From President Ryan: Meaningful Connections Facilitate Hard Conversations

In these polarized times, colleges and universities are understandably focused on helping students learn how to “talk across difference,” as it is often put.

There are the Harvard Dialogues and the Dartmouth Dialogues; MIT, UCLA and Columbia each have a “Dialogues Across Difference” series; Carnegie Mellon runs a Deeper Conversations initiative; UNC holds Dialogue for Understanding; and UVA has its own Democracy Dialogues, all designed to facilitate civil, meaningful conversations across cultural, political and ideological differences.

These efforts are laudable, but they ought to be supplemented by something very basic: giving students a chance to get to know one another. Before students have difficult conversations across difference, it would likely help a lot for them to know a bit about each other. Conversations about difficult topics are a lot easier to have among friends than they are among strangers.

This is where Hoos Connected comes in. The idea is simple: Bring small groups of students together, led by upper-level student facilitators, to meet weekly to talk and engage in activities. The project is the brainchild of Joe Allen, the Hugh Kelly Professor of Psychology and the director of the Adolescence Research Lab. He started Hoos Connected in 2018 after observing that students, and teenagers in general, were struggling with mental health and having a hard time building strong relationships with their peers.

Since 2018, more than 4,000 students have participated in Hoos Connected, a program that facilitates weekly conversations and relationship-building.

The program became a one-credit course and has been a success by every measure. To begin, it is wildly popular and has grown exponentially. The first year, 48 students signed up; in 2024, 945 students were involved, growing by a factor of roughly 20 over six years. In total, more than 4,000 students have participated. The big numbers likely come from good reviews: Survey results indicate that students who participated have grown in their sense of connection and belonging at UVA and feel less lonely.

Students also seem to gain an appreciation for different perspectives, perhaps by realizing what they have in common, and there’s no doubt that they build genuine and lasting relationships with their fellow students—all of which means a stronger foundation for conversations about topics on which they might disagree. As one student shared in a New York Times article featuring the program: “Not only did it deepen the connections I had with [my friends], it really opened my mind to the different views and perceptions people had.”

In addition to attracting the attention of national media, Hoos Connected has caught the eye of leaders across higher education. Virginia Tech and Georgetown University, for example, recently created programs modeled on Hoos Connected, and Professor Allen has also developed a version of the program for high school students.

It all sounds fairly simple and basic, because at one level it is. To be sure, a great deal of thought has gone into how to structure the groups, prepare students to lead discussions, and measure its impact. The success of Hoos Connected is not the product of accident or luck. But at its core, the program rests on the simple idea that students will be better off if they have genuine and sustained opportunities to connect with one another and learn from one another. This is the building block of friendship and a sense of belonging, which helps students have those hard conversations not only while they are at UVA, but also once they’ve left.

Our world could use more people who understand that it is important to get to know someone before jumping to conclusions about them, and who have experienced the wonderful surprise of discovering something in common with someone who on the surface seemed quite different. Connecting with others is not a panacea, but as the students in Hoos Connected would tell you, it is a great place to start.

James E. Ryan (Law class of ’92)
President of the University of Virginia