Just as civil discourse does not dictate consensus or harmony, a university ought not guarantee anyone sanctuary from ideas that upset them. Quite the contrary. True scholarship requires that ideas be freely explored, debated and discussed.

If universities are doing their job, faculty, students and guest speakers will sometimes make uncomfortable assertions. They will upset people by challenging orthodoxy and conventional wisdom.

This kind of provocation is valuable, but not just for its own sake. It is valuable because diversity of thought, opinion and perspective – and the fierce and free exchange of all of these – forms the soil from which insight and understanding grow.

When Vanderbilt Chancellor Alexander Heard was criticized in the 1960s for inviting controversial figures such as Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael to speak on campus, he responded that “young people, and especially young people in college, cannot be shielded from the winds of opinion in our world. The university’s obligation is not to protect students from ideas, but rather to expose them to ideas, and to help make them capable of handling, and, hopefully, having ideas.”