Students, administrators and faculty from Bay Area universities engaged in constructive dialogue about election-related issues at a student-led event on campus Saturday.

The Gulf Bridgean event co-hosted by the Stanford Political Union (SPU) and BridgeUSA chapters from UC Berkeley, San Jose State University (SJSU), and Saint Mary’s College of California, featured student-led dialogue and a speaker panel of administrators and faculty members from participating schools. Students addressed important issues such as immigration, abortion and foreign policy in Ukraine and Gaza. A panel of speakers focused on the importance of local and community civic engagement.

During the panel, Corey Cook, executive vice president and provost of the College of St. Mary, criticized partisan divisions and argued that there was too much focus on the presidential election. Restoring democracy results from local work bridging political differences within a community, Cook said.

“The most meaningful thing you can do is restore our democracy by working with people on the issues you care about,” he said. “The real work is that local thing that students can do now because they can do it through their courses. I can do it through internships. They can do it through partnerships with the Haas Center.”

Cook also criticized universities for being too electorally focused, noting that higher education institutions “focus on these big electoral moments as what it means to be civically engaged,” he said.

Several participants said that student activists frequently struggle to understand the power structures of a university. They noted that this leads to struggles in implementing changes in university policy and a tendency to attack those who have a “title” of institutional authority.

“Universities are really heavily controlled, in many ways, by their faculty governance,” said Norman Spaulding, a professor at Stanford Law School. He added that student activists with a “strategy that alienates faculty” are unlikely to succeed in changing university policy.

Luke Terra, deputy director of the Haas Center for Public Service, said Stanford staff and faculty are often slow to create student spaces for community conversations and emphasized the importance of celebrating student leadership. When asked how Stanford students could build or access communities of collaborative and coalitional change, Terra encouraged students to take advantage of the resources offered by the Haas Center, such as speaking with peer advisors and participating at the Cardinal Quarter.

“I think our students often feel like there are conversations that we — collectively, as a community — should be having that they don’t see being offered around them,” Terra said.

Ross Irwin, BridgeUSA’s co-founder and director of development, said he hopes students will walk away from the event optimistic about the constructive dialogue. Irwin said universities are improving their efforts to facilitate constructive dialogue, but there is more to do.

“I think if we’re really going to create a culture of respectful disagreement on campuses, it’s going to have to come from both the bottom — from the students — and the top — from the administrator, from the faculty,” Irwin said, “so that all places on campus are places for constructive, respectful disagreement, and it’s not just events like this that have to carry a lot of that burden.”

BridgeBerkeley President Samantha Dalton, a UC Berkeley student who co-organized the event, agreed that universities could do more, but emphasized the importance of student-led conversations without faculty influence.

“I think what it really comes down to is students also having that separate space to engage in that dialogue without someone standing over your shoulder,” Dalton said.

Participants said the event provided a respectful environment and exposure to diverse viewpoints.

“I think it was a really great event,” said Colin Weis ’28. “It definitely highlighted different points of view.”

SJSU student Chima Nwokolo and Berkeley student Lucy Cox both said they enjoyed the event.

“I think most of the tables had a lot of really good questions to ask, and they weren’t afraid to ask some of the controversial questions,” Cox said. “Even though some of us might self-identify as liberal or conservative, we found a lot of common ground on things I didn’t really expect to find common ground on.”