A meeting of the minds

BRONWYN MCALINDON
STAFF WRITER

1/29/2024

Alma College has recently introduced a new class to the course catalog called Common Sense Solutions. The new class, taught by Dr. Peterson and Dr. Harr, is working with students to develop new skills regarding how to have political discourse peacefully and meets every Thursday evening from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.

The new class is funded by Gary Fenchuk, a member of the Alma College board of trustees and alumnus from the class of 1968. He has found in these times it is becoming increasingly important to understand how to have an educated political discussion without bias.  

The back half of the course is designed to be a competition. As the second seven weeks of the class ends the final project gives students the opportunity to use their newly developed skills to help create a solution for the discourse of inequality in the education system. The champion students will win $1,000 per teammate.

As a society that is becoming more argumentative, it is important for one to learn how to educate oneself to discuss the issues facing the world and how to have important conversations to problem solve.  This will help the students develop new skills of understanding biases that exist and how to have a political conversation without those biases when solutions are needed. 

“I am hoping that students will gain the capacity to look at a political situation [and] to understand sort of the forces that are going into the different perspectives in it and then try to find something that exists either in the middle or that otherwise can… be accessed by both sides, and I think that that’s a matter of thinking and really understanding each other,” said Dr. Peterson.

The class dives deep into how to get information about political issues and how to put out an educated opinion based on reading multiple sources and further understanding the issues that the world is faced with. 

“I would say I’m really excited about this class because we’re [going to] be able to figure out solutions towards these issues and not just see, [but also,] study… why these happened. Hopefully by the end of… the 14 weeks… we… will have [an] actual solution and… an idea to move forward [with] to bring in partisanship,” said Hunter Jaffray (‘27).

The class will inspire students to inspire their classmates, family and others to learn how to have unbiased discourse in discussions. This will be beneficial not only in political debates, but also in discourse in other areas of life.  

“I just sort of have this vision that this course I think is critical [so] that in five years when somebody says, ‘You know, what does productive discourse look like on a college campus?’ That they think about Alma College… That, actually, we really have become a center [for moderated political discourse],” said  Dr. Peterson

Common Sense Solutions is an exciting new addition to Alma College’s course catalog. Its mission is to develop a new way to look at and better understand politics and ways to solve problems in the world. The intention is to help students handle conflict and understand how to work through conflict peacefully.