Bay Area students help bridge political gaps

Students, administrators and faculty from Bay Area universities engaged in constructive dialogue on election-related issues during a student-led event on campus Saturday.

Bridge the bayan event co-hosted by the Stanford Political Union (SPU) and BridgeUSA chapters from UC Berkeley, San Jose State University (SJSU) and Saint Mary’s College of California, feature student-led dialogue and a panel of speakers of administrators and faculty from the participating schools. Students addressed current issues such as immigration, abortion and foreign policy in Ukraine and Gaza. A panel of speakers focused on the importance of local and community-based civic engagement.

During the panel, Corey Cook, Executive Vice President and Provost of St. Mary’s College, criticized partisan divisions and argued that there was too much focus on the presidential election. The restoration of democracy comes from local work that bridges political divides within a community, Cook said.

“The most meaningful thing you can do is restore our democracy by working with people on issues you care about,” he said. “The real work is what students can do now at the local level because they can do it through their courses. They can do this through internships. They can do this through partnerships with the Haas Center.”

Cook also criticized universities for being too electorally focused, noting that higher education institutions “focus on these big electoral moments as what it means to be civically engaged,” he said.

Several panelists said student activists often struggle to understand a university’s power structures. They noted that this leads to difficulties in implementing changes in university policy and a tendency to attack individuals who hold a ‘title’ of institutional authority.

“Universities are in many ways heavily controlled by their faculty governance,” said Norman Spaulding, a professor at Stanford Law School. He added that student activists, with a “strategy that alienates faculty,” are unlikely to succeed in changing university policy.

Luke Terra, associate director of the Haas Center for Public Service, said Stanford staff and faculty are often slow to create student spaces for community conversations and emphasized the importance of celebrating student leadership. When asked how Stanford students could build or access communities of collaborative and coalitional change, Terra encouraged students to take advantage of the Haas Center’s resources, such as talking to fellow advisors and participating in Cardinal Quarter.

“I think our students often feel like there are conversations that we – collectively, as a community – should be having that they don’t see being offered around them,” Terra said.

BridgeUSA co-founder and Chief Development Officer Ross Irwin said he hoped students would leave the constructive dialogue at the event with optimism. Irwin said universities were improving their efforts to facilitate constructive dialogue, but there was still work to be done.

“I think if we really want to create a culture of respectful disagreement on campuses, it’s going to have to come from both the bottom – from the students – and from the top – from the admin, from the professors,” Irwin said, “so that all places on campus are places for constructive, respectful disagreement, and that it’s not just events like this that have to bear much of that burden.”

BridgeBerkeley President Samantha Dalton, a UC Berkeley student who co-organized the event, agreed that universities could do more but emphasized the importance of student-led conversations, free from faculty influence.

“I think it really comes down to students having that space individually to have that dialogue without someone sitting over your shoulder,” says Dalton.

Participants said the event provided a respectful environment and exposure to diverse points of view.

“I think it was a really great event,” said Colin Weis ’28. “It definitely brought out different points of view.”

SJSU student Chima Nwokolo and Berkeley student Lucy Cox both said they appreciated the event.

“I think most tables had a lot of good questions to ask, and they weren’t afraid to ask some controversial questions,” Cox said. “Even though some of us are self-proclaimed liberals or conservatives, we’ve found a lot of common ground on things that I didn’t really expect us to find with each other.”