When I remember my transformative experiences as a Trinity student, they’re all about the conversations. Conversations in class about revolutionary ideas and historical events. Conversations after a field trip to a Hindu temple about life cycle rituals across religious traditions. Conversations with my roommate at 3 in the morning about ideas across disciplines, not to mention political debates and questions about the meaning of life. Remembering these transformative discussions made me thrilled to return to Trinity as a faculty member and have conversations with students.
Undergraduate students are at a critical stage of development as recent adults and citizens. As they come into maturity with the freedom to choose what they study and how to live, Trinity students also learn what it means to participate in the civic life of democracy. Democracy depends on debate, deliberation, and dialogue between citizens. It depends on freedom and responsibility informed by a deep understanding of the world.
Trinity’s “Liberal Arts +” education is a laboratory for democracy. College, like democracy, depends on freedom of expression. By thinking freely and asking questions, students become informed, thoughtful citizens capable of taking responsibility for the future. By engaging freely in conversation, students explore what’s at stake and the nuanced positions around key issues. They challenge received wisdom and imagine new possibilities. By studying multiple disciplines and participating in cocurricular programs, they discover what they think in relation to others discovering what they think. They develop the fundamental connection between freedom and responsibility. Just as individuals can only be held responsible for saying or doing things they freely choose, they are only truly free once they take responsibility for their choices—individually and collectively.
During the 2024–25 academic year, the University started a new series of programming: The Conversation at Trinity. I launched this initiative in order to hone the power of conversation to develop understanding and transformation, to expand minds and create community. The Conversation includes events to promote constructive dialogue, spaces to encounter diverse perspectives with courage and humility, and programs to distinguish Trinity’s “Liberal Arts +” education as a laboratory for democracy.
The first year of programming ranges from public debates about climate change, immigration policies, and reproductive rights to vulnerable discussions about the value of care shared between medicine and religious studies. The Conversation includes a podcast, a class on listening, public debates, workshops on constructive dialogue, film screenings, listening circles, town halls, tabletop exercises for student leaders, and discussions across differences between notable guests.
But The Conversation is more than a series of events. It’s a way of framing what lies at the core of the liberal arts experience, where artistic experimentation is in conversation with scientific experimentation and the humanities are in conversation with business, where research is in conversation with teaching and the campus is in conversation with the city. At Trinity, people from diverse backgrounds and disciplines learn from one another’s perspectives. Students encounter opinions and ideas that they contend with and grow from, even—or especially—when these ideas make them uncomfortable. They develop their understanding of the world and other people by exchanging ideas, testing their knowledge, and rethinking basic assumptions. They not only recognize one another’s different perspectives, but they also engage those different perspectives to expand and transform their understanding. They learn about disciplines and discourses that have developed over centuries. They learn to join the conversation.
Learning deeply and widely in a liberal arts context requires students—as well as faculty and staff—to develop their capacity for conversation. A complex constellation of skills, conversation benefits from both mentorship and experimentation. The Conversation at Trinity gives students the opportunity to learn about the act of conversation by listening to discussions between experts and attending workshops about expressive activities, difficult dialogues, and conflict resolution. Students practice conversation through their participation in moderated discussions about complex issues. The Conversation cultivates courage and humility: the courage to recognize that you have a valuable point of view, but the humility to recognize that others do, too—and that minds change.
Through The Conversation, Trinity students develop their capacity to take responsibility for their freedom and to synthesize what they know with what they hope. They experiment; they test out ideas. They listen to a conversation that has gone on long before they entered it and that will continue long after they depart. Most importantly, they learn to add their voices.