Opinion: Balancing humility and conviction is the art of disagreeing well

UCL President & Provost, Dr Michael Spence, writes in Times Higher Education about the need to disagree well, and how everyone needs to learn to approach any discussions with epistemic humility and a willingness to listen carefully. It is a given in most modern liberal democracies that diversity is a good thing - that it encourages innovation, enriches communities and helps to build economies. But diversity also entails challenges. Diversity means difference, difference almost always entails disagreement, and disagreement can lead to division, threatening social cohesion. For democracies, therefore, citizens learning to disagree well is not optional, but rather a core survival skill. Learning to live with, and even to celebrate, difference does not mean avoiding the disagreements that difference inevitably creates. It means facing up to disagreement and learning from the process.