When leadership studies professor Terry Price launched his new class, You Can’t Think That! Or Can You? last spring, he wasn’t sure how students would react. He quickly found out. The course filled up within minutes, and a growing waitlist developed.

Unlike core classes in subjects like chemistry and history, which regularly fill because they are needed to meet university and major requirements, courses like Price’s stand out because students choose to take them. Waitlists sometimes need to be created for many of these elective courses shortly after registration opens.

These electives are no less rigorous than traditional subject matter and they often challenge students to flex different critical-thinking muscles.

On that list of popular classes at UR is Chemistry of Cooking and Modernist Cuisine, a hands-on course taught by chemistry professor Kristine Nolin that explores how scientific principles and techniques have transformed the culinary industry. The Disruptive Business of Branding, a first-year seminar course taught by marketing lecturer Michael Mullen, explores how businesses grow their company bases and attain market dominance through disruptive thinking and branding. Sociology and anthropology chair Matthew Oware’s Sociology of Hip Hop investigates topics from social inequality and gender to cultural critiques and commercialization.

From campus to the Wall Street Journal

As Terry Price began to outline his course, his colleagues in the Jepson School of Leadership Studies — where he is the Coston Family Chair in Leadership and Ethics and a professor of philosophy, politics, economics, and law — considered him brave for venturing into an underrepresented space. The idea for the course originated from his early experiences teaching The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, as part of a Critical Thinking class.

His new class was meant to create an environment where students would be guided to engage with others on topics where they disagree, which goes a long way in expanding what Price terms “intellectual diversity” on campus.

“Students need to be exposed to ideas that many people on college campuses believe are wrong or shouldn't be thought at all," he said, noting that this exposure allows students to explore why others look at the same issues in extremely different ways.

“I had some of the same concerns other faculty have about students’ unwillingness to talk about difficult topics,” said Price. He also wrote about the class in a opinion piece published by the Wall Street Journal. “There’s probably been some self-censorship based on what they fear their peers may think about them.”

Price structured the syllabus to bring together both ancient and modern voices. They began with reading Plato’s Apology and On Liberty by John Stuart Mill, transitioning into contemporary works such as Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell and The War on Cops by Heather Mac Donald.

“When you’re a college student, this is the time to decide what you think, and you can change your mind,” he said. “Students should understand the importance of being exposed to ideas with which they disagree and become comfortable suspending their political commitments and identities so they can listen to others’ ideas and experiment with ideas that go against the ideological status quo.” 

Price, who is also co-director of the Gary L. McDowell Institute, doesn’t tell students what to think. “The goal was never to have students reach a specific conclusion,” he said. “When they gave me an argument for X, I responded with an argument against X. That’s what I’m here to do.” 

His aim, he said, was for students to leave as intellectual friends with the skills and courage to examine and express their beliefs.

“Students must have some theoretical framework to defend their views, to be able to listen more carefully to each other, to be able to move and not move as needed in an argument." 

Managing discourse across differences

For McDowell fellow Kalina Kulig, You Can’t Think That! lived up to its name. “I took this class because I was eager to engage with differing opinions,” said Kulig, a senior philosophy, politics, economics, and law major from Denver. As a result, Kulig said she developed sharper thinking skills. “I walked away with a better understanding of my own views, but more importantly, I came to understand where people whom I disagreed with were coming from.”

In particular, she valued learning how to communicate across political divides. “The vast majority of people approach politics from a desire to do good,” she noted. “Dr. Price was a fantastic discussion leader, who asked well-placed follow-up questions to help us think through our opinions.”

The goal was for lessons to extend beyond the classroom door — and they did, as he often heard students making plans to continue the conversation over lunch. “I don’t think we give students enough credit for what they can do, what they’re capable of doing. But if you create the right environment, they thrive,” he said, noting the course will not be offered next spring while he’s on sabbatical.