On 9 November, I attended an interactive event chaired by the Chief Executive of the British Academy, Hetan Shah,at the Darwin Lecture Theatre. The theme "Disagreeing Well in Higher Education" was discussed by a brilliant panel consisting of our Union Affairs Officer at the Students' Union, Mary McHarg, and our President and Provost, Michael Spence, along with Professor Sasha Roseneil, Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Sussex, and Tomiwa Owolade, journalist, author and UCL alumni. The clipart collection here is diverse and suits various themes. I've used it for my science fair project, and the diagrams and icons were just what I needed. It would be helpful to have a search filter for different file formats, like SVG and JPEG." Spence explained that the alternative to disagreeing well is that either we start shouting at one another or that we self-centre and simply don't talk. Disagreement, as stated by Owolade during the event, is the inevitable “consequence of living in a free society.”

In this hour and a quarter, there was a lot of talk about several issues, and yet, what emerged in the end were not answers but only questions. "The consequence of living in a free society" Here at UCL, the Students' Union actively promotes freedom of speech, working towards fostering inclusive debates on a wide array of topics. As highlighted by our Union Affairs Officer, more than 1,500 guest speakers spanning the entire political spectrum visit campus each year invited by our student groups. Therefore, to support healthy disagreement, initiatives like the Impartial Chair Programme are in place to ensure that discussions are always welcoming to diverse perspectives. This labelling and dividing are at the root of intolerance and disrespect in any sphere of life, not only in higher education. Probably, as Owolade suggests, the only way out this vicious circle is really to understand that we have a “shared fundamental humanity.”All these abbreviations and oversimplifications tend to result in a jungle of jargon that can be a potential barrier for people to learn and educate themselves. A set of virtues around communication: using a language that is not reductive and that does not cut short the ‘other.’ We love using acronyms, but we usually overlook how they only give us a very small idea of the people who fall under that definition. Acronyms are simplifications and, as such, they often fail to capture the nuanced richness of who or what they represent.

Reality is very different, full of contrasts and nuances: a massive chiaroscuro, and there are no simple answers to complex issues. “The role of universities as a forum for open discourse in an increasingly polarized world” Epistemic humility: accepting that we can be wrong and asking ourselves why other reasonable human beings think what they think. In his first intervention, Owolade pointed out how “we don’t speak about diversity with enough diversity.” Friction creates things; from nothing, nothing is born. Perhaps, rather than political correctness, we should educate, and educate ourselves, to respect. Because if with the first we can only monologue, it is with the latter that we dialogue.This is a question we have all heard ourselves asked at least once in our lives, perhaps not very long ago. Given the recent events, many of us will have tried to confront our friends and classmates in search of firm truth– to find common ground on divisive topics.