Contentious Issues Seminar

September 24, 2025

We kicked things off with a vigorous discussion of last summer's Supreme Court case in which a group of Muslim immigrant parents sued their school system to prevent their children from reading books featuring LGBTQ characters. Our conversation about the difficulty of living in a diverse, pluralistic society set the tone for our seminar series, as the students offered ways to respectfully address the concerns of each minority group involved: queer children and families, religious Muslim parents, immigrants... and, as our participants were eager to point out, queer Muslim children. Must one side vanquish the other, or is compromise possible?

October 16, 2025

Amid escalating ICE raids and National Guard deployments to U.S. cities, we discussed the exercise and limits of presidential power in a robust conversation that featured an older former student of mine, Elise Flick, who reported to us from "on the ground" in Chicago about how her community has reacted to the sudden militarization. The seminar focused largely on the question of when, if ever, a president should be able to issue orders without the consent of Congress or a state's governor, and the potential tension between (slow) democratic processes and (rapid) crisis response.

November 4, 2025

Our November seminar coincided with Election Day, so our topic was California Proposition 50, which will now allow partisan gerrymandering to override the work of a nonpartisan commission in response to President Trump's encouragement of Republican-led states' mid-decade redistricting. At the core of our discussion was an intensely felt conflict between "When they go low, we go high" and "Fight fire with fire." Is undermining democracy the only way to save democracy? And if so, then is democracy worth saving? Who knew teenagers could have such a passionate debate about geometry?!

December 7, 2025

This month's topic hit closer to home: the controversy over state-run voucher programs that transfer funds from public schools to cover tuition for private schools. Our group of private school students and alumni was split over the ethics of trying to use government money to improve people's lives by, arguably, making even more people's lives measurably worse. I was inspired by how a number of our participants were able to use their own experiences (such as with The Learning Center at ACDS, high school applications, and public elementary school) to inform their admirably nuanced views on this issue in a way that transcended partisan battle lines.

January 5, 2026

At the request of one of our participants, this month's topic was freedom of speech in academic settings. My older former student Rohit Narayanan, who not long ago served as editor-in-chief of The Daily Princetonian, joined us to share his first-hand encounters with the issue and participate in our conversation, which focused on a DP article about a Princeton professor who was targeted by students for using terminology that made them uncomfortable. While our group found it challenging to muster empathy for each stakeholder, we ultimately had to acknowledge the limits of using institutional power to enforce cultural norms, no matter the politics. We also discussed the claim from right-wing students and the Trump administration that univerisities discriminate against conservative points of view.

February 10, 2026

In the aftermath of President Trump's incursion into Venezuela to abduct its president, we turned our attention to the abruptly changing role of the United States on the world stage. Should the U.S. continue to exert moral leadership, or has American rhetoric always been a hypocritical farce? Is Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller correct to assert that "strength, force, and power" are the "iron laws of the world"? What will happen to the U.S. once other countries, in the words of Canada's Mark Carney, "build a new order that encompasses our values"? Our conversation, though tinged with sadness and exasperation, revealed how different interpretations of history can lead us to make vastly different choices in the present.

March 11, 2026

In response once again to a participant request, this month we grappled with the rapidly accelerating AI revolution and its policy ramifications. Part of our discussion focused on the extent to which policy makers, from Congress to school administrators, should regulate the growth and use of AI or instead let it evolve freely in the name of innovation. We also struggled with whether AI companies should be able to restrict the use of their own products, as with Anthropic's recent demand that the U.S. military not use Claude to surveil Americans or launch autonomous drone attacks. There was a lot of technical expertise among the students who participated, and the conversation got into the weeds in the best of ways.

April 2, 2026

This month we tackled climate change in the shadow of the recent shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, a result of the U.S.'s and Israel's war with Iran, and the Trump administration's hard pivot away from renewable energy and toward coal and oil production. In our conversation, we weighed the global perils of the climate crisis against the livelihoods and dignity of energy-industry workers and shared a variety of perspectives about the feasibility of job retraining and investment in nuclear power. Ultimately, the participants came away with a clearer understanding of why climate policy progress can feel so frustrating.

May 17, 2026 (coming soon!)

For our final seminar, we will share our ideas for how the opposition to President Trump's MAGA movement should position itself in the lead-up to the 2026 and 2028 elections. Should it move toward moderation or a radical progressive vision? Should it emphasize National unity? Economic populism? Democracy? Affordability? Global affairs? Should it defend American institutions or critique them? Should it offer seasoned leadership or fresh faces? In short, we'll take the "Democrats in disarray" trope and run with it. All perspectives encouraged!