Photo: Yinan Chen, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons
HOLLAND, Mich., Hope College received a $1.43 million federal grant to teach students the lost art of respectful disagreement, MLive reported June 2. Colleges have traditionally provided that skill free of charge for roughly the last 900 years.
The initiative, called GRACE (Growing through Respectful and Civil Exchange), aims to help students engage with people who hold different viewpoints without immediately assuming they are Nazis, communists, fascists, cult members, or fans of Ohio State.
"We believe students benefit from hearing ideas they disagree with," said a spokesperson for the GRACE Office of Things Socrates Already Covered, describing a breakthrough educational concept first discovered by ancient Greek philosophers sometime around 400 BC.
The program has generated excitement throughout academia, where institutions are reportedly seeking additional grants to restore other lost educational functions.
Among the proposals currently under review:
$2.8 million to teach students how to ask questions.
$4.1 million to encourage reading entire books.
$6.7 million to teach people who complain about cancel culture to stop blocking everyone who disagrees with them.
$12 million to determine whether hearing a different opinion causes immediate physical harm.
The Grand Rapids Roast has been unable to confirm reports that Hope students will participate in revolutionary exercises such as listening while another person speaks, asking follow-up questions, and resisting the urge to post screenshots of conversations online.
To help Hope get started, the Roast has drafted a few course titles, free of charge:
Disagreement 101: Your Classmate Is Not Literally Hitler
Disagreement 201: People Can Be Wrong Without Being Evil
Disagreement 301: The Internet Is Not Real Life
Capstone Seminar: Surviving Thanksgiving Dinner
Local residents expressed mixed reactions.
"I thought this was what college already did," said Holland resident Gerrit Tulpmeester while paying off his student loans.
Others welcomed the effort.
"To be fair, if colleges had been doing this successfully all along, we probably wouldn't need the grant," admitted one parent.
At press time, the Grand Rapids Roast had begun drafting its own federal grant application to explore whether students benefit from exposure to ideas, a theory once considered central to the entire concept of higher education.
Reality Check
The jokes aside, Hope College received a $1.43 million federal grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), MLive reported June 2, 2026. The money funds GRACE (Growing through Respectful and Civil Exchange), a four-year effort to build a campus culture centered on civil dialogue and mutual respect. Provost Gerald Griffin is the grant's principal investigator, and communication professor Sarah Kornfield is project director. The grant supports student cohorts, a lecture series, faculty support for course design and classroom engagement, and public scholarship on the college's Virtues of Public Discourse. Promoting civil discourse on college campuses is one of the FIPSE Special Projects Program's priorities. Supporters can fairly say respectful debate is worth investing in. Skeptics can fairly ask why teaching it takes a separate federal grant. Both are good questions. Please discuss them politely.
Reality Check: read the real story from MLive
Satire. Real news, made-up jokes. Facts are credited and linked; everything else is invented. The straight story is in the Reality Check.