At the 2020 Silfen Forum, hosted by President Amy Gutmann, students, faculty, staff, and alumni tuned in to hear from a group of distinguished experts—Ashley Parker, Julián Castro, Donna Brazile, Peggy Noonan, and Jeb Bush, with Michael Delli Carpini of the Paideia Program serving as the event’s moderator. This year’s Forum was co-sponsored by Penn’s SNF Paideia Program.

“Our politics is a mirror of our culture,” said former Florida Governor Jeb Bush last Tuesday, during Penn’s 11th David and Lyn Silfen University Forum, which had a theme this year of “Civil Discourse in Uncivil Times.”

Governor Bush, who has also served as a Presidential Practice Professor at Penn, was joined on Zoom by Donna Brazile, a political strategist, author, and Fox News contributor; Julián Castro, the 16th U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and former mayor of San Antonio, Texas; Peggy Noonan, an author, The Wall Street Journal columnist, NBC News and ABC News contributor, and a 2018 Penn honorary degree recipient (Almanac February 6, 2018); and Ashley Parker, a Pulitzer-prize winning White House reporter for The Washington Post, senior political analyst for MSNBC, and a Penn alumna (C’05).

“The best way to preach civility is to practice it,” said Ms. Brazile.

“Read conservative publications and liberal publications, watch Fox News and MSNBC. Then you can make your own decisions, but you’ll be best informed,” said Ms. Parker.

The hour-and-a-half long event, which brought together what President Gutmann called a “blue-ribbon panel” of experts, was originally slated for this past spring, but was moved to this semester and to a live, online format due to COVID-19. More than 1,000 people tuned into the event. It can be viewed at https://silfenforum.upenn.edu/webcast

In the midst of a historic presidential election, a worldwide pandemic, and the largest mass movement for racial justice in generations, the conversation, which encouraged listeners to reach across divides, came at a pivotal time.

“With 20 days to go before a presidential election, political scientists are documenting hyper-partisan divides, demonization of political opponents, and rampant misinformation gone viral over social media, even about basic matters of life and death,” said President Gutmann, as she opened the Forum. “But these phenomena are not new to 2020. It’s well documented that we tend to listen to like-minded media, we tend to shut out facts that challenge our own beliefs. … It takes hard work to counter these tendencies.”

President Gutmann, who closed out the Forum by summing up its key components, explained how the panelists had “laid out the stakes” and how “it’s up to us to take their advice to heart, to mind, and to action.

“This is an opportunity to keep the conversation going,” she said.