In a previous blog post in late December, yours truly noted that while UCLA touts its Dialogue Across Difference program as its response to the encampments, protests, and related events that followed the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack, the program in practice avoids reference to the events that are its supposed justification.* It operates in denial even though its leadership - in an op ed in the Bruin - indicated that there ought to be programming that addressed the underlying issue.
We noted that the actual Dialogue Across Difference combined kumbaya - generic let's all get along - with topics that weren't especially controversial on the UCLA campus.
Yours truly came across a recent article in the Columbia Daily Spectator that described an attempt by Columbia to require incoming students to take kumbaya-type training proctored by "RAs," resident advisers (grad students) who normally attend to residence halls. Columbia apparently used an outside organization for its programming:
On July 15, just over a week before Columbia announced the settlement [with the Trump administration], acting University President Claire Shipman, CC ’86, SIPA ’94, wrote a statement to the University community referencing the development of “programs that will go beyond traditional trainings.” Shipman described them as part of a broader push to “build bridges” and “deepen our understanding of each other,” especially in relation to antisemitism. It was then that she also introduced a new partnership with Interfaith America.
According to its mission statement, Interfaith America works with campuses, corporate workplaces, and civic spaces to “equip leaders to create institutional cultures where people respect, relate, and cooperate across difference.” In higher education, their goal is to make “religious diversity a vital part of the college experience.”
Columbia received up to $10,000 from the organization after applying to its Teaching and Learning Pluralism Cohort, which focuses on helping faculty inspire in their students a “respect for diverse identities and divergent ideologies, mutually inspiring relationships between diverse communities, and cooperation for the common good.” In its application, Columbia was required to respond to prompts about opportunities and challenges regarding “pluralism” on its campus...
Interfaith America selected Columbia as one of five participating universities, which also include the College of Charleston, Cornell University, Goucher College, and James Madison University. Representatives from each institution convened for the first time in early August 2025.
Kevin Eckstrom, Interfaith America’s chief strategic communications officer, emphasized that the goal of the partnership is institutional transformation. “The whole idea is to embed pluralism into the DNA of the organization,” he said in an interview with Spectator. The program consists of six virtual convenings, where faculty and administrators share and receive methods, materials, and “best practices on pedagogies for pluralism,” Rebecca Russo, Interfaith America’s vice president of higher education strategy, told Spectator.
The Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning, which promotes an “inclusive” teaching approach, is adapting Interfaith America’s “Bridging the Gap” curriculum to integrate it into campus culture...
Interfaith America distributed a case study to RAs at their August 2025 training, titled “Craft and Conflict on Campus.” It centered around a hypothetical dispute in a quilting club at a fictional university after a member contributed a quilt square reading “Jesus is Lord!” for the group’s annual commencement quilt. In the scenario, club leaders deem the square’s message exclusionary and ask the student to replace it, prompting pushback from other members who call the decision censorship and argue that it reflects an anti-religion bias. As the conflict escalates—with leaders considering new rules banning religious expression in quilts and the student contacting the campus newspaper—the club becomes divided over who gets to decide what counts as appropriate expression.
Interfaith America planned for RAs to lead groups of first-years through the case study, and then discuss four questions with them, including: “What’s challenging about this situation?”; “Imagine you’re the leader of the club. What are your main concerns? What happens if you ban the square? What happens if you don’t?”; “Imagine you’re the student who made the square in question. What are your main concerns? How does this controversy impact you?”; and “The members of the group are feeling pressure to take sides. Why does this matter? How does it affect the situation?” ...
[RA Janie] Zhang said that the main issue RAs pointed out with the case studies was that they “did not feel like they were very applicable to issues that we were facing on campus.” According to Zhang, the case study felt “elementary” compared to the more consequential and current topics that students wanted to talk about, such as Israel, Palestine, and the war in Gaza. She mentioned that RAs felt disappointed that “the workshop didn’t really feel like it was helping with this big problem on campus.” ...
Russo said that Interfaith America “intentionally wanted to choose a scenario that was not about the challenges that Columbia has been struggling with very publicly.” She explained that the quilting scenario was a good proxy because it “helps bring out some of those questions about ‘how do you navigate tensions and values’” that arise “when the expression of one person’s values can come across as offensive or challenging to another person.” ...
*https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2025/12/in-dialogue-or-in-denial.html.
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