The Symposium Against Indifference is coming Tuesday, January 30th, and the College of Arts and Sciences is ready. The symposium is called Building Bridges Through Dialogue.

Dr. Blackley, professor of music and director of choral activities at Ashland University, is the on the symposium committee.

“The symposium in general is an event that happens every other year, sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences,” he said. “It is a year long program that features a number of speakers, presenters, sessions, from people of national or international stature. We usually have four, maybe five, main speakers throughout the course of the academic year and it’s all tied together under one theme.”

One thing Blackley hopes people will take away from this symposium is communication skills.

“I would think something as simple as the ability to have a conversation with someone you don’t like, you don’t agree with, you think is totally wrong about everything,” he said. “Conservatives talking to liberals, Republicans talking to Democrats, name it.”

He goes on to say: “The whole idea of people who don’t agree with each other should still, in a civil society, be able to talk and disagree without calling each other names.”

The symposium is every other year and committee members are from “different disciplines within the arts and sciences.”

“When we first put the symposium together, which took all of last year, we use the intervening years to put this symposium together, and then we do it for a whole year,” he said. “We make a list and make that list gradually smaller and we settle on the four or five main people.”

The speakers this year are Dr. Susan Glisson and Charles Tucker.

“We’ve been conditioned to listen in order to counter someone’s statement instead of listening to understand. That’s not helpful,” Glisson said in a statement.

Each symposium has a theme. This year, it is Building Bridges Through Dialogue.

“The idea for this topic has come about during the political discourse,” he said. “People seem to be getting polarized and less and less willing to even talk, let alone give, in their points of view. So all of the presenters this year will have something to do with ‘building bridges through dialogue’. To talk to other people and see their point of view, rather than just dismissing them out of hand because their not exactly what you’d think. And we happen to think, and all of our presenters happen to think that this is an important American feature. This is something that helps democracy to actually work.”

The symposium will be held on Tuesday, Jan. 30th at 7:30 p.m. and Wednesday, Jan. 31st at 7:30 p.m. in Myers Convocation Center in the Trustees Room.

“It’s cool that we do this,” he said. “It’s eye opening and it’s great to work with my colleagues across disciplines and hear what they have to say about things.”