By Phillipe Jin ’21

This year, the GRAY club will help Hill community members embrace the gray areas of politics at Hill and beyond. For co-presidents Gabe Shipper ’20 and Sasjha Mayfield ’21, the goal of the club is to find common ground between people with different political points of view. Although GRAY aims to bring together people with existing passions for civics and discussion, Mayfield and Shipper hope that it can also prompt Hill students to discover a love for civic engagement.  

As active members of the civics community at Hill, Shipper and Mayfield see GRAY as a safe environment in which people can come to understand each other while also building their own communication abilities.

“Each week we will present a topic for discussion and engage in civil discourse,” Mayfield said. “We seek to foster effective communication skills and stop people from agreeing to disagree when they misunderstand one another.”

One aspect of GRAY that Shipper emphasized is its ability to facilitate growth through active discussion. By holding discussions where almost everyone disagrees, Shipper and Mayfield hope to expose all discussion members to different perspectives and to help them critically question their own beliefs. Mayfield and Shipper want the Hill community to use these spirited discussions to mature.

“We want people to embrace the gray areas and be able to meet in the middle,” Mayfield said.

While GRAY can act as a mediator between Hill’s political extremes, it could also promote the growth of political engagement outside of the Hill campus. With the current political turmoil that the United States is experiencing, GRAY can help Hill students look beyond the Hill bubble and help Hill students become more politically engaged with the greater community. 

“GRAY aims to raise political awareness by first creating a safe atmosphere for people to express their political opinions,” Shipper said. “True diversity is intellectual diversity, and GRAY hopes to foster a diversity of opinion. By doing so people are able to get over their differences and unite, hopefully getting rid of their grudges against those with a different opinion.”