An Unexpected Model for Education in the Age of Polarization
How a small residence in New York City created a transformative educational experience
“International House was my best experience while living in NYC, much better than my studies at Columbia University…”
What kind of institution could possibly provide a better learning experience than one of the most prestigious and well-resourced universities in the world?
We spent the last three years studying the culture of International House and believe it offers a model for how to create community and encourage dialogue across lines of difference. As any team, organization, or business knows, curating culture is key. Yet the culture that many places have created is one which makes difference a dirty word.
Just a few blocks north of Columbia University, in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, sits International House. Founded over 100 years ago, International House–affectionately known as I-House by its residents–was the first global community of its kind.
More than a residency program and housing, it provided graduate students and young professionals from around the world a place to connect and learn from each other, as they studied or worked in NYC.
In 2023, we were invited to do an independent evaluation of the residential experience and whether it advances I-House’s mission to install “a lifelong dedication to cultural understanding [and] cultivate individuals who will help bridge the polarization, isolation, and division our world continues to face.“ With decades of experience studying intergroup relations, prejudice and discrimination, and political polarization in a wide range of educational contexts, we were skeptical that a relatively short-lived experience could generate such deep and lasting transformation. But we agreed to run a study of the alumni and report the results back to the I-House trustees.
To uncover what makes I-House special, we spent the past three years interviewing alumni and studying how I-House residents change to determine if I-House indeed transforms residents—and if it might offer a blueprint that we could share with other businesses, organizations, and universities.
A Community the Actually Changes People
We first surveyed 1,600 alumni from I-House, dating back to the 1950s (you can read our full summary of that study here). The alumni scored very high in several prosocial traits, such as emotional intelligence and intellectual humility, empathy, and a sense of global citizenship. When we asked alumni about their prosocial behavior in the past month–using a measure known as the World Giving Index–roughly 80% of I-House alumni had helped a stranger and 60% had donated money. If I-House alumni were its own country, it would rank among the top three most prosocial nations worldwide.
The alumni also showed much lower political polarization compared to the general U.S. population.
As we read through hundreds of survey interviews with alumni, the results were striking. The alumni uniformly raved about the experience, including how it has helped them many decades later in careers ranging from politics to business. They overwhelmingly described their time at I-House as transformative.
One former resident wrote “ In many contexts over the last 20 years I have had to draw on skills learned at the House” and another said “I believe my time at I-House was hugely impactful on my life. I definitely view myself as a global citizen and approach my work that way.”
Others spoke about the specific skills they gain from the experience, noting they gained “Invaluable skills for cultural navigation and communication. Organizational skills for managing events and groups of people. Expanded my heart and mind!”
These testimonials struck us as a remarkable departure from the student experience at many of our leading universities over the past few decades. Perhaps this is why the difference between I-House and Columbia stood out so clearly to the student from Columbia. In an era of echo chambers, I-House stood out as a space that actively fostered dialogue across differences and encouraged discussion of challenging topics.
We reported the positive results to the I-House board of trustee, with the caveat that correlation does not equal causation. Perhaps only the most enthusiastic alumni completed our survey or students from the past had a much rosier view of education than the anxious generation. Or perhaps they simply had a pristine admissions process, effectively weeding out any sociopaths or narcissists.
So I-House invited us back to conduct a longitudinal study with a full cohort of new residents at I-House. We measured their traits and beliefs in the first few days of the academic year (after most of them had moved into I-House) and again at the end of the semester. We warned that the results might not be as impressive.
But low and behold, when we got the results back, they were even more impressive! After just a few months of living at I-House people seemed to become more charitable, trusting of strangers, and emotionally intelligent.
In fact, the results were even more positive than the alumni survey—The current I-House residents outperformed the benchmark samples across every measure of prosociality we measured, even higher than the I-House alumni (as seen in the future below):
As we dug into the data, it became clear that the students who rose the most were those who had the most to gain. Immersing themselves in the I-House community led to an entire suite of positive changes–these residents improved on almost every measure of pro-sociality.
As for the residents who came in already scoring highly on these measures, they could have dropped off since there was nowhere to go but down—in statistical terms, this is known as regression to the mean—but they didn’t. Instead they continued to score highly at the end of the academic year.
The Key Ingredient for Personal Growth
What was the key ingredient that created such a transformative social and intellectual environment?
We found that participation in formal programming that was intentionally designed to cultivate personal and professional growth (like roundtable discussions, a ballroom dance showing different cultural dancing traditions) was linked to improvement on emotional intelligence and global citizenship.
But we also found that simply sharing a meal or talking in the hallway about life, school and politics was also linked to change. We concluded that the main ingredient of I-House’s magic sauce was largely just interacting with people who were fundamentally different in a place where disagreement was not only tolerated, but valued.
It dawned on us that I-House is exceptionally effective in cultivating psychological safety. At I-House, residents feel safe taking “interpersonal risk-taking”, meaning they feel like they can express their true opinions and discuss difficult issues without fearing judgment or exclusion.
This atmosphere creates a sense of belonging and trust which allows residents to explore and share different perspectives and deepen their understanding of one another and the world. For instance, one resident reported that I-House has made them “more confident in expressing [their] views, knowing that people generally mean no harm and that it’s all about understanding [people’s] perspectives”.
Moving Beyond Echo Chambers
In recent years, American colleges have been struggling to maintain a climate of open and respectful discussion of different ideas and beliefs. American college students increasingly feel unsafe to share their opinions and beliefs on campus; two in three report self-censorship during class discussions and educationally valuable conversations on campus.
This creates a kind of echo chamber where everyone retreats into their own silo. It’s not the kind of climate that students want and it’s not conducive to learning new perspectives, engaging in robust debate, or resolving conflicts–skills that are critical when students graduate, enter the workforce, and take on leadership roles in their communities.
More importantly, students are disenchanted with the culture of silence at many universities. The faculty also feel under attack from the government, at odds with university leaders, and sometimes even fear their own students (or at least being reported by their students to the administration or news). These conditions make it very difficult to learn from one another both inside and outside the classroom.
A similar dynamic has occurred in companies who created “affinity groups”— a way for people of an underrepresented background or life experience to find each other and connect. This has the benefit of fostering a sense of belonging, but it cuts off people from cross-group interactions. This eliminates two of the most powerful ways to reduce hostility: intergroup contact and working together towards a common goal.
Instead of worrying about debates between people with different ideas, our leaders and institutions should encourage genuine and constructive disagreements. Even if students or employees ultimately disagree, they can move past the caricatures they see on social media and humanize people with a different perspective. And, more importantly, they might actually learn something.
One of the striking things about I-House is that they have been practicing this for the past century. They embraced diversity and debate before it was in vogue, and stuck with it when it became a political liability. As many major institutions have simply followed the trends, this sincere commitment to these values. Their mission is to create “an open-minded and intellectually challenging community where our residents expand their worldview and form lifelong bonds.”
In an era of heightened polarization and a stretching of our social fabric, I-House is an example of how to build and bind a community as diverse as they come. Smart institutions should pay attention to these lessons if they want to cultivate social and cultural intelligence.
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