Lura Forcum and Lauren Hall interview Mike Lee, director of the Civility Initiative at the College of Charleston and host of When We Disagree, about how to improve disagreement through both debate and dialogue. Lee argues dialogue requires letting go of winning to humanize conflict and preserve long-term relationships, while debate uses evidence and stress-testing to clarify issues and strengthen arguments; done well, each supports the other. Hall shares a pandemic-era student government conflict involving Slack disputes, Blue Lives Matter symbolism, privacy, and free speech, which revealed the need for dialogue alongside principled adjudication. They discuss conflict avoidance on campuses, perspective-taking and mentalizing, structured on-ramps and accessible topics to make disagreement less threatening, and whether media can scale healthier models via parasocial contact. Lee ends with optimism about people’s hunger for connection and the return of sunshine in Charleston.

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00:00 Dialogue vs Debate

00:41 Podcast Introductions

02:20 Civility Initiative Explained

03:30 Why the Distinction Matters

05:56 Campus Conflict Case Study

10:09 Forbearance and Relationships

11:26 Do Students Want to Win

15:13 Debate Kids and Parenting

18:56 Active Listening Can Weaponize

23:52 Conflict Avoidance on Campus

27:26 Three Ways to Spark Debate

31:35 Curiosity Shift Drill

33:33 Debate as Perspective Taking

36:46 Mentalization Against Tribalism

40:28 Can Good Debate Scale

43:43 Adam Smith and Sympathy

47:58 Parasocial Contact Through Media

52:12 Teaching Dialogue in Class

54:32 Adversarial Collaboration Model

58:51 Hopeful Closing and Plugs

Resources

You can find Mike’s books here:

Creating ConservatismWe Are Not One People: Secession and Separatism in American Politics Since 1776

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