No educational leader could miss the fallout from college campus protests this spring, when student encampments and administrative responses were headline news. Coverage of the business angle most often turned to crisis management: table top drills, lockdown exercises and insurance considerations. These aspects of business continuity are critical to consider, but alone they miss the most cost-effective way to address unrest, according to Kalyan Balaven, head of Dunn School, which is through an educational lens and structured dialogue from the outset. While “preventing campus unrest” may seem like an “other duty as assigned,” the solution in this case was at the core of what schools do best. The following is Balaven’s narrative of Dunn School’s response.
When Hamas attacked Israel on Saturday, October 7, 2023, Dunn School was on October break. We had the following Monday off, and folks returned to campus Tuesday evening. Some in the community were clamoring for the school to make a statement. I put together a brief statement but waited to send it out until it had real substance to it, just as the students returned to campus. To avoid virtue signaling, I knew we had to do something beyond a simple message. It made sense to treat the matter in the way we do best at schools – like a class, a structured educational experience. So, we didn’t just issue a statement; we launched an entire course that began that very Friday and continued throughout the year. This course explored the context and perspectives necessary for students to fully understand the scope of what was unfolding in the Middle East.
I’ve seen that when community members react to something in fear, friction inevitably follows, and schools end up spending immeasurable resources — financial, operational and reputational — reacting to that friction. I wanted to avoid being reactive if we could. At the same time, I was leading Santa Barbara’s Inclusion Lab, which is a partnership of leaders in public and private schools and different industries who come together each month to talk about racism, antisemitism and other forms of discrimination in the U.S. that also impact our schools. Through the lab, I also was part of an informal group of Jewish and Black leaders in Santa Barbara committed to having monthly dinners to process our strategy to combat hate in the county. I thought I could lean on these partnerships and invite these individuals to our campus to lead discussions.
The 24 countries represented by our boarding program presented a unique challenge. Considering that these students, educated all over the world, have their own historical perspectives on the Holocaust and conflict in the Middle East, it was important to level-set. We built a series of engagements, using our all-school seminar period to ensure that all students could be impacted by the dynamic class that would unfold. It began with a dynamic fishbowl conversation featuring two speakers from our community: a historian and practicing Muslim, and a leading humanitarian and daughter of a Holocaust survivor. They dialogued to understand the context for the tragic events from the past weekend.
In the following weeks, we brought in the regional representative of the Anti-Defamation League to help facilitate the understanding of terminology. We focused on definitions because we quickly understood that words had different meanings for different people. For instance, the term “Zionism” means the right of Jewish people to exist for some, while for others, it’s a lightning rod for the ills of colonialism. We could not create dialogue and understanding if the very words used had different meanings to different people. We also examined historical maps, laying context for the diversity of Jewish, Arab and Muslim people and their nomenclature.
Professors, rabbis and educators representing Arab and Muslim perspectives shared their insights. One speaker, an Egyptian Muslim married to an Israeli Jew, told the story of managing hurt, anger and conflict within his own family. When he recounted being on the phone with his father-in-law while bombs were dropping blocks away from his house in Israel, Dunn students were so riveted that you could hear a pin drop.
Eventually the entire middle school visited LA’s Holocaust Museum, and grades 8-12 visited the Museum of Tolerance, also in Los Angeles. The goal was to expose students to all the layers, to begin as close to the simple facts as possible and then grow in complexity so rich dialogue could take place.
Meanwhile campuses around the country were blowing up, and I kept coming back to the cost of what we’d done and the difference in campus climate. Dunn’s approach cost relatively little — a few honoraria and some professional development money for field trips — compared to the cost of bringing in consultants to pick up the pieces of a broken campus climate or the loss of faculty or administrators due to unrest.
Taking an educational approach in response to these polarizing world events has enabled our students to live with differences and actually talk about them. Students who are on completely different sides can express their positions passionately while sitting peacefully next to each other. Without the planned series of dialogues throughout the year, they might not be able to be friends.
My hope is that we can continue this dialogue in addressing other difficult issues that come up in our culture. In the fall, Irshad Manji, most recently the author of “Don’t Label Me,” and founder of the Moral Courage College, will visit campus. She teaches how we can hold paradox within ourselves and have a relationship with people with different views. Going forward we will have an inclusion line item in the budget to support inclusive conversation around issues that can create tension in the student body and community. While not insignificant, it is minimal compared to the heavy costs of working through entrenched conflict within the community.
One of my mantras is that inclusion is not a special interest. When responding to a sensitive situation, I think about what we can do to benefit the entire student body around that issue. With that approach, you avoid making a statement that speaks to one subcontinent, which can feel tokenistic or exclusive for everyone else. And in positive terms, you lay the groundwork for productive dialogue that furthers a school’s educational mission.
