While the concept of disagreement tends to have a negative connotation, the Harvard Kennedy School argues disagreement is not only important, but instrumental in the quest for truth.
To promote civil discourse and discussion on campus, Artemis Center board members Lucy Williams (’25) and Sophia Shin (’25) established the ArtemisEngage program last year. The Artemis Center hosted the most recent ArtemisEngage event Wednesday, March 12, focused on the question, “Should hate speech be censored on social media?” Around 15 students and faculty in total convened in Director of the Artemis Center Beth Gold’s classroom to engage in the conversation.
The creation of ArtemisEngage was inspired by Williams’ participation in the University of Chicago’s Parrhesia Ambassador Program, a course focused on teaching students how to engage in civic dialogue and construct arguments, during the summer before her junior year. Williams said, prior to establishing ArtemisEngage, she was looking for ways to explore a new area of activism that the Artemis Center had not previously touched upon.
“[During the Parrhesia Ambassador Program], we learned about how conversation is dying, and we learned this model of discourse for improving conversation,” Williams said. “And so I brought it back to Archer, and I wanted to just foster space outside of the classroom for authentic discourse that people actually cared about. It’s a really cool cross-generational conversation.”
Two days before the discussion, Gold sent out an email to upper school students, faculty and staff members with information on the event and a participation form. The Artemis Center then sent those who signed up an informational sheet covering the conversation topic to ensure everyone had the same baseline understanding of the issue going in.
The discussion included three rounds. The first was a round-robin, where participants shared their initial thoughts — questions, comments or concerns — aimed to guarantee everyone had the chance to speak. The second round was a socratic-seminar style discourse, and the event concluded with participants sharing their takeaways and gratitude from the conversation.
“The conversation format is really beneficial because the students who come are actually interested. It takes a second, but they do share, and they do bounce ideas off of each other. Because of that first round, people aren’t afraid to speak because they’ve already been forced to,” Williams said. “It was also really interesting, especially today, I saw a lot of students and teachers asking each other questions. The teachers were like, ‘So, have you seen this on Tik Tok? Have you seen that? We want to know what it’s like.’ And the students were like, ‘Oh, how do you interact with social media?’”
History teaching apprentice Brynn Estrada was one of the faculty members who participated in the discussion. This was her first time joining an ArtemisEngage event, and she said she joined because she was interested in hearing student perspectives on their experiences with social media and their thoughts on censoring hate speech.
“It was really cool to see faculty engage with students in a discussion that is not typical to how a discussion would occur in class,” Estrada said. “It was almost like I was removed as a teacher, and I was just speaking freely with everyone, and other faculty were doing the same.”
Similarly, Artemis Center board member Olivia Hallinan-Gan (‘26) said the dynamic between students and faculty offered an interesting opportunity to engage in collaborative discussion.
“It’s really cool being in a room where it’s students and teachers, and we’re all on the same level with similar and different ideas,” Hallinan-Gan said, “where we can debate and agree and come up with strategies on different ways to solve problems.”
The Artemis Center board decides on the theme for each ArtemisEngage event by thinking about current events and subjects that would be most applicable to the lives of high schoolers. According to Williams, they also take into account the nuance of potential topics — they aim to choose topics that community members will have varied opinions on.
“Discourse is a pillar of our democracy. It’s the pinnacle of free speech and the way that we express our ideas, come together as a community and actually make decisions that are democratic,” Williams said. “So I think this program would be really important to educate the next generation about how to have a conversation, how to keep an open mind and fight against those algorithm bubbles on social media.”
A large focus of the recent discussion was how hate speech differs from person to person, and what someone considers as hate speech may be different from what someone else considers as hate speech. Estrada said she enjoyed hearing perspectives she was not anticipating hearing.
“Generally speaking, I’ve always believed that hate speech shouldn’t be allowed on social media,” Estrada said. “I honestly thought that many students would come in with the same mindset, but they didn’t, which is good, because that showed me more sides of the conversation and what other people’s thought processes are.”
Next year, Hallinan-Gan and Maya Hernández (‘27) will be overseeing ArtemisEngage. Hallinan-Gan said she hopes to maintain the safe, healthy environment fostered in the conversations this year and even bring in new perspectives — such as middle schoolers — to expand the scope of the program.
“Civil discourse is really important, especially with such a polarized government and so many polarizing ideas. Everyone seems to be very one way or another, and I think coming together to agree in some ways and disagree in others — in a healthy way and in an actual conversation — is really healthy,” Hallinan-Gan. “It makes me not so scared for the future of just overall fighting and debate. There can be agreement, and it is possible to come to some kind of understanding.”
