I absolutely agree that you do not have to believe in the equal validity of ideas to promote equality. You only have to believe every individual has an equal right to hold and communicate their ideas. Whether it is important to avoid certain topics or not probably depends on the context. If you’re talking about something that isn’t obviously related to politics or religion, it’s probably smart not to go there. But many ideas people disagree about, probably the ones they disagree about most strongly, have to do with politics and religion, so they can’t be avoided. I certainly don’t have the magic bullet to facilitate dialog between people who disagree, but I think it is important to emphasize the distinction between ideas and people and to not try to silence those who disagree with you. It also helps if people can take criticism of their ideas without taking it personally, which I feel that I can do easily, but this is not the case for many people. I wonder if that is something that students could be taught to do, but I suspect it would be very hard to achieve.

Agreed!

That is very good to know, and something I’ll definitely have to look into. I’ve always struggled with how to bring up topics like that, that just don’t fit into most engineering classes.