“How can we speak our minds and still carry on civil discussions?” This is the question the new Upstander Dialogue Series is asking Pomona College faculty, staff and students to consider.
Drawing from the social psychological theory of the bystander effect, where people are less likely to act if others are present, “upstander” behavior encourages people to speak up, even when there are risks involved.
The first speaker in the series, Stephen D. Solomon, professor of journalism at New York University, spoke to an audience inside Frank Dining Hall’s Blue Room on First Amendment freedoms and how the nation’s founders navigated their own political passions as they created a new government.
In the presentation on March 11, Solomon traced the United States’ political culture to its founding generation.
He pointed out that the Declaration of Independence was “mostly a list of grievances against King George III.” The document helped ingrain a culture of protest and free speech in the U.S. from its earliest days as a nation. He also noted the First Amendment’s expediency: “In 45 words five rights were protected,” including the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press and the freedom to assemble.
“Protest and freedom are all part of the grand design,” said Solomon.
Despite vast ideological differences between the founders, they completed a significant amount of work fairly quickly. In just a few years, they drafted the Constitution, ratified it state by state, built a federal government from scratch in the First Federal Congress, drafted the Bill of Rights and ratified it state by state.
“How did the country’s founders accomplish so much in four years?” Solomon asked.
The answer lay in their ability to keep an open mind and have intellectual humility, he said. Solomon pointed to the example of Benjamin Franklin, who said, “For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects which I one thought right, but found to be otherwise.”
Solomon ended by imploring the audience to keep an open mind, to respect opinions held by others and to be willing to compromise. “Progress requires compromise,” he said.
After Solomon’s presentation, faculty, staff and students participated in small group discussions to reflect on what they heard.
“The event was enlightening,” said Bridget Brodie ’27. “It’s always good to hear a professional speak their piece and then talk with the people you go to school with about what that means in the context of the environment in which you live and learn.”
Rascal Kemble-Curry ’29 concurred.
“It was interesting putting our current problems in context,” he said. “It’s easy to, in the moment, feel like the problems we’re facing today are new and uniquely terrible. It’s inspiring to hear how these problems have played out in the past, and it makes me more excited to be involved in what happens next.”