The "It" Girl of college essays reminds me of a certain 1950s gym.
The “disagreement question” is a rhetorical question: it demands the right kind of answer.
If you haven’t seen this essay by a Harvard sophomore (gift link), you’ll want to read it now. I’ll wait.
An increasing number of colleges’ admissions forms asks what insiders call the disagreement question:
“Tell us about a moment when you engaged in a difficult conversation or encountered someone with an opinion or perspective that was different from your own. How did you find common ground?”
Well, who wouldn’t want that? Shouldn’t we all seek common ground? But the disagreement question is a rhetorical question in the truest sense: It’s not a question, it’s a requirement: We demand civility.
I don’t want to pick on university administrators. They’re going through a perfectly rotten time, what with all the tribal warfare over Israel/Gaza, the grant clawbacks, the rapidly diminishing respect for education…
Can’t we all just get along? Thus the disagreement question. It implies that disagreement is a disease, and the cure is…common ground. Why does this remind me of West Side Story?
Because civility isn’t the end of deliberative argument; it’s just the beginning. To get anyone even to listen to you, you have to make your audience believe you’re worth listening to. This is not easy. Think about it: happily married spouses often find it hard to believe the other is worth listening to.
Civility isn’t the end of deliberative argument; it’s just the beginning.
This is why it’s a mistake to launch into logical points in the hopes of finding agreement. You first need a common identity. A spouse who argues over proper dishwasher loading should start by telling his mate that he loves her. A pro-Israeli student debating a pro-Palestinian student should seek…not common ground but some shred of common identity: a shared attendance in a class on Mozart’s opera, or a common love of Terry Gilliam films. You’re tribe-adjacent somehow—a Jet-leaning Shark, or a Shark-curious jet.
Next comes the argument itself, whose purpose is not to achieve civility but to change the other’s mind—or at least inject some doubt into the other’s blocked head. Civility didn’t create democracies; argument, and trust in the value of argument, created them.
So what should an ambitious applicant do with the disagreement question? It’s obvious: game the system! Show you’ve achieved saint-level civility. Tell a story about how you awed a crowd of nerds making fun of your prep-schooled lacrosse prowess by whipping a flute out of your backpack and playing a few moving bars of Michael Daugherty’s Trail of Tears.
But suppose you want to change the world. Are world changers, leaders for good, the greatest masters of civility? Were Jesus and Gandhi and Susan B. Anthony civil? Was MLK’s mission to seek common ground with the racist regime?
I’d admire you more, young wannabe society-changer, if you knew how to change your own mind….Facing a challenge to your identity as a learning opportunity…Finding not common ground but new terrain, and learning ways to attract followers.
I’m still convinced this ability-to-learn approach can make for a great college essay. In fact, you can even use the disagreement question as a prompt. Every skilled rhetor knows to frame the question around the answer she wants to give. What if you wrote an essay about finding common ground with your divided self? (Essentially, that’s what my latest book is about.)
My son could have used the disagreement question as the prompt for his winning college essay…about his chronic headache.
What do you think, beloved reader? Be as civil as you want, but I benefit most when you change my mind.
Great piece as always, and I know I come at many of these issues from a different perspective, but since you endorse arguing... :-)
When I engage with someone who disagrees, as often as not, I'm seeking to learn as to persuade (case in point -- you might respond to this with counterpoints I had not previously considered, and I welcome that education). And when seeking to persuade, it's almost never on the point itself, but merely to show that "people on my side are driven by logic, civility, and respect, so you don't need to hate us." E.g., I know there is virtually no chance that a Trump hater will persuade a Trump fan to her side nor vice versa, but if one can show that they have more in common in terms of wanting everyone to live well and be safe and healthy, then perhaps the magnitude of the disagreement, limited to the best ways to achieve those mostly shared common end goals of broad prosperity, can be reduced to still allow friendship despite the political differences.
True persuasion of a particular endpoint, at least for me, is mostly limited to sales and negotiation, but even there, especially where I've been most successful, it starts with questions to understand the true underlying interests of the target (rarely are they the same as the superficial or even claimed objectives). Sometimes, this may be prefaced by a favor or some excessive honest disclosure to gain trust first, so they open up about their true interests. Or, sometimes by a request for a favor, which engenders trust because then they know I owe them a favor in return. But ultimately, how can one construct a proper case or pitch that will hold an unshakeable appeal to that audience without first knowing what exactly that audience wants?
Important acknowledgement on those attempts at true persuasion: I'm rarely working a large audience. I'm usually working on a single person, or, at most, a family or small group of executives. So perhaps for a larger audience, my approach is inappropriate. Perhaps it becomes essential to rely on generalized and aggregate information for a large group, like a political speaker must, because it's impossible to understand the specific and unique underlying interests of a sufficient portion of the individuals.
And here's a combative stance on the specific point of race in that NYT article you linked: This is a small factor for most people elevated more by race baiters for financial or political gain than by any actual personal experience. The child of an abusive family, regardless of race, is likely to have a harder life (psychologically, at least) than the child of a happy family. A child is more likely to be beaten bloody on a recurring basis by peers for any manner of minute differences, usually relating to weakness, shyness, or social awkwardness far more than race, and this also leaves permanent effects on the child into adulthood. With respect to career advancement, getting things done with a positive, happy attitude while helping coworkers to also succeed will almost universally lead to advancement, at least as positions for advancement are available. Complaining and projecting an attitude of entitlement or sabotaging others will have the opposite effect. Race plays a miniscule role in comparison.
Worse, the (false) assertion that racism is a bigger problem than it is creates perverse incentives to perceive oneself as a victim ("my people have it harder than yours," which can only be countered by "but I had it personally worse than you did"). And a victim mindset largely (not entirely -- a notable minority are able to harness those experiences to harden their core and achieve greatness) precludes the kind of positive attitude and innovative drive that yields professional success. Therefore, urging someone to believe they are a victim is likely to damage the entire arc of their life and harm both their happiness and lifelong earning potential.
In other words, if you want to keep a person or an entire group of people down, tell them that they are victims and that others have it easier. At best, that creates hatred toward those groups who "have it easier." I think the word du jour for that is "privilege," which in turn fuels and perpetuates the race-vs-race mentality.
None of this is to say that there is not racism (obviously there is, and some despicable people are largely defined by their hatred of others over race, gender, religion, age, accent or other factors that are not based on the choices or kindness of their targets), but it is just one relatively minor facet to the complex set of challenges in the lives of Americans. Let's condemn cruelty and praise kindness, condemn making choices out of fear or to join the mob and praise being bold despite the difficulty, condemn intolerance and praise listening-before-talking, condemn prejudgment and praise those who wait to hear the facts and arguments of all sides before reaching conclusions. These are teachable skills that unite us while precluding the creation of a weak and vulnerable culture of victimhood. They also leave scant room for racism.