The Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education (CEVIHE) seeks to strengthen higher education by making serious engagement with competing ideas a durable part of teaching, research, and campus experiences.
Housed at Tufts University, the Center develops, tests, evaluates, and disseminates programs and curricula that prepare students for mature citizenship and responsible leadership, support faculty in teaching and researching contested public affairs and policy questions, and equip other colleges and universities with practical models they can adapt.
Our History
CEVIHE was established on September 3, 2025, amid renewed questions about whether universities are exposing students to a sufficiently broad range of serious ideas, cultivating the intellectual and civic habits required for life in a pluralistic society, and sustaining research environments in which difficult questions can be examined openly.
During its inaugural academic year, the Center moved rapidly from proof of concept to institutional practice. CEVIHE established faculty, community, and student advisory boards; created recurring student-facing programs and a student leadership ecosystem; launched undergraduate and postdoctoral fellowships; organized public and scholarly convenings; began developing curricula on contentious and consequential questions; and opened a dedicated home at 97 Talbot Avenue, Medford. This foundation allows the Center to deepen its work at Tufts while developing models and resources for higher education broadly.
Our Mission and Goals
CEVIHE is committed to renewing the university’s intellectual mission by fostering a culture of engagement across ideological, religious, cultural, and disciplinary differences. We aim to bring innovation and excellence to teaching, research, and campus experiences.
The Center pursues four related goals:
- To prepare students for mature citizenship and responsible leadership by cultivating intellectual humility, analytic rigor, moral courage, close reading, generous listening, independence of judgment, and the capacity to understand opposing arguments.
- To support faculty who want to broaden the range of readings, arguments, methods, and evidentiary traditions represented in teaching and research, particularly on sensitive and contested subjects.
- To strengthen a campus culture in which open inquiry, constructive disagreement, and engagement across differences are recognized as essential features of academic life.
- To develop practical tools, curricular resources, evidence, and institutional models that educators and universities beyond Tufts can test, adapt, and improve.
How We Work
CEVIHE’s strategy rests on a clear institutional logic: robust intellectual and civic habits develop through repeated, structured encounters with serious disagreement. Campus culture changes when research, curriculum, student leadership, public events, and informal intellectual life reinforce one another over time.
Student formation and leadership. CEVIHE creates sustained learning pathways through courses, reading groups, the Edge Fellowship for first-year undergraduates, advising, student employment, enrichment opportunities, and student leadership bodies. Students participate as co-creators of the Center’s work and help shape a campus culture in which disagreement becomes an opportunity for learning.
Faculty-led curriculum and research. The Center supports voluntary, discipline-sensitive collaboration with faculty and academic units. Its work includes curricular innovation, teaching resources, interdisciplinary research, the Postdoctoral Fellowship in Expanding Viewpoints, scholarly convenings, and support for early-career researchers whose work broadens the range of serious questions and perspectives represented in their fields.
Public convenings and campus culture. CEVIHE treats public events as gateways into deeper learning. Headliner events, public forums, conferences, co-sponsored events, and student-led programs connect participants to courses, reading groups, research, and continuing discussion. The Center’s home at 97 Talbot Avenue serves as an intellectual commons for seminars, meetings, informal conversations, and collaborative work.
Measurement and wider impact. CEVIHE uses evidence to improve its programming and courses. The Center evaluates student learning, faculty collaboration, curricular development, campus culture, research production, and the adoption of its practices by other institutions. Annual reports, curricular guides, teaching materials, case studies, workshops, and public scholarship allow the Center’s work to travel beyond Tufts.
Our Broader Vision
CEVIHE’s long-term ambition is to become a durable intellectual hub at Tufts and a practical national model for higher education. Success will be measured by changes in practices: students who engage in disagreement with confidence and humility; faculty who have stronger tools for teaching and researching contested questions; scholars who expand the intellectual range of their disciplines; student organizations that collaborate across differences; and peer institutions that adapt CEVIHE’s materials and methods.
At its strongest, CEVIHE will demonstrate how universities can respond to polarization and declining trust through the core work of higher education: teaching students to read carefully, argue honestly, listen generously, think independently, and learn from those with whom they disagree.