By Steven Fesmire , Green Mountain College

Protests turned violent on the Berkeley and Middlebury campuses; students shouted down speakers at MacMaster University and UCLA and blocked entry to a talk at Claremont McKenna : These are among the many recent incidents that have students, faculty and outside observers searching for ways to debate controversial issues on campus without dogmatism and groupthink .

In the aftermath of these incidents, campus protesters are caricatured as criminals and thugs by their opposition. Protesters, in turn, portray their critics as nothing but cogs in the machine of the status quo . Sadly, these caricatures feed into what journalist Juliet Eilperin has called our national fight club politics : a black-and-white, us-versus-them outlook that has risen since the mid-1990s.

As a researcher in ethics, Ive been especially interested in how people can make wiser decisions and communicate more effectively . Thankfully, campus activists are targeting a lot of the unfortunate learned behaviors that inhibit mutual growth and underlie botched moral decision-making: racism , xenophobia, classism, sexism and gender discrimination.

But much of campus protest as well as pushback against it is characterized by a sort of moral fundamentalism, a my-way-or-the-highway approach to right and wrong. Thats a recipe for failed communication and bad decision-making.