Liberal education means challenging one’s own settled opinions about all important questions of human existence, and this requires engaging with those opinions in open-minded and productive ways. Thus, Concourse is committed to promoting open discourse and norms that facilitate productive discussion.
In 2023, Concourse joined forces with two distinguished philosophy faculty to develop the Civil Discourse Project with support from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. The project as a whole aims to reinvigorate the open exchange of ideas at MIT with high-profile speaker events where an invited speaker debates an MIT faculty member on important and controversial issues of the day.
Concourse extends this experience to students by providing opportunities to engage themselves in such debate and to bring these debates to the broader MIT student community. In Concourse, this involves Friday seminar discussions about the historical and theoretical background of free speech, as well as student debates, using the Braver Angels debate format, that accompany our speaker series as well as others of students’ own choosing. We invite other MIT students who attend the speaker series to join in our Friday seminar debates.
Each semester, Concourse offers paid positions to “Debate Fellows” who help organize and run the student debates. In the Spring semester, Concourse invites other MIT students to come and learn what intense and civil discourse about hot-button issues looks like through periodic roundtable discussions over dinner and how exciting and instructive they can be.
For more on the civil discourse project see this MIT news article about its inception.
Photos by Kevin Ly
