With polarization at record levels in America, the question of how the nation moves past this moment of division and conflict has few clear answers. One proposed path forward, advocated by the Center for Enlightened Disagreement, launched in 2024 at Northwestern University, is for people to get better at listening across difference and disagreement and to get trained in having uncomfortable, even difficult, conversations respectfully.
That approach is now getting some significant philanthropic backing. On September 3, Northwestern University announced that Alec Litowitz and spouse Jennifer Leischner Litowitz, a Northwestern alumna and parent, had donated $20 million to support the Center for Enlightened Disagreement.
The investment is designed to provide foundational support and scale up the center’s work to address polarization on campus and give students the intellectual tools and analytical skills they need to build understanding and engage in a healthy way across differences.
“Exchanging conflicting opinions freely and openly can fuel innovation and change, force us to think critically and push us to expand our worldview,” said donor Jennifer Litowitz, who is also a Northwestern University trustee and director of hospitality for the family firm, QStar Capital, where she oversees strategy and design projects.
“We want to have a positive impact on the next generation,” the mother of four sons told IP. “We see this as a way to cultivate curiosity, encourage mutual respect, expand people’s minds and foster constructive dialog, which are all opportunities to grow.”
The center uses a multifaceted approach combining research, curriculum, outreach and conversation. Student sessions focus on evidence-based efforts to promote open mindedness, identify cognitive biases and work collaboratively to get beyond disagreement and move into constructive, respectful dialogue.
In recognition of the couple’s largesse, the newly renamed Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement has the potential to reach thousands of students.
“If we truly want to have meaningful dialogue and navigate across difference, we need to start with a better understanding of ourselves before we can try to understand others,” Alec Litowitz, founder and former CEO of Magnetar Capital, told IP. He now serves as the founder and managing partner of QStar Capital. “The intent of the center is to teach this type of critical thinking to create a foundation of understanding for constructive discussion and debate. The result may not be agreement, but something equally valuable: enlightened disagreement.”
The philanthropic couple, who also funded and support a graduate creative writing program at Northwestern, said they see this latest gift as an investment that will help drive real progress and necessary change — on campus and beyond.
“Our nation is threatened today by the politics of identity and persistent divisions based on geography, class, religion and educational attainment,” former Northwestern President Michael H. Schill said in a Spring 2025 Northwestern Magazine profile on the center. “We increasingly lack the capacity to understand each other and to empathize with people who seem to be not like us. Solving such problems is what higher education institutions should be about.”
Addressing polarization on campus
Launched In February 2024, the Center for Enlightened Disagreement is a university-wide research hub housed in the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern’s graduate school of business. It’s codirected by Kellogg faculty members Eli Finkel and Nour Kteily. Both have expertise working to understand and remedy polarization. “Our society has become so divided that people avoid talking to others with different views — and when those conversations do happen, they can quickly become toxic,” said Finkel, who studied intimate partner relationships for much of his career, in a university alumni magazine interview.
A professor of psychology at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Finkel likens America’s current dysfunctional political discourse to a troubled marriage. Hallmarks include contempt, disdain, lack of kindness and generosity, and associating only with people who despise the other party. Given the parallels, he thought there might be lessons from the world of facilitating constructive conversations within marriages struggling with conflict that could be useful when dealing with political disharmony.
Finkel told Northwestern Magazine that the country is largely polarized around emotion, not substantive issues. “We don’t necessarily disagree more in the 21st century than we did, say, 30 or 40 years ago, “ he said. “We have a huge difference in how much we dislike the other side, which is the opposite of what we’d want. I want us to have big differences on substantive issues but ideally without hating the people on the other side.”
The center isn’t looking to tamp down disagreement but instead help students learn to better navigate it. “We don’t want people to stop disagreeing but rather to harness the power of disagreement,” Kteily told the magazine. This kind of thinking appeals to the Litowitzes, who had been having related conversations with campus leadership for about two years and who felt that rather than reinventing the wheel, it made sense to marry their mission (and donation) to the center, given their shared vision.
The approach is rooted in research. The center is trying to generate an evidence-based program for what strategies and interventions really do work to combat uncivil discourse and aims to spread those insights broadly. “The idea is that disagreement is not a bug to be fixed, but rather a strength to be harnessed. Disagreement helps to drive innovation, promotes the wisdom of crowds,” Finkel told IP. “The problem is that navigating disagreement constructively is difficult, especially for moralized issues. In such cases, our human psychology pushes us to distorted perceptions of the other side, to view issues of legitimate political debate as issues of good and evil.”
That’s where the notion of enlightened disagreement comes into play. “We adopted the phrase because we seek to help people, organizations and society mitigate the dangers of moralized disagreement (including political violence) and leverage its promise (including by cultivating a fairer society),” said Finkel. “The goal is not to pursue some sort of milquetoast middle, but rather to canvas a broad range of ideas and work together to identify the best of them.”
Enlightened disagreement and widespread campus unrest
Northwestern has been no stranger to campus unrest in recent years. Since Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the university has come under scrutiny for its handling of pro-Palestinian protests and encampments and for incidents of antisemitism on campus. The Litowitzes’ donation announcement came a day before university president Michael Schill resigned following a three-year tenure marked by both his efforts to promote free expression and engagement across difference and criticism of his handling of campus tensions. (The Litowitzes said the timing of the two announcements is completely coincidental.)
Schill’s difficult term as president included attacks from congressional Republicans and federal funding cuts that forced the university to announce in July it would eliminate about 425 jobs (half were already vacant). That comes on top of April’s abrupt freeze of $790 million in federal research funds to the university amid disputes over campus vigils.
Schill’s resignation — in which he acknowledged the “extraordinary challenges” he faced — is the latest in a series of high-profile departures from elite universities, including several Ivy League schools, during Trump’s second term.
The center, it would seem, has its work cut out for it.
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A massive task ahead — and an opportunity
Reducing the amount of virulent animosity in the world today can seem like an insurmountable task. But the Litowitzes, whose philanthropy focuses on education, arts culture and human services, see an opportunity to make a difference.
“Constructive disagreement is a very powerful tool,” said Alec Litowitz, who is the son of two psychoanalysts who attended Northwestern. “Advances derive from constructive disagreement and stagnation derives from unconstructive polarization. Enlightened disagreement is an opportunity for growth.”
It’s also hard to come by. The couple hope Northwestern will serve as a trailblazer in sharing the importance of enlightened disagreement and provide a call to action that resonates and is taken up at other campuses across the country.
It’s certainly an issue that philanthropy is weighing in on at other universities. Take, for example, a $100 million anonymous gift last September to the University of Chicago’s Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression to support open discourse. And consider the new course Openness to Opposing Views — which is funded by four anonymous donors — that kicked off this summer at the University of California, Berkeley.
Northwestern’s center may be the first housed inside a business school that leans into the inherent value of disagreement. The Litowitzes said spurring similar efforts at other universities would be a huge sign of success from their perspective.
“Everyone’s looking at ways to meet the moment. These are very charged times, it would be great to address them and lower the temperature,” said Jennifer Litowitz. Added her husband: “Current events make the need for this all the more urgent.”
