The Difficult Dialogues Committee was constituted in the autumn of academic year 2005-2006 by the executive director of the Cultural Center, Dr. Harvette Grey. The committee was charged with providing programming that would promote open and challenging dialogues about social differences and oppression in a supportive and safe environment to stimulate intellectual and socially engaging discussions on issues seldom discussed outside the classroom setting. The committee used the Cultural Center theme—Invisible men: Human Rights and Human Dignity for Men of Color—as one way to develop difficult dialogues. Drawing from themes identified in autumn quarter 2005 by Professor Ward Churchill and in winter quarter 2006 by Irmgard Hunt the committee developed two difficult dialogue sessions.

In autumn 2005 the committee focused on what it called “Disappearing Acts: ‘IN’ visibility and the Power to Name” to address key questions related to who has the power to name people as terrorists, Native American, Black, White etc. In the second difficult dialogue session the committee addressed the theme “Silencing Critique and Civilizing Oppression” to deal with how perpetrators of oppressive actions can claim victim status (e.g., Hitler claimed that Germany was under attack by the Jews) by appropriating language to silence critique while making people complacent, reluctant to challenge, confront or critique the reduction of civil liberties in the US and throughout the world. That is, we hoped to communicate that this rhetorical move allows those in power not only to silence those attempting to critique social inequality but to transform the latter into “uncivilized” aggressors and those in power into victims.

Because so many social tensions emerged during this year, the Difficult Dialogues committee decided to hold a final difficult dialogue session, which we called a town hall meeting. The meeting addressed explicitly a year-long set of discrimination-related issues including, but not limited to: the unacceptable harassment of the Cultural Center Executive Director (and subsequently, faculty who defended the Cultural Center) for inviting Ward Churchill; the offensive and tired “Affirmative Action Bake Sale” at which DePaul Conservative Alliance members attributed differing values to baked goods based on one’s race and gender; the deliberate positioning of the Bake Sale table directly in front of the Cultural Center for the purpose of provoking and upsetting primarily students, staff, and faculty of color; the use of university sponsorship, funding and facilities to host a decidedly non-academic and injurious, epithet-laden rant by the former wrestler known as “The Ultimate Warrior”; the approval and use of university security to remove those in attendance at The Ultimate Warrior event who sought to challenge the speaker’s ideas, insults, and epithets towards LGBTQ people, women, and people of color;  the repeated appearance of hate graffiti particularly targeting members of the LGBTQ community and students of color in the dorms, and the chronic anti-gay attacks visited upon LGBTQ students; the response from President’s office to the DePaul Conservative Alliance equating Ward Churchill with the Ultimate Warrior as well as the moral judgment of the organizers of both events. In this final session the committee asked participants to think about inequitable social hierarchies and power relationships within and outside DePaul University and what mechanisms might be developed to confront them.