through experiential learning, through getting involved with all these different organizations, by doing certain things on campus and out of campus. That's a huge opportunity, and I think we are gonna continue to move in that direction when it comes to issues of free speech, but civic life in general.
Mario Rewers: And I think generally looking to the future for higher education is so difficult because the whole discourse is really far behind in some ways. You already mentioned it, but one of the interesting things about the way people talk about higher education in the US is that it's so focused on a handful of elite institutions. That's what newspapers write about. That's what's in the news. People, for some reason, really care what this one sophomore at Oberlin did or what happened at Yale in 2013 or whenever it was. And these small handful of really not representative institutions drive so much of the discourse. And so I think there's an interesting generational shift happening, too, because I think many people, when they think about campus culture and free speech, are still stuck 10, 20 years in the past in some ways. I think students have changed enormously since then, since the pandemic, since other kind of events since then. And so I think one of the reasons why it's hard to predict is because I think we're still trying to figure out, okay, what are our students actually like? 'Cause we're all five to 10 years behind in our assumptions in some ways.
Elliot Felix: We're trying to catch kind of perception up to reality in a way. Huh. That's really interesting. And I think the recognition that AI is good for some things and maybe not for others because you're missing out on that developmental opportunity or to build those skills, I think is really interesting. And something I've been thinking about, I feel like there are these eras of interfacing with technology, and maybe to begin with, it was analogous to the physical world, right? So it was like everything was in folders. We're filing things in folders, and we had tools that looked like hammers and wrenches, even though those weren't really applicable to files and such. But then we moved into the search era, and now in AI, I think we're in the conversational era, right? Where the interface is like a conversation with technology. And I wonder what that might mean given your class is, I don't mean to do it any injustice, but it's how to talk to each other about difficult topics. So do you think the fact that more and more students, more and more people are gonna be talking, whether it's Alexa or in a prompt, they're like talking to a technology and what's the impact of that on how they talk to each other and with each other?
Mario Rewers: So one of the things that's worth pointing out is that these are issues that we specifically address in class. Last year when we taught this class, we had someone come in who was trained as a lawyer, who now works for a think tank, who does research on free expression and artificial intelligence. Figuring out which model gives what kinds of answers. If you ask a model, "Is Taiwan part of the People's Republic of China?" What is the answer? Who started the Ukraine war? These kinds of issues. And so I think one of the really nice things is that we don't try to have a kind of detached view of these things as if we had the answers and we're trying to guide students. We're trying to make students aware that these are live questions that people are thinking about, are grappling with, and that some people have thought very hard about. And I think it helps students understand that—or it gives them a kind of like higher level sense of just, "Oh, everything's in play here. This is something that's happening to me right now, and I don't have to take it for granted or accept it, but here is something that I can shape myself or I should be aware of." So one of the nice things about this class is that it's allowed us to address some of these technological and tech issues specifically, too. We had another guest speaker come in last year who used to work as a lawyer for Facebook, now Meta, and was talking about some of the challenges she had experienced in terms of content moderation, like giving us hypothetical cases about what should we do if somebody posted this.
Elliot Felix: Where do you draw the line? How do you draw the line? Yeah.
Mario Rewers: Yeah, exactly. And especially in a tech context where what does it mean if somebody posts something threatening, but then they have a winky emoji next to it? What does it mean now? And so it gets very interesting. And so one of the neat things about this class, it actually has a lot of overlap with current debates about technology and its influence. But we can now talk about it in this framework and to really make students much more aware of all the things that are going on than they would otherwise be, I think.
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Paul Stob: I'll also say that your question about sort of the conversational model of AI is really apt and makes me really nervous because there are important parallels between what we're doing in this class and what you can do with these AI models. But there's also the teaching students all the problems and pitfalls that come along with some of those models, right? The stories we've all heard about people having conversations with their chat agent and it turning into some weird sycophantic thing that just spirals out of control is a big problem. And of course, it's not face-to-face. You're not able to look at another human being and have these difficult conversations, and that's one of the things we're really trying to lean into in this class and in our program writ large. But it's also something that I see students really want. Students in the wake of the pandemic now want to have face-to-face interactions. They wanna come to class in the classroom whenever possible. They wanna have meetings with me, not over Zoom. I always offer them a Zoom meeting, and students actually want to engage, and they wanna see face-to-face, and they wanna have those kinds of exchanges. So there are definitely these parallels with these chatbot models, but it is never gonna be, I don't think, a substitution for being in a room with other people and really going through the energy dynamics of the give and take of conversation and talking to each other about really difficult issues. So that's one of the things we always really wanna stress to our students.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, and I think one of the things that's interesting is sometimes we bring the norms and the expectations from one medium into another. Like I remember as campuses reopened, students were bringing Zoom behaviors into the classroom or maybe had anxiety about being in the classroom, having not been in there before, or because being in public connoted a kind of a danger. And I think it's interesting we might see some of the conversations that students have with AI translate poorly or well into the classroom. I just think, some questions don't have answers, right? And the whole point is to hear different perspectives and think through it, but there's not gonna be a definitive answer. Whereas in a way a conversation you have with AI is set up to give you some kind of answer, right? How frustrating would it be to just, "I can't answer that question," or, "That question doesn't have an answer." But in person with a person it's a different context, and there's nuance there.
Paul Stob: Being able to live in ambiguity and live in a place where I don't know, I'm uncertain, I don't have a good answer to this. Yeah. You don't have a good answer to this. But what a life skill that is, right? Yeah. To be able to sit there and realize the world is full of gray areas where there's not a clear answer.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. And that's often how like trust and respect is earned, by telling someone, "Actually, I don't know," or, "Let me think about that," or, "I disagree with you." You can get anyone to agree with you. I think there's a lot more respect and trust that's earned when someone can diplomatically, respectfully, skillfully offer a different perspective.
Paul Stob: One of the virtues we really try to teach our students in this class and in our program writ large is simply intellectual humility, right? Coming back from a sort position of certainty, which is a sort of problem in so many different ways, especially for growth. But learning that operating from a position of I have a lot to learn, I have a lot to learn from other people, I am open to new ideas and new perspectives, that's one of the things we really wanna instill in our students, because that's, to me, the right position for life. It doesn't mean we can't ever come to conclusions or have answers, but the moment we hold onto those too firmly, the moment we've cut ourselves off from pathways of growth and development.
Elliot Felix: I agree with these ideas about getting folks to the table. And the book I talked about earlier, Everett Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations, even though it's a classic, let's call it, in addition to coining the early adopter term and creating that adoption curve, Rogers also identified the five key considerations that people make when they're adopting a new idea: compatibility, complexity, trialability, observability, and the fifth one that I'm gonna focus on, which is called relative advantage. What's in it for me? So I think in addition to getting staff and frontline folks at the table, you need to articulate how this is gonna benefit them, right? Is it gonna save them time? Is it going to help them deliver more impact, right? Live the mission. That's generally why they're there. What are the benefits for them going to be? And I a while back did a project with a university, and it was so interesting because, like, how many of you wanna sit in a all-day training session? Probably zero if we raised our hands. But we got staff to participate in several all-day training sessions because they were specifically designed to fix the pain points that staff were feeling, and it was positioned not as "Hey, come learn this stuff you may never use." It was like, "Hey, you know that stuff that's driving you nuts? We're actually gonna figure that out together tomorrow. See you there." And so I think if you really double down on relative advantage, not only will you have them at the table, but they'll be excited to be there, and then they'll reap the benefits, and so will everyone else.
Ben Bongers: Let's keep cruising. I'm still hanging on to the idea that we all prefer to learn about AI with and from our peers. Surveys at our institution indicate this too. How are we applying this preference to student use and learning?
Elliot Felix: When you're short on time and funds, you have to get the most of both. And every other year we do a national student experience survey, and it asks, I think, across 48 different dimensions of student experience. And can anybody guess what's the lowest c- every year, what's the lowest satisfaction- Anybody wanna take a guess? Parking? Par- parking's pretty low, but even below it is group projects group projects I think is 44% satisfaction. And it's often because we're just throwing students together in groups. We're not forming those groups correctly. We may not be guiding or mentoring those groups. But it seems to me that we have an opportunity to make group work not suck and have students learn AI from and with their peers at the same time, and that could be a class project for company, an experiential learning opportunity. It could be through co-curriculars, an AI workshop at the library. It could be a a hackathon, in the business school. As we dig into learning design, looking for ways students can learn from and with each other in a way that solves the AI problem but also solves the group work problem would be delicious.
Ben Bongers: Let's keep moving forward. There's a lot of questions on here. Elliot, you can keep the mic. This one's for you. You talked about lead users. How do you find them? Can you say a little bit more about how you find lead users? Are they people who are obviously doing something innovative, or is it more about spotting potential and giving them room to run with it?
Elliot Felix: It's great to find emerging leaders and people with potential. Lead users are generally the people that are already doing really interesting stuff. They're already pushing the boundaries. They're making the odd requests. They're taking risks. They're doing things that others might worry would get them shunned by their peers. They have unusual partners. And a good example of that, we led a study for Georgia Tech a while back that was looking at the future of learning and research on their campus, and e- engaging lead users with ethnography was a, a key part of that. And one of them was a literature professor named Hugh Crawford, and how do you get a bunch of engineers to engage in literature? No easy task, potentially. But what he did was he actually had them build Thoreau's Walden cabin in front of the library. And so while not every literature professor is gonna have engineers building cabins, there's some really interesting stuff embedded in that, right? Like primary sources putting things in context, working in groups, hands-on activities partnerships across disciplines. When you spot a literature professor that has engineers building a cabin, that sort of gives you a sense, These are the people that are really at the forefront and going to the library and saying, "Hey, could we build a cabin in your courtyard?" So that's what I would be on the lookout for. And I'll upload the article 'cause that'll help too.
Ben Bongers: How long before we should expect anything to actually show up in outcomes like retention? Does anybody have a clear sense of that? How long before we should expect any of these interventions or use cases to actually show up in re- outcomes like retention?
Elliot Felix: I can just say quickly several of the examples I shared, they were already measuring against retention Cal State Northridge and ASU using RCT data The future is already here, right? Yeah. It's just not very evenly distributed.
Ben Bongers: Let's keep moving through some of these questions. This one is specifically for you, Elliot, but I think it applied for all of you. "Seems like an especially unusual time for innovation with AI capabilities moving so quickly along with mixed sentiment about use, and the future is full of unknowns. Will future costs of using AI tools become prohibitive, like free access versus pay per token models, safety and ethics, et cetera? Are we really in an unusual time, or is this normal, and how is innovation impacted by all of this?"
Elliot Felix: I can start just by saying I think higher ed is always innovating, right? There's always some, some change. There's a new technology, there's societal needs, there's social shifts. I think now might be a moment when it's needed more acutely, and I think in different ways because a lot of that innovation in the past has happened through addition. The higher ed playbook for responding to change and to innovating is generally to add something. We add a center, we add an institute, we add a program, we add a department. As a result of all that adding we add cost and complexity, and the adding was maybe sustainable over the last 50 years when we were in growth mode but now it's not. So we have to innovate without necessarily adding, right? So you have to solve a few problems at once. You have to create new courses and integrate AI into the curriculum while sunsetting other programs so that you have the time and resources to invest in the new ones. And I think that's what makes this moment really hard because you can't build on that tradition of innovation in ex- exactly the same way because you also have to find lots of things that you can stop doing so that you can start doing the new things and do them not just in isolated pockets, which is very resource intensive, but actually do them at scale so that you get some economy of scale. And I think that's what makes this moment different, but I think it's very much needed. And in fact, while you can't govern based on a poll or lead based on a poll, we've probably all been watching the Gallup confidence in higher ed poll, and it declined. Last year it actually went up, and when they asked people why it went up, the biggest reason it went up was a perceived sense of innovation within the sector. So I think we need to keep going. Now, this year it went down again- And we're all getting whiplash, but now's the time to innovate. We just have to do it not by purely adding stuff. We also have to sunset stuff, consolidate, collaborate to free up the time and the resources to make that happen.
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Mario Rewers: And, I still think in some ways that AI just makes what used to be called a liberal education just even more important. I think many technological changes have just highlighted that the old model of an education in the arts and the sciences, where the idea is, and that's why it's called a liberal education, it's an education worthy of somebody who's free. Really just meaning somebody who has and will do more in their lives than just take orders, be told what to do. Be a little cog in a big machine where they're taking orders, they do what they're told to do, but they don't really have to think. 'Cause of course, that's usually what unfree people have to do, who can't make decisions, who aren't allowed to make decisions. If the idea of a liberal education is that we're educating people to be decision makers, to think for themselves, to run households and companies and run for political office and think about ends rather than means. I think oftentimes when I talk to, again, incoming students or parents, I try to get them to understand that what an education like the one they're getting at Vanderbilt and in our program gives them is the ability to think not only about means. It's not only instrumental rationality where somebody tells you what to do and then you figure out what the most efficient way to do it is. But it gives you the ability to think about what should we be doing in the first place. It's about values, it's about goals, it's about ends. I still think in so many ways that's what students get when they come to a school like Vanderbilt, when they major in a program like Culture, Advocacy, and Leadership. And yeah. And so I think in some ways the AI revolution only makes this more important because in some ways, where in the past the point of a liberal education might have been, it's about me being an assertive, autonomous person vis-a-vis other people. Now it might be the same, me being an autonomous person vis-a-vis artificial intelligence, AI. And in some ways, as somebody once pointed out or recently pointed out, the future belongs to those who will be able to use technology rather than be used by it in some ways. And so I think all of this still aligns very much with the traditional purpose of a liberal education, a general education in the arts and sciences that students get here in our program and in a class like the one we're teaching.
Elliot Felix: Mario, Paul, this was great insight and great advice on having better conversations about dangerous ideas and building those skills and relationships that make it happen and help students make an impact. So I really appreciate it. Thank you.
Paul Stob: Thank you so much for having us. This was great.
Mario Rewers: Thanks for having us.
Elliot Felix: Thanks for listening to the Connected College podcast. Go to ElliotFelix.com for more information about my book, the Connected College, articles I've written and talks I've given. There's also tools you can download, information on upcoming events, and information on booking me to speak at your institution or organization. Please support the podcast by rating it and reviewing it wherever you're listening. Let's create connected colleges where all students succeed.