Join us for Heterodox Academy’s Research Colloquium Series, a virtual seminar series designed to highlight the scholarship and thought leadership emerging from our community.

This colloquium will feature Simon Cullen, Senior Fellow at Heterodox Academy, presenting the latest findings from the student chat platform, Sway.

Facilitating Constructive Disagreement at Scale: Surprising Findings from 14,000 One-on-One Student Conversations

Sway is an educational chat platform designed to promote HxA values: it pairs students who disagree about statements their instructors write, and provides an AI facilitator that joins every conversation. Since launching in summer 2024, the platform has hosted over 14,000 one-on-one student discussions across more than 100 campuses. The results have frustrated many common assumptions.

Simon Cullen will share what Sway is revealing about the abilities of students and of AI, what defeats self-censorship, how attitudes change, and the role of argumentation in persuasion. He will also present data evaluating Sway's AI facilitator for political bias and argue that the proper role for AI in higher education is facilitative rather than generative.

This colloquium offered exclusively to HxA members on September 2, 2026 at 3:00-4:00 PM EST will include time for audience discussion and Q&A. Register today to join the conversation.

About the speaker

Simon Cullen is a Senior Fellow at Heterodox Academy and co-founder and president of Disagree Wisely, a nonprofit research organization that helps learners cultivate essential intellectual virtues—humility, cognitive empathy, critical thinking, and the ability to engage constructively across differences. His research combines philosophy, cognitive science, and educational technology to improve reasoning and communication. He was a Faculty Research Fellow at the Segal Center for Academic Pluralism in 2025, and won HxA's 2024 Open Inquiry Award for his work on AI facilitation and for his Carnegie Mellon course, Dangerous Ideas in Science and Society. Sway generalizes that course's approach, so that instructors anywhere can give their students the same hands-on, low-stakes, scaffolded practice with constructive disagreement, regardless of resources.