Discourse and Democracy: Lindsay Hoffman and Timothy Shaffer

Higher Ed Now continues its series of conversations with leading lights in the surging national movement to foster viewpoint diversity and free expression on college campuses. Today’s episode spotlights two leaders at the University of Delaware – a major institutional partner in the college debates and discourse work that ACTA is doing with Braver Angels and BridgeUSA.

On April 18 Higher Ed Now's producer Doug Sprei traveled to the University of Delaware to chair a Braver Angels debate for a classroom of 25 students led by Lindsay Hoffman, an associate professor of communication who serves as the research leader for ACTA's two-year Braver Angels project funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Afterward he sat down for a conversation with Dr. Hoffman, along with another stellar leader in the discourse space, Timothy Shaffer, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Chair of Civil Discourse at U Delaware’s Biden School of Public Policy and Administration. Shaffer is also director of Civic Engagement and Deliberative Democracy with the National Institute for Civil Discourse at the University of Arizona. Both guests are highly accomplished, have extensive resumes and publication credits, and carry great passion around helping students engage in dialogue, discourse, and democracy.