Students can no longer converse with people who disagree with them because of a rise in online “echo chambers,” an Ivy League university president has warned.
Sian Beilock, a cognitive scientist who took the reins at Dartmouth College last year, said social media has made it difficult for young people to interact with each other in person.
The Telegraph has the story.
“We’re seeing that students aren’t practised at having conversations with people who disagree with them, in part because social media puts you towards people who agree with you,” Ms Beilock said.
The Dartmouth College president said that “learning to talk to people who are different from you is a muscle that you build with training” and that it is something her university encourages alongside counselling and wider support mechanisms.
Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, also takes new students on trips into nature in a bid to teach them how to spend time off their phones.
Ms Beilock said students used to debate with people in person who they disagreed with, but now they communicate online and some are even scared to make a phone call.
“I see that as a progress away from interaction and I want to bring that back,” she said.
She went on to explain that face-to-face communication is usually better than emailing because “things get lost in translation and especially in a crisis”.
It comes after the “anti-woke” University of Austin (UATX) launched itself as an antidote to what its founders described as creeping “cancel culture” on American university campuses.
At the new Texas-based university, students are encouraged to disagree with each other and it is all but impossible for faculty members and undergraduates to get cancelled.
UATX claims to be a place where students and faculty “have the right to pursue their academic interests and deliberate freely, without fear of censorship or retribution”.
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