Higher education is failing one of its most basic duties | Opinion
It's not enough to acknowledge the failure, like Yale University has now done. It's even more important to put free speech and dialogue into action.
Is higher education truly ready to admit its mistakes?
An April report from Yale University offers some much-needed hope. The school’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education frankly acknowledged, among other failures, a decline in free speech and rise in “conformity, intimidation, and social shaming” on campus.
Yale’s president responded by asking university leaders to “establish classroom principles that foster intellectual openness.”
Yale, along with administrators and faculty virtually everywhere else, might want to look to Dartmouth College for inspiration.
Dartmouth shows how we can disagree better
Since she assumed office in 2023, Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock has steered my undergraduate alma mater in a profoundly different direction. Now, her record of promoting free speech and vigorous debate is the exception that proves the collegiate rule.
From the start, Beilock declined to follow the other Ivy League schools in spewing moral mush and encouraging the mob. She directly condemned Hamas after the terrorist organization attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, while calling for “open, honest, and difficult dialogue” in order to “test and hone our thinking.”
She heeded her own advice within three months, launching an initiative called “Dartmouth Dialogues,” which she has described as one of her “signature priorities.”
This initiative does the unthinkable in modern higher education. It not only pushes young minds to study disagreement, it also forces them to practice it.
All first-year students are now trained with the skills to have difficult conversations, face-to-face. All undergraduates can also take a course on facilitating dialogue to fulfill a required credit.
They don’t just talk about debate – they actually do it.
In its first year, nearly 15,000 people participated in Dartmouth Dialogues-sponsored events, an impressive feat for a college with fewer than 7,000 students. Even better, the college reported in November that “two-thirds of incoming students this year identified dialogue as a factor in their choice to attend Dartmouth.”
Open political discourse builds a better campus
This is nothing short of a transformation. The free-speech group FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) ranks Dartmouth the 35th best school for free speech in the country – up 189 spots in a few short years.
More than 90% of the school’s students now “say engaging with challenging perspectives is essential to their education.” It is even more essential to cultivating democratic citizens, capable of keeping America together.
Dartmouth under Beilock isn’t the only school that meaningfully prepares students for the lifelong duty to dialogue and disagree respectfully.
Michael Crow is another role model at Arizona State University. So was Ben Sasse at the University of Florida, before his sudden and unfortunate departure. On the private college front, Denison University in Ohio deserves praise for setting the tone in freshman orientation, with parliamentary-style debates to help train students in basic discourse skills.
Unfortunately, the list of exemplars doesn’t extend beyond the fingers on one hand, maybe two. Like most Ivies, my graduate alma mater, Columbia University, has beclowned itself for tolerating the anti-discourse mob in recent years. The school was dead last in FIRE's 2025 ranking.
Dartmouth is the rare school where the Middle Eastern Studies and Jewish Studies programs can hold joint public forums that ascend to the heights of meaningful conversation, not descend into shouting matches and threats of violence.
The key is putting high ideals into practice
While plenty of schools have launched optional discourse programs, too many are lip service, with a focus on talking about discourse instead of practicing it. I fear many institutions are merely trying to ward off attacks from the Trump administration.
However, Dartmouth shows students are hungry for the real thing. I know it from experience, too.
Since 2021, I have taught a leadership seminar for students from Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. It’s optional, not for credit, and held on Saturdays – yet dozens of students still enroll each year.
We debate everything from the Second Amendment to abortion to other hot-button issues of the day. The rules are simple: Use objective evidence from proven sources. Don’t raise your voice. Don’t revert to ad hominem attacks.
The first thing we read is George Washington’s “Rules of Civility,” which sets the tone. With such guardrails in place, students learn how to find common ground, or at least recognize common humanity. It’s a new experience for most of them.
From the Ivy League to state schools, from small liberal arts colleges to large land-grant universities, every institution of higher education should create something similar for its student bodies. They should require students to learn how to disagree ‒ not just by studying dialogue intellectually, but also applying it practically in classrooms or seminar settings.
The alternative is to let students stagnate, both intellectually and morally, leading them toward lives of shallow thinking and deepening anger for those who don’t share their views.
So many universities already cultivate that destructive mentality, endangering the respect and critical reasoning that undergird American society.
It’s not enough to acknowledge the failure, like Yale University has now done. It’s even more important to put free speech and dialogue into action, and Dartmouth College has illuminated the path forward for all of higher education.
William R. Gruver is a senior fellow at the Open Discourse Coalition.