Can we still be friends, even if we agree on nothing?
The Power of & is about bringing people and ideas together through listening, understanding, and connection.
Suzanne Rivera, President of Macalester College, highlights a program that brought together students at Macalester and the University of Northwestern – St. Paul. These two campuses are right down the road from each other but couldn’t be more different.
“If you’re familiar at all with Minnesota, you’ll know that Macalester is quite possibly the most liberal college in the state and University of Northwestern is probably the most conservative. Billy Graham literally was their president. They have a mission that many students at Macalester would literally find offensive. I mean, to live and work there, you have to agree, for example, that marriage is only between one man and one woman and that the sex that you’re assigned at birth is your gender. Macalester is very much a, and I say this in the most loving and affectionate way, it’s kind of a free to be you and me campus. So even suggesting that students from these two campuses would break bread together is pretty radical. And the fact that the two presidents enjoy a warm collegial relationship, even though we don’t agree on pretty much anything in terms of the big important world issues.
But we do agree that we respect each other as colleagues and that we admire each other’s commitments to our families and to the promotion of democracy. And we cooked this idea up ourselves. We said, “What would it look like to get together once a month for a sustained relationship-building exercise over the course of a year?” At the end of that year, this thing was so successful that the 12 students came to the presidents and said, “Do you think it would be okay if we organized a bowling outing at the end of the year to celebrate the conclusion of this year?” And I thought it was such a wholesome expression of their genuine positive regard for one another that they’d be willing to take a Sunday night and go bowling.”
