The Campus Partnerships team is excited to announce our 2024-2025 Advancing Campus Pluralism grantees.
Rising prejudice and polarization in American civic life are creating significant tensions on college campuses. To serve the nation effectively, campuses must be spaces where individuals from diverse identities and divergent ideologies can learn from one another. Interfaith America believes that campuses are uniquely positioned to become laboratories for pluralism and launching pads for leaders equipped to navigate a pluralistic nation.
We are excited to have selected nine institutions to implement their projects in the 2024-2025 academic year. Our grantees include Baylor University, James Madison University, Otterbein University, Saint Mary’s College of California, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Barnard College, Gonzaga University, La Salle University, and Providence College.
These innovative projects include:
- Pluralism Training: Sponsoring training sessions on engaging deep divides constructively during first-year orientation and professional development for campus staff, faculty, and student leaders.
- Curriculum Integration: Incorporating a series of courses on the theory, skills, and practices of cooperation across difference into the college’s general education curriculum.
- Modeling Difficult Dialogues: Establishing university-based institutes, projects, or programs that model difficult dialogues and civil discourse, while providing students with opportunities to develop essential skills for engaging across differences.
- Ongoing Pluralism Programming: Planning events such as dinner and dialogue gatherings, speaker series, and service projects that unite students and other campus stakeholders around shared civic purposes.
Our grantees were selected from proposals submitted by institutions that attended the Advancing Campus Pluralism: Bridgebuilding Across Difference conference in April 2024 in Washington D.C. The Advancing Campus Pluralism: Bridgebuilding Across Difference convening is a collaboration between Interfaith America and AAC&U. We look forward to witnessing the positive impact of these projects as they cultivate understanding and cooperation across differences, preparing students to thrive in a diverse society.
