Learning to Argue Well is the Point of Education

Andrew Perrin, SNF-Agora professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, reflects on leading a high-stakes effort to redesign general education at the University of North Carolina, revealing how institutional change sparks deep and often personal disagreements about what students really need to learn. What begins as a debate over course requirements becomes a broader argument about the purpose of higher education itself. Perrin describes shifting the focus from content coverage to core capacities like asking questions, evaluating evidence, and acting on informed judgment. The conversation highlights how academic turf wars, incentives, and identity shape conflict, even among experts. Ultimately, this conversation reframes argument as a fundamental skill at the heart of education, citizenship, and public life.

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Transcript

Michael Lee : [00:00:00] When we disagree is a show about arguments, how we have them, why we have them, and their impact on our relationships and ourselves. We consistently underestimate how long tasks will take and we overestimate what we can accomplish. This planning afallacy explains why projects run late, why renovations exceed budgets, and why promises get broken and disagreements.

The planning fallacy creates conflicts between optimistic promisers and frustrated promise receivers between those who plan and those who suffer when plans fail. The planning fallacy can destroy trust in relationships. Your partner promises to be ready in five minutes and takes 20 or more. Your friend swears they'll help you move, but shows up hours late.

Your he, your teenager, insists they can finish homework in an hour, then needs three. They're not lying. They might genuinely believe they're optimistic estimates, but repeated planning failures feel like [00:01:00] deception to those who suffer the consequences at the workplace. The planning fallacy can create cascading failures, marketing promises, delivery dates that engineering can't meet, or managers set deadlines based on best case scenarios, not realistic scenarios or worst case scenarios.

Teams commit to more than they can deliver. Understanding the planning fallacy improves relationships and reduces conflicts. We can add buffer time to everything when estimating. Consider our past performance and not hope for improvements. When others give estimates, maybe double them to yourself. Most importantly, recognize that planning fallacy isn't just dishonesty.

It's really human. We're all pretty terrible at predicting how long things will take and forgiving others planning failures as you'd want. Yours forgiven is a decent set of advice. Better yet, plan for planning failures. I'm more Michael Lee, director of the Civility Initiative, and Professor of Communication at the College of Charleston.

Our guest today on When We Disagree is Andrew Perrin. [00:02:00] Andrew is the SNF Agora Distinguished Professor of Sociology and the chair of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. His last book was American Democracy from Tocqueville to Town Hall to Twitter, and he is currently working on a book about how Americans argue badly.

Andrew, tell us an argument story. 

Andrew Perrin : Thanks so much for having me. I was trying to figure out which of a couple of interesting ones to talk to you about. I think the one that I'll maybe spend the most time on today was working with several colleagues on trying to redesign a general education curriculum for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which is where I was I was on the faculty.

I led that effort in 2016 to 2019. And as you can imagine, that's a pretty big deal for a college. It's a big deal to make a decision about. What it is that student that all students need to know in order to graduate college. And as you can imagine, everybody's [00:03:00] got their own idea of what's most important, what's not important, and how to do it well.

And so going through that process, leading that process was probably the most interesting. Set of disagreements to talk about. 

Michael Lee : What was UNC? I'm from North Carolina, so I call it Carolina. Yes. What was Carolina shifting from and shifting to in terms of gen ed requirements? 

Andrew Perrin : Yeah, so Carolina had a pretty conventional gen ed requirement.

We call it a check box or a cafeteria style curriculum where it said basically take a certain number of social sciences, a certain number of natural sciences, et cetera. And then a few other things have been grafted on top of that, like a requirement for a course that focused on social and ethnic diversity, stuff like that.

But it was pretty our students understood it as a series of hoops to jump through a series of boxes to check. They did not see it as anything that was coherent or that they saw as really driving an ex exciting [00:04:00] educational experience. 

Michael Lee : And so were you gonna shift it to, how do you make general education what everybody should know, coherent from the sciences to history and beyond?

Andrew Perrin : Yeah, no, it's a great question. And the main thing that we tried to do was we started at the beginning. We said, we are not gonna start with, we've always done it this way. We're not gonna start with our peers. Do it this way. We're gonna start with. Why should a student take a certain set of courses in order to be generally educated at Caroline?

And and what we ended up doing was to say look, what do we want them to be? Because they've been through this process. I think most students and parents and educators want our students to be employable. We want them to be able to have good jobs and have fulfilling careers that contribute to society.

We also want them to be good citizens, right? There's, it's always been an ambition of higher ed that we're helping our students to be responsible [00:05:00] members of the political society that they're part of. And we want them to be something that we call lifelong learners. We want 'em to be people who are intrinsically curious, excited to learn about the world.

I think the big bet that we placed. In that curriculum was we think all of these are based on the same set of skills. So instead of giving students one set of skills to be employable, another set to be good citizens, and another set to be lifelong learners, we decided we wanted to combine that into one set of skills that students would learn really well and would put them in great shape to be both employable and excellent citizens, and to have that.

Coveted intellectual style of habit of mind for them to work with. 

Michael Lee : So one way, at least the broadest possible answers to this question, what should all students know? One answer would be they should be more knowledgeable, and one answer would be they should be more skillful. 

Andrew Perrin : And I think [00:06:00] what we came up with was something we called capacities, which is a blend of knowledge and skills.

But we think students ought to be able to ask really good questions to know what the right questions are to ask. They ought to be able to assemble excellent evidence whether that evidence is already out there or they need to gather it themselves. They should know how to analyze that evidence and make good judgements about what the answers to those questions are.

And then they ought to be able to both make good judgements about what to do about it, and they ought to be able to act on it in the world. Whether that means voting in a particular way or making a particular investment decision, or making a scientific decision. Those are all ways that they act on evidence.

Even though evidence is usually not complete, it's always, insufficient in some way. So our big bet was that. If we can get students to understand that cycle in any one of a number of different topic areas [00:07:00] that, that was gonna give them the tools that they need to to move forward.

Michael Lee : Just so I have it right, the capacities you were trying to build. That blend, that blur the gap between being knowledgeable and being skillful, and also perhaps maximize employability, being good citizens, loving learning, being lifelong learners are the ability to ask good questions, to find, gather, and interpret evidence, and then to act on the basis of that interpretation.

Did I miss anything? 

Andrew Perrin : I think that's a good summary. 

Michael Lee : Okay. How did your quest to get these enshrined in Carolina's gen ed curriculum go? 

Andrew Perrin : The, ultimately the quest went great. That's effectively, that is the core of the curriculum that we ended up designing and that got adopted.

So very proud of the outcome. But along the way, there was a lot of disagreement. A lot of faculty felt that we were denying the importance of their particular field. I can't tell you how [00:08:00] many conversations I had with someone who says, it's fine for everyone else, but every student has to take history, right?

Or it's fine for everyone else, but every student has got to take some chemistry. Because my topic, my subject area is truly important. And so there was a lot of that, what we would call turf war. And I think partly it's genuine. Professors are trained from the beginning to think that what they're doing is really important and they're all right.

It is all really important. It's also the case that, as is true in lots of universities, money follows force registrations. And so departments have a real incentive to try to hold on to some of what they're teaching in that general education curriculum, because that's where some of their budget's coming from.

So for both of those reasons, we had to go in front of people and make a case that they needed to make a, they needed to have the conversation on the terrain of why do our students need [00:09:00] this? Not is this important? 

Michael Lee : And what would you say to be like, oh, we will role play it out. I teach ancient 

Andrew Perrin : Yeah. 

Michael Lee : Greek 

Andrew Perrin : tragedy.

So my point and the point that I kept making time and time again was look there are 36 departments and programs in the College of Arts and Sciences at Carolina. Every single one of them is full of great teachers teaching really important material. So even if we were to just to require one course in every important department or program.

We'd be looking at the majority of each student's full college career. So just sh just telling me that the material is important is not adequate. The question is, what is the way that I often put it was tell me what a student needs from your course. That if they're not gonna major in your course, say Student's not gonna be a history major student's not gonna be a chemistry major.

Breaks my heart, but the student's not gonna be a sociology major. What do they need? Coming out of that [00:10:00] coming outta that class, why should they take it if they don't need to know the particulars of that course's content? 

And I think people ultimately got that right and they said look, what I can teach through chemistry is I can teach a particular analytic mindset, or I can teach a particular kind of quantitative reasoning, or I can give students the tools that they might actually use somewhere else.

And that was really the gold standard for us. 

Michael Lee : Curious about the role of communication in this, and specifically building a kind of culture of argument. And so if we're going back to the skills we're talking about, asking good questions, interpreting or finding evidence, interpreting that evidence and acting on that basis.

At what point in there is there room for rival interpretations about the questions, about the evidence, and about how to interpret that evidence? And then what should we do when we come up with inevitable disagreements about finding and interpreting [00:11:00] evidence? 

Andrew Perrin : Absolutely. I think the reality is that the evidence is never absolute or dispositive.

The evidence is always tenuous. 

And so I would say that whole cycle that I mentioned is really about it's a big picture way of thinking about argument as the core of what students need to be able to do again, across their whole adult lives. Yes I'm not a rhetoric and I'm not an argument person per se, but I do think that what we're looking at is asking we're asking students to be able to do a really good job of building what they think is the best argument, and then listening to other arguments and pushing pushing for their position, in a good public scene.

Michael Lee : Are there any rival conceptions of what, of answers to the question? What should all students know that you think have any merit compared to this one? 

Andrew Perrin : Look, I think I'm a pluralistic kind of guy. I think a lot of them have lots of merit. The other two big competing [00:12:00] styles of curricula are number one, the open curriculum basically says, let students choose whatever they wanna take.

And and number two the the, what you might call a core curriculum. All students should have to read a particular set of texts. They should be subject to particular right? Say knowledge of the founding of the American Republic particular sets of knowledge that they should have.

Michael Lee : Some kinds of specialization perhaps. 

Andrew Perrin : I, I'm very involved in a pretty pluralistic group of folks working on a question of civic thought in the academy. That's what does it mean to do a good job of teaching students to be good citizens? And there's certainly a faction in that coalition that thinks that what people really, what we need to make sure we do is, students need to read the Federalist Papers and the Declaration of Independence, and they need to read some Hobbes and lock, and they've.

Philosophical slash documentary knowledge. I'm not against that. I think I teach those texts in my [00:13:00] classes too. I think they're valuable. I think it's important, but I think they're important because they provide the stuff out of which a good argument is made. So I think they're only valuable insofar as they help students do something in the world.

Michael Lee : Could you teach those or chemistry or ancient Greek history in a way that was specifically married to these four skillset outcomes? 

Andrew Perrin : Absolutely. Yes. Yes. In fact I would say like when I teach my first year seminar, that's exactly what I do. We read all those documents, but we read those documents in a way that's not, memorize what they say or why they said it, but what's the role that they played in trying to convince people or in, in building a case for a strong democratic foundation. 

Michael Lee : So you say, okay, tomorrow the University of North Carolina switches. To this curriculum that you have established, how do you then teach [00:14:00] other professors to teach in a way that gets to these skills and not in the ways that they've been accustomed to?

Andrew Perrin : I actually think that's much easier than you might think. And the reason I think that it's easier is that these, that, that when professors are doing what they're trained to do, in their research lives, in their discovery of knowledge lives, they're engaged in the same basic process. And the main thing that we're trying, that, the main shift we're asking professors to do is to teach more about how we know stuff than what we know.

But professors are in great shape. That's what they spent their PhD years doing. 

Michael Lee : There's this larger argument about the role of the university here, too. Both universities, as they face students and universities, as they face societies, there's this argument that universities can be about.

One of two things, and this is a reductive claim, often attributed to Jonathan Hy, but I'll make it here and see what your reaction is that the university can be about pursuing truth, or it can be [00:15:00] about pursuing justice. If I'm reading your, the skillset that the curriculum that you helped design at University of North Carolina is trending towards, it's more about the former, it's more about true seeking and less about justice.

Andrew Perrin : I think that's, I would say that's definitely right, but I don't really buy the strong distinction. 

Michael Lee : Okay. Go ahead. 

Andrew Perrin : Between the two, I don't think that. I don't think that the job of a university or certainly of the educational side of a university is to tell students what is more and less just but I think it's entirely appropriate for us to give students the tools for them both to figure out what they think is more and less just, or is what's or what's likely to give rise to more and less just outcomes.

And I think it's totally appropriate for us to give them the tools to act on that themselves. If we've given them the tools to understand how society works, [00:16:00] understand how justice movements might work and how to make a really good argument in public, like they can use that to pursue justice.

That's up to them that, that. I think our job as a university is to give them the tools to figure all that out. So I do think it's more on the former, on the side of the search for truth, but I don't really buy the strong distinction. 

Michael Lee : Yeah. Are you, to what extent are you evangelizing on behalf of this model for all colleges and universities in the United States?

Obviously you've moved on from North Carolina and now at Johns Hopkins. To what extent does your quest to redesign curricula, general education curricula around these skills? Continue. 

Andrew Perrin : I don't know that I would call it my core quest. I have done a bunch of work trying to help other institutions that are going through similar processes.

Just I think for good reason, the Carolina redesign process was seen as both innovative and successful. And so a lot of a lot of other institutions [00:17:00] UCLA, Michigan State, Auburn, UIC, I'm forgetting a couple of others. Purdue have all been, come to me or to others who. Called us and said, can you help us think this through?

And I've done a little bit of writing about that as well. But I'm not so much an evangelist for the gen ed model, although I think it's good as I am for being really thoughtful about the role that our university is supposed to be playing in society and trying to make us live up to that as much as possible.

So I've been doing a bunch of this work with folks trying to design civic thought initiatives within universities. A bunch of work trying to survey students as to their experiences with free speech and self-censorship in the classroom so that we can hold ourselves to account as professors and as universities are we really doing what we ought to do.

Michael Lee : Andrew Perrin, thank you so much for being on when we disagree. 

Andrew Perrin : My pleasure. Thanks for having me. [00:18:00] 

Michael Lee : When we Disagree is recorded at the College of Charleston with creator and host Michael Lee. Recording and sound engineering by Jesse k and Lance Laidlaw. Reach out to us at When We disagree@gmail.com.