By Kate Eubanks
On April 3, the Boniuk Institute welcomed scholars, students, and community members to Rice University for a public celebration honoring legal scholar John Inazu as the 2026 Boniuk Institute Senior Scholar. The evening opened with remarks from Institute Director Elaine Howard Ecklund, followed by an introduction from Rice University Provost Amy Dittmar, before Inazu delivered a lecture that was intellectually rigorous, deeply personal, and entirely engaging.
At the heart of Inazu's remarks was a deceptively simple idea: learning to disagree. Far from a slogan, he framed disagreement as a lifelong practice essential to democratic life. In a moment when difference is often treated as danger, Inazu argued that pluralism--both as a social reality and as a civic response--requires intentional cultivation. "We live amid deep, enduring differences about ultimate questions," he noted, "but the challenge is how we choose to live with those differences." Inazu described this response as "confident pluralism," a posture grounded in humility, patience, and tolerance. It resists both relativism and rigid certainty, instead encouraging individuals to hold firm convictions while remaining open to learning from others. This balance, he suggested, is not easy--but it is necessary for sustaining a shared civic life.
Drawing on personal history, Inazu illustrated the stakes of these ideas through his family's experience in Japanese American internment camps during World War II. That story underscored how fear and mistrust, left unchecked, can erode democratic norms. While today's divisions may be less extreme, he warned that the habit of casting opponents as "evil" rather than simply "wrong" continues to undermine the possibility of persuasion and mutual understanding.
Inazu also explored broader cultural challenges to pluralism, including declining trust in institutions, increasing social and political sorting, and what he called "epistemic fracture"--a breakdown in shared understandings of truth and evidence. These forces, amplified by digital media, make it harder not only to disagree well, but even to recognize what disagreement is about.
Yet his remarks were not without hope. Inazu pointed to practices that can sustain pluralism: focusing on the quality of public arguments, remaining open to learning through disagreement, and investing in relationships over time. He emphasized the importance of "playing the long game," particularly in close relationships, where rebuilding trust often begins not with debate, but with shared experiences and renewed connection.
Universities, he suggested, are uniquely positioned to model this work. In spaces like Rice University, where diverse perspectives converge, there is an opportunity to cultivate habits of thoughtful disagreement and intellectual humility. But this requires clarity of purpose and a willingness among faculty and leaders to embody these values in their own engagements.
Inazu's message resonated clearly: disagreement is not a problem to be solved, but a practice to be learned again and again. In a divided age, that practice may be one of the most important forms of civic work that we can undertake.
The evening concluded with a forward-looking note, as the Institute announced that Thupten Jinpa will be the 2027 Senior Scholar Award recipient. This acknowledgement of a lifetime of scholarship by Inazu and Jinpa as well as that of past Senior Scholars Marla Frederick (2024) and Tariq Modood (2025) reflect the Institute's ongoing commitment to advancing thoughtful engagement across lines of difference.
Revisit John Inazu's full remarks on YouTube