Last semester, as I was quietly enjoying a delicious cup of matcha alongside a deep-focus study session at Cafe Dulce, a guy beside me asked about the article I was writing. The conversation, which was congenial at first, gradually soured as I expounded on human rights and the current political climate in the United States. 

Midway through discussing immigration, he became quiet before asserting that, although he liked me, he was “for Trump.” In a moment, any window for friendship, or even good-natured debate, was shut. 

Upon reflection, I became fixated on the interaction, wishing I could have asked him the reasoning behind his stance. It also made me think: How truly beneficial is instinctively avoiding antithetical perspectives? Perhaps a simpler, initial question would be: Why and how have we begun to do this? 

According to a 2025 report by education firm EAB, political polarization in university-age students can begin with the universities we choose to attend. The survey found that 29% of students decided against applying to a college for political reasons. 

Researchers at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute traced the outcome of students choosing universities based on politics by analyzing the political views of college students from 1982 to 2019. According to their findings, student body populations went from including a wide range of political points of view to being centered on one side. Some schools shifted more right-leaning; others became more left-leaning. 

Furthermore, consideration of politics extends beyond choosing colleges and into social interactions at those schools. Another study by Brown found that nearly 70% of their student population cited valuing political concurrence when making friends. There appears to be a common consensus that amiability is impossible between two people with different sets of beliefs.

Political polarization within universities is evident, but why exactly do we exclusively congregate with our political twins? 

The primary reason is likely students’ reluctance to share their political views. According to the Spring 2024 Harvard Youth Poll conducted by the Harvard Kennedy School, one-third of students aged 18 to 29 said they felt uncomfortable revealing their political views on campus, fearing negative repercussions. 

This fear is understandable considering that what each political party stands for has drastically diverged from one another within the past decade, according to a 2025 study published in Nature Human Behavior. More than ever, many people view politics not as a matter of personal opinion, but as an indicator of moral standing. 

This conflict is manifesting in actual politics: Future governors trade insults instead of answering questions, elected officials spend their downtime bashing their opponents on X and, worse yet, debates rarely end before someone lobs insults. Everyone is, simply, enraged by one another. 

Because of this infectious contempt, we’re losing out on more than we think. Debates and discussions between opposing points of view exist for a reason; without them, we don’t improve or evolve as a society. 

To demonstrate, take generative artificial intelligence as a model. Large language models and applications such as ChatGPT are trained on the public internet. As such, the more AI content saturates the digital media market, the more AI starts to train on its own content. This eventually leads to what researchers call the “model collapse,” a degenerative learning process in which a model’s quality degrades over successive generations of training on its own data.

There’s a reason these models are referred to as “artificial intelligence”: They’re developed using external, human-generated content. Their eventual crash, therefore, foreshadows our own imminent failure, which will manifest as the stunting of any human improvement after refusing to take in any external ideology. 

It’s hard to swallow that there’s a better alternative to vilifying and ostracizing those who disagree with us, eliminating our own evolution in the process. In truth, we need those different perspectives. They may not always be “politically correct” or conventional, but without them, we give up the best part of human nature: the ability to understand, connect and advance. 

I saw my Cafe Dulce debater about a month after my initial interaction with him. That time, I asked him why he thought what he did and listened carefully. Though I didn’t agree with much of what he said, his opinions made me think about things I would never have thought about before. 

So as we all start the next year and come across new faces, reconsider the importance of listening to someone with a different perspective — even if it’s outside your realm of belief.