Now available to all students, faculty, staff and alumni, the class features lectures and discussions with top UC Berkeley scholars and offers suggestions on navigating especially challenging conversations during polarized times.
Amir Rafiei has long known that some topics can be divisive. But he hadn’t realized how his own actions may have caused divides in his seemingly neutral hobby of filmmaking.
Sometimes he’d feel “locked in” with his own thoughts and ideas. He’d stop listening to what his collaborators were saying about shot techniques or narrative structures. Tensions would ratchet up. In one case, he walked away from a project entirely after a disagreement with actors about whether segmenting a film a certain way would ruin the storyline.
After a recent UC Berkeley summer class, however, “My mindset has slowly shifted.”
Rafiei is part of the first wave of students who have enrolled in a new Berkeley course on navigating disagreement and engaging with opposing viewpoints. The asynchronous online course launched this summer as part of the Berkeley Changemaker program. Students can sign up for a one-credit version; faculty, staff and alumni can now take a no-credit option for free.
An incoming third-year transfer student majoring in statistics, Rafiei learned how Berkeley faculty deal with combative critiques of their research and how social media algorithms and media bubbles deepen divides. He also learned how well-timed questions can lead to better listening and smoother conversations — lessons he’s already taken into daily interactions.
“I personally thought taking the course Openness to Opposing Views would open up my mind about collaborating with others and being open to other ideas,” Rafiei said. “It definitely did.”
Almost 500 people have already enrolled, with thousands more anticipated this fall, said Laura Hassner, who codesigned the course with Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, a cultural demographer and executive dean of the College of Letters and Science.
Featuring lectures and conversations with a Nobel laureate, the provost and 20-plus scholars from 14 departments, Hassner said this kind of survey course could only happen at a place like Berkeley.