The killing of political activist Charlie Kirk has thrown into sharp relief the hostility between conservatives and progressives and between champions of free speech and crusaders against hate propaganda. It also highlights a less obvious dichotomy: between a marketplace of commodified opinion, on the one hand, and seedbeds for deliberation and dialogue, on the other. The former dominates the political culture in open societies. The latter is what universities urgently need to cultivate.

The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein privileged the ethos of the marketplace in his immediate response to the news of Kirk’s death. “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him,” Klein wrote, noting that the controversial speaker believed in “argument … to be won with words.”

Klein’s tribute to an ideological opponent may be grounded in liberal political philosophy, but it fails to grasp the political economy of the marketplace that made Kirk a cultural powerhouse. A recent profile in The Economist, published before the shooting, pointed out that the teenaged Kirk “quickly figured out how to part Republican donors from their money. He told them that he was going to challenge the dominion of liberalism on America’s campuses. As college students began embracing illiberal ideas like ‘deplatforming’ conservative speakers, donors found Mr. Kirk’s sales pitch ever more appealing.” From 2018, he traveled with a camera crew, “the better to capture the idiocies of his opponents—who are still not old enough, in many cases, to order a beer.”

“In the early days,” the Economist profile continued, “Mr. Kirk attempted to win the hearts and minds of the people standing in front of him. Now, he turns them into content to win hearts and minds online.”

Kirk’s killing has been an occasion to assert the value of responding to differences verbally, not violently. But the fact that Kirk did not shoot his opponents dead shouldn’t be enough to qualify him as a poster boy for civil disagreement. Even if you suspend judgment about whether he was the hatemonger that many saw, his approach to persuasion was not what universities should be cultivating. Encounters with difference need not be a performance designed for the attention economy. They can aim to find common ground if possible, and acknowledge shared humanity if not.

When Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes introduced the idea of the “market” to advocate free competition in ideas and information, he meant it metaphorically. In contrast, Charlie Kirk’s terrain was a literal marketplace. There, verbal exchanges are commodified, packaged and monetized. The student who accepts an invitation to spar is not treated as a conversation partner, in a sincere attempt to increase mutual understanding. The goal is instead to reduce others to a caricatured “them,” which then also traps followers in a monolithic “us” conducive to mobilization and marketing.

Educators need to disabuse themselves of any naïve notion that the likes of Kirk model good-faith participation in the public sphere. He was not the first or only and won’t be the last entrepreneur to marketize the marketplace of ideas. The dominant talking-heads format of television news has for decades turned discussions about current affairs into a genre of unscripted reality TV entertainment, with guests and hosts chosen for their conflict potential. Social media algorithms famously heighten polarization for the commercial rewards it generates for platform owners.

Such exaggerated representations of differences of opinions and values are so ubiquitous that the resulting misperceptions may be self-fulfilling. If people feel that others are beyond reason and empathy, they are likely to act accordingly, withholding trust and cooperation. This creates a major problem for the future of democracy.

Over the past few years, I have been studying groups around the world who are determined to break this cycle of distrust. My forthcoming book, Fighting Polarisation: Shared Communicative Spaces in Divided Democracies (Polity), is a multisectoral and transdisciplinary look at such efforts, ranging from settler-native co-governance mechanisms in New Zealand and interfaith dialogue in India to citizens’ assemblies in Ireland.

My first stop on this global tour is the American campus. Of all the sectors I studied, universities are the institutions with the greatest power to shape their members’ communicative environment. For years, various organizers have been trying to develop campus-based opportunities for dialogue and deliberation across difference. Many of them have been working long enough for their effectiveness to have been independently verified by social scientists. They do not necessarily change students’ minds on issues that they have firm opinions about. But they reduce affective polarization—the tendency to treat others with opposing views as enemies—and increase mutual respect. Some of these programs are developed on campus, such the Dialogue, Inclusion and Democracy Lab at Providence College, while others are run by specialized external organizations such as Essential Partners. There are also informal, student-run initiatives like Breaking Bread gatherings at the University of Pennsylvania, started by pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli students who, while supporting their peers’ right to protest, also felt an aching need to understand and be understood.

Their methodologies vary at the edges, but they have some features in common. They mostly work through face-to-face communication—because a person in front of you will appear as the whole and complex human he or she is, not reducible to a pejorative, othering label. They all believe in everyone being given the chance to speak up, but also cultivate deep listening skills. The point of exchanging opposing views is not to win the argument, at least not in the short term, but to grow in mutual understanding. As UPenn student and dialogue organizer Mouctar Diarra told me, the best way to be heard was not “a perfectly crafted argument” but through “empathy and respect.” Experienced mediators, whether professional dialogue facilitators or trained peers, nudge conversations along, modeling how questions can be crafted as invitations to share, not as traps for petty point scoring. Even Braver Angels, which organizes campus debates, uses these verbal bouts as conversation starters and not to declare a winning side.

In other words, these campus events are everything that Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA is not. There are good reasons why they are not as well-known as they should be. News media know we are hardwired to attend to sights and sounds of conflict, so they are less likely to report on people trying to get along. Furthermore, the emphasis on inclusive, interpersonal dialogue means these events are small. They grow by replication, not by swelling the crowd—again making them less newsworthy than a charismatic speaker who fills a field or stadium.

I doubt that the counterpolarizers I met, whether working on campuses or in other sectors, hanker for that kind of stardom. They know that the fame game is part of the problem, reducing ordinary citizens to passive extras while larger-than-life personalities distort human relations. As Stanford University professor David Palumbo-Liu wrote about the political class, “One way we have lost a sense of being together and of being potent political actors is through the delegation to others of our responsibilities— we have given them our voice. And the people to whom we have given our voice are some of the most irresponsible on earth.”

Even if campus dialogue and deliberation cannot compete for headlines or market power, universities must give them more mindshare. They are not a substitute for more contentious forms of politics, including the disruptive protests that may be called for in an unjust world. But even when a society appears to be at war with itself and there may be an urgent need to take a stand, we shouldn’t neglect the simultaneous need to bridge divides. While the work is slow and unglamorous, such projects are probably democracy’s best hope against the rot of polarization and hate.