How do we build bridges across the chasms that so often divide us?
Over the past half century, societies around the world have witnessed a profound loss of the capacity to engage in genuine dialogue with our fellow human beings who view the world differently from us. The Reconciliation League brings together colleges and universities to enable students across the world to close the divides that characterize the modern world. Students will engage in an accelerated curriculum created to cultivate confidence and foster meaningful conversations.
THE MISSION
The Reconciliation League is an association of colleges and universities committed to identifying, connecting, training, and empowering students who are open to meaningful across the divides that characterize contemporary society.
In service of this goal, the League brings together cohorts of Reconciliation Fellows from the League schools for an 8 week innovative, rigorous curriculum designed to foster in them an ability to reckon with competing familiar and unfamiliar ideas and to engage in a genuinely dialogic conversation about them. These students - drawn as they will be from the generation inheriting the challenge of healing the polarization plaguing society – thereby will emerge from the experience both with the skills necessary to facilitate this healing and with the intellectual humility, curiosity, passion and dexterity to become disciples of debate and dialogue.
Having completed this training, the Fellows become permanent members of a Reconciliation Corps, connected over time in their efforts to foster productive discourse in the institutions and communities they inhabit and, in many cases, lead.
Program Details
This program currently operates through several partner institutions equally as committed to our shared goal of engaging in genuine dialogue.
NYU President Emeritus John Sexton has called universities “the last, best hope” to counter trends of division. Each participating university will nominate students to become a Reconciliation Fellow. The remaining spots will be filled by nominees from external student school.
Participants will enroll in one of two 8-week programs, both split into two parts over the course of the year. One cohort will study at Lafayette College and the other will study at Wroxton College Abbey in Coventry, UK. The initial six-week program will take place over the summer, followed by an additional two weeks in January. Each Fellow will be awarded a total of 12 credits from NYU.