The Divide Isn't Left vs. Right. It's Old vs. Young. And Nobody's Talking About It.

A few years ago, my kids were part of a project called Seeing Eye to Eye. The idea was simple — connect young people with seniors living in assisted care facilities over Skype, help the older residents learn how to use the technology so they could stay in touch with their own families, and see what happened when two generations who had no obvious reason to talk to each other actually did.

What happened was remarkable. The kids taught the seniors how to use Skype. The seniors taught the kids about the cities they'd grown up in — neighborhoods that no longer exist, businesses that had been there for decades, history that never made it into a textbook. They swapped something real. They needed each other. And by the end, they weren't a young person and an old person sitting across a screen. They were just people.

I've thought about that project a lot lately. Because I keep seeing the same problem in my professional life — in DEI work, in universities, in civic spaces — that Seeing Eye to Eye was quietly solving in community centers: we have stopped talking across generations. And it's costing us more than we realize.

The Divide We're Not Talking About

We spend a lot of time talking about political polarization. Left vs. right. Red vs. blue. And that divide is real. But recent research suggests we may be misidentifying the fault line that matters most right now.

The generational divide — in values, in how people understand history, in what they believe institutions owe them — is in many cases larger than the partisan divide. Older generations tend to look at American history and see a story of hard-won progress worth honoring. Younger generations look at the same history and see injustices that haven't been fully reckoned with. Both things are true. But they're not talking to each other about it — because they don't have anywhere to do that.

And here's the part that actually gives me hope: when researchers strip away the politically charged language and just ask people about ideas, the agreement is striking. People who say they oppose certain frameworks often strongly agree with the underlying principles when they're described plainly. The gap isn't always about values. It's about the words we've let become weapons — and the fact that we're not in the same room long enough to get past them.

What This Looks Like in Universities

I see this play out constantly in higher education. And nowhere more clearly than in debates about free speech.

Ask a student in their twenties about free speech and you'll often hear something like: words cause real harm, and harmful speech shouldn't be protected. They mean this sincerely. They've grown up watching online harassment destroy people's lives, they've seen language used as a weapon, and they've come to believe that protection from harm is a prerequisite for full participation. That's not weakness. That's a lived experience producing a coherent conclusion.

Ask someone from an older generation and you'll often get something closer to: the First Amendment exists precisely to protect speech we find uncomfortable, and the answer to bad speech is more speech, not less. They mean this sincerely too. They grew up understanding free expression as a hard-won protection against government overreach, and they see any restriction on speech as the beginning of a slide that history has shown goes somewhere bad. That's not callousness. That's a different lived experience producing a different coherent conclusion.

Here's what I want to be honest about: talking doesn't automatically fix this. These aren't just misunderstandings that dissolve once people get in a room together. They're genuine value differences — about what fairness means, about who bears the cost of unregulated speech, about what institutions owe the people inside them. You can have a great conversation and still walk out disagreeing. That's okay. That's actually the point.

Right now, most institutions handle this by picking a side — usually whichever one the loudest voices are pushing that week — and calling it policy. That's not leadership. That's conflict avoidance dressed up as conviction.

What I think institutions can actually do is harder and less satisfying than a clean answer. It starts with being honest that there is no neutral position on free speech. Every policy makes a choice about whose discomfort gets prioritized. The question is whether you make that choice consciously, transparently, and with input from across the generational spectrum — or whether you make it reactively, in response to whoever is most upset in the moment.

It means creating forums — real ones, not performative town halls — where people with genuinely different views on these questions have to make a case to each other rather than just to people who already agree with them. It means training people not to reach consensus but to argue better: to steelman the other side, to identify the actual point of disagreement rather than the loudest flashpoint, to separate the principle from the specific case.

And it means being willing to say out loud what most institutions won't: that a 22-year-old and a 65-year-old are going to have different intuitions about what speech costs, and both of those intuitions contain something true, and the institution's job is not to declare a winner but to hold that tension in a way that doesn't blow everything up.

I've been in enough of these conversations professionally to know that when they actually happen well, something shifts. Not always agreement. But the quality of the disagreement improves. People stop talking past each other and start actually arguing — which sounds worse but is genuinely better. You can work with a real argument. You can't work with two people performing outrage at each other across an unbridgeable gap.

What DEI Gets Wrong Here

Here's my honest assessment as someone who has spent twenty years in this work: DEI has gotten very good at naming certain kinds of difference and very bad at bridging others. We talk about race, gender, sexuality, disability — and those conversations matter. But we have almost entirely neglected generational difference as a form of diversity that requires active cultivation.

In fact, I'd argue that a lot of DEI work has inadvertently deepened the generational divide. Many of the frameworks that dominate the field were developed within a particular generational worldview and assume that worldview as the baseline. When older employees push back — not out of hostility but out of genuine confusion about norms that shifted faster than anyone explained — they're often treated as obstacles rather than as people with a different but legitimate frame.

And when younger employees feel like their concerns are being minimized or patronized by people who "don't get it" — they disengage from the conversation entirely. Both groups end up more isolated. The institution gets less diverse in the way that actually matters: in thought, in perspective, in the capacity to challenge each other productively.

What My Kids Figured Out

Seeing Eye to Eye worked because it gave people a reason to show up that wasn't about resolving their differences. It was about doing something together. Teaching someone a skill. Learning something you couldn't learn anywhere else. The connection was a byproduct of the shared task — not the goal itself.

That's the lesson I keep trying to bring into professional and institutional settings. You don't build intergenerational understanding by running a workshop about intergenerational understanding. You build it by putting people in a room with a real problem and making them actually need each other to solve it.

A senior employee has institutional knowledge that no onboarding document captures. A newer employee has a fluency with tools, platforms, and cultural shifts that no training can fully transfer. When you structure work so that both are genuinely necessary, not as a feel-good exercise but as an operational reality, something happens. People start to see each other. Not as representatives of a generation. As people.

The Common Future Thing

As the country marks its 250th anniversary this year, there's a lot of noise about which version of American history is the right one. And I get why — origin stories matter, and people are rightly invested in whose story gets told.

But I keep thinking about something my kids' project showed me: the seniors in those assisted living facilities weren't just teaching history. They were passing something on. They wanted someone younger to know what they knew and carry it forward. And the kids weren't just learning. They were being trusted with something. That act of one generation saying to another: here, this matters, take it. That's exactly what we're missing right now.

We don't need everyone to agree on what happened. We need people to care enough about the future to talk to someone who sees the past differently. That's not a DEI program. That's not a curriculum. That's just what it means to be in a community together.

I think it is. I've seen what happens when it works. And I've spent enough time watching what happens when it doesn't.

My kids figured it out with a Skype call and some seniors in assisted living. No budget. No framework. No consultants. Just a reason to show up and something real to exchange. We've built whole institutions around this problem and still can't seem to crack it. Maybe we're overcomplicating it. Maybe the answer has been in front of us the whole time — we just keep walking past it on the way to the next meeting.