Frequently asked questions

Eligibility & Applying

  • A Reconciliation League Fellowship underwrites for Fellows all costs of participating in one of the League’s six-week summer sessions and the following January Summit. The Fellowship provides tuition, room, board, and all other costs of participation. Fellows pay only the cost of getting to and from the summer session site; and, several member schools often provide assistance even for this cost for qualifying students.

  • No. Students from League member constitute over 80% of each cohort; however, at least 15% of the Fellowships are awarded in an “at large” process that enables students schools that are not League members to apply.

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  • It depends. If your school is a member of the Reconciliation League, you apply through the internal selection process at your school. Contact your Campus Reconciliation League Liaison for details.

    If you are a member of a Posse Foundation cohort, and you are not at a League member school, you apply through the Posse Foundation Reconciliation League Liaison.

    If you are at a school that is not a League member, you apply directly to the Reconciliation League through the at-large process.

  • Students entering freshman year are not eligible unless their school has made a special arrangement. Students entering sophomore or junior years are preferred, though seniors are not ineligible.

  • Yes, for both.

  • No, but they must be open to engaging across differences.

  • Extremely competitive.

  • The selection process for the summer program occurs during the Fall Semester. Scholars are announced at the beginning of February for the following summer.

League Members & Summer Sessions

    • African Leadership University

    • Asian University for Women

    • Brigham Young University

    • Fordham University

    • Lafayette College

    • London School of Economics

    • Morgan State University

    • New York University

    • Pomona College

    • San Carlos Apache College

    • University of Kentucky

    • University of North Carolina

    • Yale University

  • Lafayette College (Pennsylvania): May 26 to July 1
    Wroxton College (United Kingdom): July 24 to August 20

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Academic Program

  • Please see the Reconciliation League Curriculum page for a full description of the academic program.

  • Fellows may receive up to 8 academic credits, depending on their home school’s policies. In any case, they receive a transcript attesting to their completion of courses.

  • The faculty who teach the Core Course and Honors Courses, as well as the Senior Fellows in residence, are among the most outstanding thought leaders and teachers anywhere. They make themselves available because they believe deeply in the mission of the Reconciliation League; moreover, they will be available as mentors well after the course is over.

  • The Summer Fellowship Program is an intensive experience that will require your very best efforts. There are classes or other activities seven days a week during the session, and Fellows are expected to be present for all classes and most activities. Students should not apply if they are not deeply committed to the mission of the League.

Excursions & Experiential Learning

  • The Reconciliation League Retreat programs are an integral component of the Fellowship curriculum. They provide immersive experiences that bring the program’s central themes of self-reflection, cosmopolitan conversation, and engagement with the unfamiliar into practice.

    Planned Retreats for the Summer 2027 program include an eight-day rafting trip covering 300 miles in the Grand Canyon or a full week living with the Apache Nation on their land.

Community & Dialogue

  • Yes. The program is designed to prepare students to approach difficult and controversial conversations with an attitude that makes them productive for the participants and society.

  • The Reconciliation Fellowship program is, indeed, a leadership program; and, it does involve at least one study away experience for each Fellow (and, for some, two, if both the Summer Program and January Summit take them from their home country). But these features are corollaries rather than the essence of the Reconciliation Fellowship. The focus of the League is quite particular: identifying, nurturing, and connecting over time leaders who engage productively with difference. And the membership of the League was crafted intentionally to assure that each member of each cohort of Fellows would encounter - and live in sustained community with - other, equally talented, members of the cohort who came from places (physical, intellectual, and spiritual) that were new.


    The Fellowship program adopts a unique approach to the idea of reconciliation by training Fellows to cultivate both a critical awareness of their own belief systems and a fully developed sense of empathy. The formal curriculum and informal collateral activities help Fellows to understand reconciliation as a self-reflective and collaborative process. In addition, the Reconciliation Fellowship continues after students return to their home campuses, through ongoing collaborations on real-world projects that will be presented at the January summit meeting

About the Reconciliation League

  • Those who have formed the League see higher education as the site most able to inculcate in emerging leaders, precisely as they are forming their life principles and habits of mind, the skills of bridging divides and dealing productively with those who have different backgrounds, experiences, views, or orthodoxies. The League therefore is a set of universities and colleges, very different from each other in some ways, but all equally committed both to the pursuit of excellence and to the League’s mission.

    In service of its goal, the League brings together cohorts of Reconciliation Fellows from the League schools for several weeks to experience a rigorous curriculum designed to foster in them an ability to reckon with competing unfamiliar and familiar ideas and to engage in a meaningful conversation about them.

    These students - leaders, drawn as they will be from the generation inheriting the challenge of healing the polarization plaguing society – 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 full, 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.

    There are other notable, existing efforts that recognize this imperative. The Reconciliation League complements these other worthwhile efforts; it does not replace them.

    Among the distinctive features setting League apart are:


    (1) The League is a set of 14 founding institutions, each excellent in what it does but together representing a broad cross section of higher education. Simply bringing together students from such different places provides a laboratory for a unique dialogue. There simply is no other place gathering students from such extraordinarily different backgrounds for a sustained encounter with each other and each other’s experiences and viewpoints.

    (2) The League brings these students together as a focused community (apart from their campuses and free of distractions) for a unique intensive program of instruction and complementary exercises over several weeks. This training, drawn from the well developed and successful techniques initially developed in the context of religious ecumenism, has been refined by the faculty of the Reconciliation League for use in bridging secular divides; it prepares the Fellows to return to their campuses both committed to the bridging of division and equipped to do that bridging.


    (3) The initial League experience is uniquely intensive; yet, this initial experience does not by itself represent fully the engagement of the League with the Reconciliation Fellows. The League has created significant tools to maintain the commitment over time of a community of dialogic activists. Having completed 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 lead. The League will provide continuing connectivity, not least through quarterly virtual “conventions” of prior Fellows that will update the members of the Reconciliation Corps on ongoing initiatives and will ensure their accountability to the mission.

    (4) The League is governed exclusively by a mission driven board (independent of member institutions) and thus is able to avoid turf wars among groups, departments, centers or others. Moreover, the Board is committed to a biannual, external review of the League’s fidelity to its mission of creating genuine dialogue.

  • No, nor has any group identified with a particular political, religious, or ideological movement provided funding to the Reconciliation League. Indeed, the by-laws of the League require the Board to conduct an externally driven audit every two years assessing the fidelity to its mission of open dialogue.

  • The Reconciliation League is an independent, non-profit organization with a distinct mission: producing leaders who will devote themselves to creating and engaging in dialogue across difference. The colleges and universities that are members of the League embrace this goal and provide sets of student leaders who embrace it; however, the League is independent of them.

    The Reconciliation League has a distinguished Board of Trustees and a Leadership Team of leading educators.

    > Our Team