Since 2016, America’s college campuses have become synonymous with idealogical echo chambers, anxiety, and intolerance. But the cultural tide within higher education is turning.

There is a new counterculture on America’s college campuses. It is a counterculture that cherishes tolerance, constructive dialogue, and curiosity in an ideologically diverse environment. Rather than meeting disagreement with the closed fist, this counterculture believes in the open hand — a fundamental belief that we must understand why someone believes what they believe. This new counterculture is called bridge building.

Bridge building is precisely the counterculture because it is challenging the prevailing norms on campus and tapping into the extraordinary silent demand for curiosity, tolerance, and dialogue. In many ways, it is more unexpected to meet controversy on campus with a civic dialogue than it is to stage a protest- that is because idealogical hostility is the norm while constructive dialogue appears to be an aberration.