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In this episode of the Pluralist Points podcast, Ben Klutsey, the executive director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, speaks with Shira Hoffer [ [link removed] ], the founder and executive director of the Institute for Multipartisan Education [ [link removed] ], about her work as a mediator and the importance of curious disagreement. They discuss self-censorship among college students, how to develop good conflict resolution skills, the Hotline for Israel/Palestine and much more.
BEN KLUTSEY: Thank you for joining “Pluralist Points.” Today I’m speaking with Shira Hoffer [ [link removed] ]. Shira is a student at Harvard University, and very involved in mediation and dialogue. She is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Multipartisan Education [ [link removed] ], which seeks to support educational institutions to engage in curious and constructive disagreement. Shira, thank you for joining us.
SHIRA HOFFER: Thanks so much for having me.
Creating the Institute for Multipartisan Education
KLUTSEY: Great. We’ll just delve right in. Now, it’s really impressive what you’ve done building this organization. You launched, as I said, the Institute for Multipartisan Education when you were, was it a sophomore?
HOFFER: A junior.
KLUTSEY: You were a junior. First, tell us what this institute is and what was the motivation for it.
HOFFER: Yes. Thanks, again, so much for having me on the show. The Institute for Multipartisan Education is a 501(c)(3), which works with middle schools, high schools and universities to broadly promote curious engagement across polarization. We do that through working with middle and high schools in a consulting capacity, however that might best support the school. That might look like workshops for students. It might look like working with administrators. However the school wants to see change, we try to support that in a grassroots way.
Then we have a fellowship for college students where we have our own college students running a fellowship for their own peers, where the goal is to use a train-the-trainer model to support the infusion of curiosity into places where people already have trust—so their student organizations, largely speaking—and bringing in those ideas into the student organizations in the first semester. And then in the second semester, having those students create a capstone project for the broader university. We’re really excited to pilot that in the fall with Elon University, actually, and go from there.
KLUTSEY: Great. Can you walk me through what the experience of someone who wants to be a part of this work, who wants to maybe be a fellow—what is the experience like? What do they have to do when they say, “Okay, I’m interested”? They reach out to you, and then what happens?
HOFFER: Yes, so we’ll work with the team at Elon. It will be restricted to Elon for the fall, and then hopefully we’ll grow to more universities going forward. Eligible students are student organization leaders who want to bring more curiosity to their student organization. We’re thinking of it more as a life skill, not as like a, “You guys want to debate abortion? You guys want to debate gun control? Let’s come together and do it.” That’s amazing, too. We’re thinking about how can curiosity, curious engagement with difference be part of everyday life.
The students will come to a three-day retreat, where our staff members, who will be students, will teach them why it’s really hard to engage curiously, why it’s important nonetheless and how we can do it. That’s our three-pronged model. We’re drawing on insights from psychology research, from pedagogy research that we’ve done over the summer, really trying to understand what is the fundamental intellectual underpinnings of curious disagreement work.
We’ll teach them both what we’re calling the skills and the disposition to approach difference with curiosity. Then they’ll work with mentors—again, our student staff—to come up with some programs. For example, to make it a bit more tangible, the head of the student newspaper might apply to be a fellow and notice that they’re having a hard time conducting interviews with more conservative, I don’t know, members of society because they aren’t coming up with the best questions. They might run a program based on what we’ve taught them for their interview staff to help their interview staff ask better, more interesting, more curious questions.
That brings this idea of curiosity toward difference into the organization by somebody who they trust already. They’ll spend the first semester creating that program with our support. Then we’ll do a second retreat in December. Then the group will work together to create a capstone project for the university. They know the university best. Maybe everybody loves field days at that university, right? Create a field day around curiosity to really make these ideas feel tangible and exciting and meaningful.
KLUTSEY: I see. Very, very interesting. Thank you for sharing that. Now, I imagine that when you went to college, starting this organization may not have been on your radar. What were you looking forward to when you started as a freshman?
HOFFER: Yes, and the story arcs quite nicely from that question to this conversation. I’m glad you asked. I came from a small Jewish high school which had a focus on pluralism. We focused a lot on, some of us might be more traditionally observant and some of us might be less, but we’re all one community. Let’s learn about each other’s differences and build community together. Coming into college, I was like, it’s going to be like my high school, but on steroids. It’s going to be all these different people, all living together, learning together, engaging with each other’s differences. I think I was a little bit starry-eyed in retrospect.
[laughter]
HOFFER: It was challenging. I think it seemed to me that not as many people as I was hoping were really excited to get into these difficult issues of disagreement. I had a few experiences where I was asking really tough questions and alienating people, professors and other students, actually. That led me to get involved in the mediation world. I mediate in small claims court, as you mentioned, and have done other dialogue fellowships throughout college, all leading up to October 7, which was a moment in time, right? A moment which inspired the founding of this organization.
Free Speech on Campus
KLUTSEY: I see. For most outsiders who don’t know much about what happens on a campus like Harvard, can you provide your original thoughts on what it’s like on campus in the context of free speech?
HOFFER: Yes. I think, first of all, I would say that it is not as scary or cutthroat or terrible as the media has painted it to be. We’ve had a lot of cameras on campus this past year, a lot of requests for comments from students. Usually, the students who want to comment are the ones who really have something to say. The perception, then, is that everybody really has a strong opinion on what’s happening. I think that’s true. There’s a lot of people who are feeling stifled right now.
A big thing that’s going on is these library sit-in protests [ [link removed] ], where folks are ostensibly adhering to the rules of the library, sitting quietly and studying, but doing so with signs on their computer protesting the war in Gaza. There’s a question as whether—they’ve been kicked out of the library for doing so—is that a free speech violation? How does that fall into Harvard speech codes? I think this has really been all over the media.
I haven’t seen it. I have not seen one person do that. I think it’s an interesting juxtaposition where you can just be living your life on campus and going to class and doing your homework, or you can be really involved in these conversations. I think it’s really up to you. I would say that it is not the crazy cesspit of screaming people that the media has sometimes painted it to be.
KLUTSEY: Yes. Now, oftentimes, and I think that we see this in surveys as well, that students are self-censoring [ [link removed] ], especially on difficult topics. Do you find that to be true?
HOFFER: Yes, I think that that’s true. I certainly don’t think that it’s everyone. It is certainly not all the time. I was in a class, for example, my sophomore year about religion and Western democracy. I was one of two religious students in the class. I remember she and I would text each other in class like, “Do you want to defend this point? Do you want to jump in on this one?” We very much were in the minority.
There were days where we’re like, “You know what? We’re just too tired. We’re not in the mood.” We would not push back on points that people would make. We weren’t the scared type. We were the type to not want to bring it up because we were worried about it. Sometimes it just gets exhausting.
I sympathize with the people who are nervous about what might happen to them when they speak. I remember a notable time in my freshman year: I was in a class and the whiteboard said, “How to dismantle the university system.” That was the topic of the day. We started talking about it.
I’m sitting there. I was 18 years old, and I was like, I'm confused why we’re dismantling the university system in the first place. I raised my hand and asked the question, and everybody just looked at me, just stared at me. I was like, “Oh, no, I said something wrong,” but I didn’t know what it was. We moved on. It was awkward. Then afterward, I went to the professor and I said, “Hey, I’m still curious about this. Something weird clearly happened when I raised my hand. Do you have any insight?”
She explained to me that this was a class that was typically a safe space for students who had experienced, as she called it, racism and homophobia in other classes like economics and government. That’s from her. “We don’t ask questions like that in this class.” I’m still sitting there with my mind spinning. I’m not trying to be provocative; I just fundamentally didn’t understand why we were doing this.
I think that’s a good example. There’s all of these piles of layers of assumptions of when you ask a question. But how could someone interpret it, and what could it mean? That’s important. In society, we have to be really careful. What is the impact of our words? Sometimes it makes it really hard to just ask basic questions.
Too Much Morality?
KLUTSEY: Yes, that’s really interesting. Yuval Levin [ [link removed] ], in his book “A Time to Build [ [link removed] ],” talks quite a bit about college and universities and how things have changed over the years. He says that it used to be that we thought that college would do three things, right? The first is a sense of professionalism. You learn a craft or a discipline that will inform your career path, whether it’s architecture or computer science or what have you, right? That’s an important part of it.
You also get a sense of some moral reasoning in college. You get a sense of how the world works in terms of what might be right, what might be wrong and so on. Then the third thing is, you learn the traditional liberal arts, critical thinking, and you challenge, you push back and so on.
He says that it seems as though that middle part, the moralizing of things, of issues, has become the predominant aspect of college and university. I wonder if you recognize that in your experience, or you might say maybe just a little bit of each.
HOFFER: To clarify, his suggestion is that colleges are focusing too much on imposing a moral system on their students?
KLUTSEY: Right.
HOFFER: Yes, that’s an interesting question. I don’t think it’s that dystopian. I wouldn’t say that there’s an imposition. I think there is definitely a dominant narrative of a liberal, progressive system. If I put my hand up in a class about women and gender issues and say, “Here’s why I think that abortion should be illegal,” I would definitely get funny looks and funny comments from folks.
I think that there’s still a spark of hope there. I think that conversation actually—as long as the professor was on top of it, and I think most of them are, I think that comment would be entertained. I think there is still room for that intellectual exploration, if you go for it. You have to be the person who goes for it and tests ideas and uses your own personal bravery to explore those ideas.
I think it is less brought out by peers. There’s less devil’s advocate. There’s fewer, even, folks who actually believe it; doesn’t have to be devil’s advocate, right? It could be someone who really believes something that’s in the minority position. You just don’t hear it a lot.
I don’t think that it’s the administration or the faculty conspiring to impose morals on students. I think that there’s just less excitement, both with faculty and with students, about how can I really challenge my own views? That’s a question I ask myself every day. What can I do today to challenge my own perspective? I think if more people were to ask that question, then those conversations would be entertained. The status quo is, let’s go with what’s comfortable.
Conflict Resolution
KLUTSEY: You ask yourself the question, “What can I do to challenge my own views?” What is it about you that makes you want to do that? Is it something about your personality that makes you want to do that? Because I imagine that not everyone walks around thinking that way, right?
HOFFER: I think that’s probably true. I think one aspect is just, I fell into this work and became passionate about it. It’s very much on my mind that my views aren’t challenged very often in class, just by nature of the fact that I’m a liberal who happens to agree with most of campus on most issues, though with notable exceptions.
I also think—and this is a funny story—my family is really good at conflict resolution. And we used to have these family meetings where we’d all sit around a bowl of M&Ms and discuss the problems we were having. There was a notable moment where my brother, when he was like 8, came to the meeting (I was 12) with a list of 17 things that he didn’t like about me.
[laughter]
HOFFER: We went through that list as a family. Some of the things—
KLUTSEY: Really?
HOFFER: “I don’t like the way Shira laughs” is not something that was up for conversation. “I don’t like that Shira makes fun of me in the mornings before I go to school.” “Okay, Shira, you got to change your behaviors.” I think I’ve grown up in a system where conflict resolution and new perspectives is really important. Maybe I was predisposed.
KLUTSEY: That is fascinating. Did he feel as though the issues that he brought forth were eventually resolved?
HOFFER: I hope so. I hope so.
Survey Results
KLUTSEY: Now, the story that you talked about, the one in your class about dismantling the university, is one that you highlight in your thesis as well that you’re working on. What have you discovered in your research as you’ve been working on your thesis?
HOFFER: Yes. My senior thesis is about how religious and secular students approach controversial issues on campus, or rather, what is their speech behavior patterns around self-censorship on campus? I did a survey through the Prolific survey system, which allowed me to gather a somewhat representative sample, though the N is—just putting all these precursors out there at the beginning—at the end, the N was about 428. It was nationally representative on gender and age and year in school, but there were all sorts of things that it wasn’t, and most of the findings were not statistically significant.
Now, given all of those caveats, which I think are pretty standard for a senior thesis where you don’t have $250,000 to spend on the creation of a survey, I found some really interesting information, which, largely speaking, showed that it’s actually religious students who are more interested and more capable of engaging with perspectives that they might not hold.
I measured five different categories: self-censorship—gosh, now you’re going to have me remember them off the top of my head—self-censorship was definitely one, positive engagement with new perspectives, playing devil’s advocate, whether or not you shout down speakers that you disagree with and maybe punishment of others for their speech. I think that was the fifth one.
On four out of those five categories, religious students demonstrated either less self-censorship, more willingness to engage, less likely to punish others for speech and more likely to play devil’s advocate. The fifth one was that they were actually more likely to shout down speakers than secular students.
I think that that’s surprising to a lot of people that I tell about this work. There’s this notion that religious is fundamental and traditional, and therefore closed-minded. I think that, and the thesis argues that, there’s something about the way that we conceptualize a public-private divide in society, this deliberative democrat model, where we, in order to reach consensus, have to separate the private from the public.
There’s this notion that leads to better engagement, but I think that the findings of these surveys—which I think that the statistical insignificance is due to a small sample size and not due to an incorrect conclusion—suggest that we need to rethink the way that we engage in society and maybe shift our goal, I argue, toward mutual understanding as opposed to consensus. That we can use a blurring of the public-private divide to come to that mutual understanding, which will lead to more consensus but also lead to healthier relationships and reduced polarization.
Anecdotal Evidence
KLUTSEY: I see. Fascinating. Fascinating. Now, do you have friends on all sides of issues? Personally, do you cultivate that?
HOFFER: I try to. I think there’s something interesting about being a religious Jew on a liberal campus, because a lot of my religious friends are also conservative, like American political conservatives. I’m not, and so I have a lot of also secular friends, and religious, and Jewish friends as well, who are more liberal like I am. But then because of the space that I pray in every week, a lot of those folks disagree with me on a lot of issues. We’re all tied together by the same religion, but we also very much disagree on a lot of other issues.
KLUTSEY: I see. Now, with your religious friends, do you see your research reflected in the way that you engage with each other? Are they more willing to play devil’s advocate? Are they more likely to shout down speakers, and so on and so forth?
HOFFER: That’s an interesting question. Well, I have been to a protest, a silent protest, of a speaker that I disagreed with, where the folks who were disagreeing were religious Jews. And nobody shouted him down, so I thought that was impressive. I think shouting down speakers is not the best way to engage. I’m not sure. I’ve never really conducted social science research on my friends.
The ones that I’m—and maybe this is a selection bias—but definitely the folks that I’m friends with will have conversations, especially around the election, of—you’ll say, “Oh, well, Trump will be better for Israel.” And some of them will be single-issue voters and therefore vote on that topic. I’ve had some interesting conversations with them to say, “Okay, maybe he will be better for Israel. What about these other issues? How are you thinking about the holistic picture of somebody being the president as opposed to a single issue?” We’ve had, yes, productive conversations on that topic.
KLUTSEY: I see. In what ways do you think the election is shaping campus behavior lately? Obviously, it’s only been about a week or so, but how is that being experienced on campus?
HOFFER: This was a mistake on my part. I was away from campus Wednesday and Thursday of last week, so I missed the immediate aftermath. I was running a training through the institute in California. I think there was a lot of frustration from my conservative peers that some professors canceled class. They thought that was not an appropriate use of, I don’t know, professorial discretion of the schedule. What if somebody’s really elated? Why should you cancel class for them?
I think the general vibe, though, is to not talk about it. It came up at dinner the other day, and someone was like, “Oh, do we have to talk about the election?” I think people are pretty tired of the topic. There’s a sense of, especially among the liberals, inevitability and maybe a sense of doom that their candidate didn’t win. I would love to go around interviewing people and being like, “What do you think and why?” I don’t know that I have the time also.
Hotline for Israel/Palestine
KLUTSEY: Yes. Now, in the aftermath of October 7, you did some work on campus. You had a hotline [ [link removed] ] that folks could reach out to. Can you tell me more about that?
HOFFER: Yes. So basically—and I’m glad you asked because that’s filled in the loop to how we got to the institute now—the way that Harvard communicates is through email listservs on dorms. There was a message that had come out clarifying that Harvard’s position was that Hamas is a terrorist organization. Some of my peers wanted to share that message with the community via dorm listservs. Somebody asked me if I would forward the message to my dorm. This was October 9.
I was worried that anything I said on the topic would lead to some sort of reputational damage by somebody who wanted to assume something about what I thought. I said fine, I’m happy to forward the message along. In my email, I said, “Hey, guys, passing along a message. Here’s what it is. By the way, my background is in mediation. I’ve done these dialogue fellowships. I actually know a lot about this conflict. It’s really complicated, really difficult, really emotional. Here’s my cellphone number. If you have any questions, I’m happy to have a conversation.”
I figured if I include my cellphone number and an open offer for a conversation, nobody can judge me for being closed-minded. Nobody can say I’m unwilling to talk. I’ve blown that argument out of the water. That was that. Then throughout the day, I was getting inundated with all these questions from people that I didn’t know. “Hey, Shira, this is John. Hey, Shira, this is Kate. I have this question.” The first question was, “What’s the best solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?”
KLUTSEY: Oh, boy.
HOFFER: I was like, “Oh, boy.”
KLUTSEY: That’s a big one.
HOFFER: That’s a big one. I turned it into a national hotline, texting hotline that still runs. You can text it right now. It’s staffed by our volunteers, who are committed to responding to questions with a range of perspectives and resources to back them up. If somebody said, “What’s the best solution?” we might say, “Here are three big solutions that have been proposed in the past. Here are some articles in favor, and here are some articles against. Why don’t you take a look and get back to us. We’re happy to have a conversation.”
The idea was to have a place where people could really express that genuine curiosity that I was seeing, that sometimes we don’t see in the classroom or in social settings with the anonymity that comes with it, and be able to get a bunch of resources to learn for themselves. We’re totally apathetic to the conclusion that the person comes to. We just want that conclusion to come from something more than the photo they saw on Instagram last week, which suddenly made them experts in the Middle East.
This hotline is still running. We’ve answered hundreds of questions from across the country. But I realized—and this is just to quickly draw the link—I realized that this is a great resource for people who have questions. But the people that I’m more worried about are the people who don’t think that they have any questions at all. Those are the ones for whom I founded the Institute for Multipartisan Education based on a text from a teacher that I got, asking if we could support some work they were doing in their school. Launching this organization to promote curiosity, to help people who think that they don’t have any questions realize that there’s actually so much to learn.
KLUTSEY: Interesting. Now, what are the common threads of the questions that you get through the hotline? Is it a sense of fear, a sense of just anger? Is it confusion? What are you getting from these messages?
HOFFER: Yes, there’ve been different waves of questions. Right now, folks have been pretty dormant, which is fine. I think there’s a lot of exhaustion on the topic in the U.S., which makes sense. At first, there were a lot of factual questions. Why is Israel in Gaza? What does Israel have to do with Gaza? What is this I hear about water supply? What are these checkpoints, et cetera?
Then—and this has been interesting—it’s morphed into an emotional support hotline which we tell people we wish we could do this, but we are not licensed mental health counselors, et cetera. People will say, “I have a cousin, I have a sister who thinks this and I think that, and I don’t know how to empathize with them. I don’t know how to engage. I don’t know what to do.” We’ll try and support them. It’s been interesting that there’s been this shift from “I want to understand the situation”n—we still get questions like that—to “Help me handle the interpersonal aspect of this conflict as well.”
KLUTSEY: Yes. Going away for the summer, has that been helpful in terms of calming things down on campus?
HOFFER: That’s interesting. Because I was also away—I keep missing out on things. I was abroad last spring. I missed the encampments [ [link removed] ] altogether. I hadn’t been on campus for nine months. It definitely was calmer than I expected in the fall. I really thought we were going to be met with waves of protests on different sides. Really, there have been a few, but it’s mostly been pretty quiet. I’m not really sure why. I'm not sure—there was the momentum of last spring, right, that got cut off. There are definitely still folks who are passionate on both sides of the issue, but it has been less public.
The Importance of Curiosity
KLUTSEY: Yes. You have centered curiosity in your work with the institute and maybe the hotline as well, because you’re encouraging people to be curious about what’s happening. Tell me more about that. Why is curiosity so important to you? Why do you find it to be the core when it comes to issues related to dialogue and civil discourse?
HOFFER: Yes, I’m so glad you asked that question. I think curiosity—I don’t think that it’s a silver bullet, but I think it’s pretty close to helping resolve polarization and also helping to strengthen relationships. I think, originally, the reason I came up with the slogan “Disagree Curiously” was because it struck me that a lot of the terms that have been thrown around, like “civil discourse” or “free speech,” they’re coded in ways that people have immediate reactions, whether positive or negative. I wanted to found an organization that nobody would have a preconceived notion about.
I was like, okay, curiosity is a cool idea. It evokes a child blowing a bubble and being like, “Wow.” There’s that awe factor that comes with curiosity. Then over the summer, when I brought on some folks to do some research into curiosity itself, it turns out that it’s an amazing trait or state or way of operating in the world that helps to combat a lot of the neurological, cognitive, social and moral factors that make disagreement or make engagement with hard ideas really so challenging.
I think there’s a lot of evidence to suggest—and I’m happy to talk about it—that the brain and the way that we’ve structured society are working against us, making it really, really hard to build bridges and to depolarize. But that curiosity can come in and, when expressed the right way, really start to break down some of those barriers.
KLUTSEY: I see. In all of your work doing this, in mediation and civil discourse and practicing all of this, what have you found to be the most useful skill, or maybe the most useful tool, to bring down the temperature of a heated conversation?
HOFFER: That’s a great question. I think there’s a couple. One, if we’re talking about really bringing down the temperature, I think silence is actually super powerful. That in mediation, sometimes the parties will be really heated, and we’ll just count to seven and not say anything. Everyone looks super confused and it feels super awkward, but suddenly when you start talking again, you can speak at a much lower volume and it’s like a reset.
In conversations with people, if you’re really getting frustrated and then you just stop for a second. Maybe you’re taking a deep breath or maybe you’re formulating a question. Just taking a beat to not say anything can have a huge calming, depolarizing effect on an individual conversation.
Another trick that I really like—and this one I’m sure people have heard—is reflecting back, verifying that you understand, saying, “If I understand you correctly, this is your position, right?” When somebody feels understood, they’re much less likely to continue screaming in your face because they’re like, “Oh, yes, they got it.” Then that can calm things down.
The third one—and I remember exactly where I was when I learned this trick—there’s a big difference between “do you think?” and “don’t you think?” Both of them are questions, they’re very similar words. But actually “do you think?” is open-ended; you could translate it to, “I’m curious to learn more.” Whereas “don’t you think?” is actually an accusation with a question mark at the end, right?
KLUTSEY: Yes.
HOFFER: In a conversation about the election, you say, “Well, don’t you think that Trump just wants to harm immigrants?” versus, “Do you think that Trump wants to harm immigrants?” Those are very different questions and portray very different levels of respect for the person that you’re talking to. The ability to reframe questions as more positive, more curious, can take a very heated conversation and very quickly turn it into a more curious one.
Role Models and Optimism
KLUTSEY: Is there anyone that you look up to in this space? Anyone whose work you think of as a model for advancing pluralism, civil discourse or anything like that?
HOFFER: Oh, that’s a good question. There’s so many coming into the space. I feel like it’s unfair to name one group, but we’re going to be putting out the rest. I guess one that’s close to my heart is Interfaith America [ [link removed] ] organization, which is turning now toward bridge building more broadly.
I had the chance to speak at their conference over the summer with Manu Meel [ [link removed] ], who’s the founder of BridgeUSA [ [link removed] ]. Just being in that room of students who come from ostensibly really different backgrounds, and backgrounds that against each other have caused wars across the world. Talking with Manu about the power of bridge building and student leadership was really an inspiring moment.
KLUTSEY: I see. Wonderful. Are you optimistic that this kind of work will gain traction across Harvard and across other colleges around the United States?
HOFFER: Yes. First of all, I can’t not be, right? Otherwise, I would just not get out of bed in the morning. I think the answer is yes. I think maybe because it has to. If it’s true that the majority of colleges lean liberal, then the majority of the college population is going to be in opposition to the U.S. government for the next four years. If we’re going to not just hide in a hole and dig deeper into polarization, then we have to approach these things with curiosity.
I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen students who really disagree with each other sit down and have conversations. It’s not impossible. For folks who are feeling really hurt by the election, maybe we need some more time to grapple with the current reality. Then I think we’re going to have to pull it together and be like, “Okay, this is what more than half of the country wanted. How can we understand that better, and how can we build bridges with these people, even if we really strongly disagree?”
Common Criticisms and the Flaw in Bipartisanship
KLUTSEY: Yes. What’s the common critique you hear about this kind of work? Is it that people say, “Ah, it’s just not going to work,” or what do you hear more often?
HOFFER: There’s a bunch of them. It’s a good question. I think the more radical critiques, especially from the left, are it’s immoral to sit down with somebody with whom you disagree so strongly, somebody who holds an abhorrent position. You’re platforming them. You’re giving them a chance to influence the world with their perspectives in a way that you shouldn’t.
I would suggest to that, for example, that Nelson Mandela sat down with all sides and had closed-door conversations to resolve apartheid in South Africa. This idea that having conversations is counterproductive to creating justice, I think, is not true. There is a critique that it can promote hate speech. I think that I would have the same response. Those are coming from the really far progressive left.
On the right, I think there is more of a, “This is never going to work,” or a feeling of pain also that there’s been such rhetoric, especially about Trump supporters, that they’re misogynist and racist and horrible people with no morals. When you say all these things about a group of people, and then you walk into a room of them and you’re like, “Hey, do you guys want to talk?” you haven’t built up the trust to have that conversation. There’s a dismissal: You don’t respect me, so I don’t respect you.
One thing that’s nice about this work is if you get hate from both sides, you’ve got to be doing something right. There are definitely different challenges that need to be addressed on both sides to bring people toward this type of engagement.
KLUTSEY: Yes. Now, there’s a reason that your institute is called Institute for Multipartisan Education. I understand you have an issue with bipartisanship. Tell me more about that.
HOFFER: Yes, I’m glad you asked. Somebody actually the other day asked me if I meant to be advocating for a multiparty system of U.S. government. I don’t know enough about that issue to know how I feel.
What I take issue with in terms of bipartisanship is that it suggests that there are two sides. When there are two sides, it’s one against another. It’s us versus them. It creates this dichotomy that I really think is false. I think most people that I know have nuanced views on different issues that actually aren’t just the laundry list of Republican or the laundry list of Democratic causes.
I think I am more sympathetic to religious-freedom arguments than a lot of Democrats, but I’m more sympathetic to pro-choice arguments than a lot of Republicans. If you ask me about any of my friends, I could probably name an inkling that they have on one side and the other, which makes it such that just dividing it into a binary forces people to neglect that nuance or just to ignore it all together, and to adopt really hard-line positions. I think by saying multipartisan, we’re suggesting that actually there’s more than two sides. There are multiple ways to engage that all have validity.
Looking Forward
KLUTSEY: Yes. What’s next for Shira? What’s going to happen with the hotline, and where does the institute go from here?
HOFFER: God willing, in six months, I’ll graduate from college. That’s the first step. From there, my plan is to run the institute full time as its executive director and to continue this work. I’m not sure if we’ll end up focusing more on college or more on middle and high school. We’re trying to pilot both of those programs now and see what gains traction, what feels productive.
The hotline will continue to run. It’s been tricky running both. If anybody’s listening and they’re like, “Dang, I really want to run that hotline. I really want to work on it,” definitely reach out to me. We could use some extra hands. Assuming that we can raise the staff and raise the support to continue this work, then my plan is to do it as long as I can.
KLUTSEY: Excellent. What’s your major?
HOFFER: Social studies and religion.
KLUTSEY: Fantastic. Now, as we bring this to a close, what’s your call to action? What do you want folks to do after listening to your thoughts, your experiences on campus?
HOFFER: I think the best call to action is to start wondering why a little bit more—and not facetiously. That if you hear something that you’re like, “Nobody could ever think that. I can’t imagine how a reasonable person would think that,” try to shift that in your mind and think, “Why might a reasonable person think that? What do I have to learn from a person who thinks that?”
I think a really important takeaway is that curiosity doesn’t require the willingness to change your mind. I, for example, am really curious when people assert that Jews are bad for society. As a Jew, I’m never going to change my mind on the perspective that Jews are not bad for society, but I’m curious to understand why they think that. I think that example is really important to illustrate the fact that you can be really, really curious about why somebody voted for somebody that you didn’t, or why somebody supports a policy that you don’t, and you’re not opening yourself up to that vulnerability necessarily to change your mind, unless you want to.
To just wonder why somebody thinks that, what values led them to that conclusion, what experiences have they had, I think is so enriching. I would encourage everybody to take a moment for curiosity and see what you can learn.
KLUTSEY: Shira, it’s been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much for taking the time.
HOFFER: Thank you. It was great to be with you.

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