In our era of polarized politics, media silos, and shifting truths, Bowdoin’s Viewpoint Exchange program offers a forum for students, faculty, staff, and community members to hear different voices—and to share their own.
Over the coming months, the College is inviting several speakers to campus to address some of today’s most complex and challenging issues. Three of the Viewpoint Exchange lectures will be followed by a dinner in Daggett Lounge so audience members can discuss what they’ve just heard.
Viewpoint Exchange is part of a campuswide initiative outlined by President Safa Zaki in a message last March. This undertaking aims to strengthen open discourse, encourage respectful curiosity of difference, and foster a deeper sense of belonging for all members of the College community.
Viewpoint Exchange's goal is to encourage the community to reflect on contemporary life—where we’ve been, how we got here, and where we might be headed, said Benje Douglas, Bowdoin’s senior vice president for inclusion and diversity.
“We need to see our community as being open to ideas across the ideological spectrum but with a grounding of creativity and compassion,” he said. “We also need to have speakers who can thoughtfully address issues beyond headlines or sound bites, and push our community to grapple with how we got here and where we're going next.”
Viewpoint Exchange continues last year’s speaker series and community dinners. Just like last year’s program, the project is a collaboration with faculty and staff from across the curriculum to ensure a wide range of topics are addressed.
All of the events are open to the public, and more speakers will be announced in the spring.
Jen Scanlon, senior vice president and dean for academic affairs, said Viewpoint Exchange complements and extends the kind of learning that happens in classrooms.
“This is a wonderful opportunity for members of our community to exercise outside the classroom some of what we do inside: engage with ideas that challenge us in fundamental ways, listen with regard, grow in the process—essentially, to build the muscles necessary for the kind of citizenship in great demand in today's world,” she said.
The lineup will start on September 24 with Loretta J. Ross, the author of Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You'd Rather Cancel. She’ll be followed by Yair Rosenberg, a staff writer for The Atlantic and an expert on antisemitism. The next two speakers are Ken Stern, director for the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, and filmmaker dream hampton, who will have a conversation with Bowdoin’s Roux Distinguished Scholar Ayana Elizabeth Johnson about film, culture, and climate.
“I don’t expect everyone to like every speaker,” Douglas said. “But I hope they all provoke responses, or even just the response, ‘Oh, I hadn’t thought about it that way.’”
Jim Hoppe, senior vice president and dean for student affairs, agreed with Douglas, saying that college is like sitting at a big dinner table where you're going to hear a little bit of everything.
“Some ideas you’ll love, some you might disagree with, and some might surprise you. But learning how to sit with that variety, to listen, share your own view, and still pass the salt with kindness, that’s a big part of education,” he said.
Not Just Listening. Talking, too.
Three of the lectures will be followed by community dinners, where students, faculty, staff, and local residents who heard the talk can process it together over a meal.
Katy Stern, Bowdoin’s director of institutional inclusion and diversity programs, will guide these discussions with the help of student co-facilitators. She also led last year’s series of post-talk dinners.
“It felt really inspiring to be in a room with students, staff and faculty, and members of the broader community, to watch them sitting at tables and really talking and listening together in a way that doesn’t always happen,” she said.
She's looking forward to a new year of people getting together to connect and talk. “Right now, it’s as important as ever to stop and listen to each other,” she said, “and a lot of the programs I’ll be working on this year, including Viewpoint Exchange, have a goal of bringing curiosity and respect to conversations.”
The dinners follow a loosely structured format to encourage attendees to participate equally in the conversation. At the start of the evening, the guests will be invited to write down one question or idea based on the speaker’s remarks on an index card. These are mixed up and read out loud, anonymously, to spur discussion. “Then we let the conversation flow,” Stern said.
Viewpoint Exchange offers more than just intellectual enrichment, it’s a model for a way forward in a divided world, Douglas said. “In times of fractiousness, it is easy to fight,” he said. “But disagreement can actually build a stronger community if I care enough to listen to you.”
Fall 2025
All talks are open to the public.
Loretta J. Ross, “The Radical Power of Calling In Those You'd Rather Cancel,” September 24
Activist, public Intellectual, professor, and podcaster, Ross is the author of Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You'd Rather Cancel. She speaks, trains, and consults on the issues of reproductive justice, human rights, violence against women, and what she calls “calling in the calling-out culture.” She is an associate professor of the study of women and gender at Smith College.
Rosenberg is a staff writer for The Atlantic, where he publishes his Deep Shtetl newsletter about politics, culture, and religion. He was previously a senior writer at Tablet Magazine, and is a regular speaker and commentator on antisemitism in the modern era and on strategies to combat abuse on online platforms.
Marla Brettschneider, October 27
Brettschneider is a professor of political and feminist theory at the University of New Hampshire with a joint appointment in the departments of political science and women's and genders studies. Her work is mainly in the field of Jewish diversity politics and political theory, using the co-constituted critical tools of feminist, queer, anti-racist, class-based, de-colonial, and Jewish theory.
Ken Stern, and dinner, November 4
Director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate, Stern is an author and attorney, and is the former director of the American Jewish Committee’s division on antisemitism and extremism for 25 years. He has argued before the United States Supreme Court, testified before the US House of Representatives and the US Senate, was an invited presenter at the White House Conference on Hate Crimes. He is the author of The Conflict Over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate.
Khalil Abdur-Rashid, “Understanding Islam, Muslims in America, and Islamophobia,” November 13
Abdur-Rashid is the first full-time Muslim chaplain at Harvard University, where he’s also an instructor of Muslim studies at the Divinity School, and a public policy lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government. He has been an advisor to the NYPD Police Commissioner, served as imam for several years in New York City, and co-founded, with his wife, the Islamic Seminary of America in Dallas.
Film, Culture and Climate: a conversation with dream hampton, November 14
dream hampton is an award-winning filmmaker and writer from Detroit. Her recent works include the award-winning short film Freshwater and Ladies First . Other films includer Treasure, Finding Justice, It’s A Hard Truth Ain’t It, and the Emmy-nominated Surviving R. Kelly, which broke ratings records on Netflix and earned her a Peabody Award. In 2019, hampton was named one of TIME 100's most influential people in the world.
Howard French, and dinner, November 19
French is a journalist, most recently with the New York Times, and the author of four books, including Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power, and China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa. He has also published a book of photography, Disappearing Shanghai: Photographs and Poems of an Intimate Way of Life.
More speakers will be announced in the spring.
