On a warm November day, a group of Columbia University professors set up “listening tables” near the center of campus and hailed students rushing to class, inviting them to stop and talk.

About a dozen students, alumni and faculty members sat down, grabbed some free pizza and chatted about how the protests over the Israel-Hamas war had alienated some of them and inspired others.

Then, a woman in a kaffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian scarf, spoke up and the tension rose. Over the past year, her view of the conflict had evolved, she told the group. She talked about “this genocide.”

“I wouldn’t call it a genocide,” said Scott Barry Kaufman, an adjunct psychology professor moderating the group. “Do you hate me because I disagree with you?”

No, she did not hate him — “for that reason,” she said.

“Ouch,” Kaufman replied.

As campuses have been caught up in protests and counterprotests over the Israel-Hamas war, universities have tried to regain control and dial down the temperature, driven in part by pressure from outside forces such as alumni, politicians and federal civil rights investigations into antisemitism on campuses. In the spring, some resorted to force, with arrests and suspensions.

Now, more schools are trying the gentler but also messy art of conversation as an antidote to student unrest.

Columbia has been holding weekly listening tables, hosted by a university research center called the Trust Collaboratory, since September.

They are staffed by faculty members, students and administrators (including, at one point, the university president, Katrina Armstrong). They have become a place for hundreds of students to find community, “which really makes me happy,” said Cristian Capotescu, associate director of the Trust Collaboratory.

“Once in a while, we leave the door open to mild confrontations,” he added.

Indeed, the exchange the other day — with its feints and jabs, yet desire to engage — illustrated some of the promise and disappointments of this technique.

Calls for civility are common at times of crisis, but one historian cautioned that they can be problematic if they are mainly focused on containing the behavior of the protesters.

In the 19th century, many church leaders wanted to tamp down conflict over slavery within their churches and resorted to a posture of neutrality.

“So they got very focused on preventing the discussion of slavery at all and seeing the debates as the problem rather than the moral issues at hand,” April Holm, an associate professor of history at the University of Mississippi, said in an interview.

That said, she added, “I think students should be talking to each other.”

With catchphrases like “cultivating conversations,” “curious disagreement” and “respectful disagreement across differences,” advocates of civil discourse say the guiding principle is not to win the argument but to understand the other person’s point of view.

But the desire to win is a hard habit to break, and even some leaders of such programs concede that there are problems.

“As much as I love civil discourse and promote it, I have many criticisms,” said Jason Vadnos, a sophomore at Vanderbilt University. Vadnos is on the student advisory board of a program called Dialogue Vanderbilt, which was founded just before Hamas’ attack on Israel last year.

Often, the same people show up every time, Vadnos said, and they are the peacemakers, not the hard-core activists. Going to a one-time event is unlikely to change behavior in the longer term. And it is hard to cut through raw emotions to some kind of mutual respect and understanding.

When it comes to the war in Gaza, Vadnos said, many people are so emotionally invested that “even when they are hearing about other people’s perspectives, it is challenging to really step into their shoes.”

Demand for such campus programs has risen since the first Trump administration, according to the College Debates and Discourse Alliance, a group that organizes debates about contentious issues such as abortion and cancel culture.

Lately, some students have chosen to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said Doug Sprei, director of the alliance.

The evidence that these programs work is mainly anecdotal, but a research project is finding that participants become more open to people they disagree with, Sprei said.

The problems the civil discourse programs are trying to solve are painfully real.

Nevia Selmon, a Harvard Divinity School student, told the story of a friend who was tied up in knots over whom to invite to her birthday party.

“I have all these friends who are super involved in the pro-Palestinian organizing, and all these friends who feel super uncomfortable about the encampment,” Selmon recalled her friend saying. “I don’t know how I can have them in the same space.”

Selmon, who is Jewish, said anti-Zionist views seemed built into some classes.