Sarah Shay said she did not know what to expect the first time she spoke to her research subject, a farmer in Virginia’s Dinwiddie County.
The George Mason University sophomore knew her professor, Steven Pearlstein, had paired her with someone who did not share her liberal political views. And given the charged atmosphere of the presidential campaign, Shay worried about the tone their weekly conversations would take.
“But it’s been amazing,” she said. “He has been extremely respectful—very open, very polite. When we do disagree, we do so respectfully. We’ll even laugh about it.”
That is exactly the kind of interaction Pearlstein wants in his Honors 131 class: Contemporary Society in Multiple Perspectives: The 2016 Presidential Campaign.
“One of the big problems in politics is people think the people they don’t agree with are stupid or venal,” said Pearlstein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning business and economics writer at the Washington Post and a Robinson Professor of Public Affairs at George Mason. “There are a lot of people you disagree with who aren’t stupid and venal, and they have real reasons for the way they think.”
The 24 Honors College students in the class are taking a deep dive into the U.S. political system. There are readings about how campaigns work, discussions about political behaviors and tutorials about how to distinguish between what Pearlstein called the noise and actual signals in the cacophony of political conversation.
He said he spent two weeks in August recruiting his students’ subjects, including a union leader, a corporate executive, a real estate developer, a tea party activist, a newspaper executive, a gun club member and a retired police chief. The objective is to discover the reasons for their political viewpoints. Pairing students and subjects of opposite views is not to spark confrontation but to get both sides out of their echo chambers.
“If we can understand each other better, we would have better politics,” said Pearlstein, who has used this teaching technique five previous times.
“In the Honors College we have this mantra of multiple perspectives, broadening our horizons,” said Evan Cypher, a fiscally conservative, socially liberal sophomore economics major paired with a Hillary-supporting soccer mom. “This is the first time we’ve actually experienced that firsthand. It’s not multiple perspectives within a small, liberal arts college classroom. We’re reaching out for all different kinds of perspectives.”
Grace Zipperer, a sophomore and global affairs major, wants to be a journalist, so she speaks with her subject, a conservative, born-again radio host, as though conducting an interview.
“I don’t think this class has made me more open-minded. I think it has allowed me to explore the open-mindedness I already had,” said Zipperer, whose views skew liberal. “That I’ve had this class and been able to exercise it will give me more confidence to do that more often.”
Which brings us back to Shay, a civil and infrastructure engineering major, and her Donald Trump-voting subject.
“I’m free to say what I believe and he is free to say what he believes, and it might be completely contradicting,” Shay said, “but we can still have an intelligent conversation. I’m so grateful to be in this class.”