Glenn Reynolds: On campus political correctness, Obama gets it right Even our Democratic president understands blacklisting conservative speakers doesn't promote learning.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds | USA TODAY

Two encouraging things happened this week with regard to America’s campus climate. First, socialist Bernie Sanders, now seeking the Democratic Presidential nomination, spoke at ultraconservative Liberty University. Sanders was received with respect and civility — leading one to wonder whether someone as far-right as Sanders is far-left would have been similarly received at, say, Berkeley. Many college students seem to believe that they have the right not to hear things they disagree with, and in some schools — the University of California, for example — the administration seems to agree with them, treating opinions that students find disagreeable as some sort of assault. But not at Liberty University where, as Jonathan Chait notes, students managed to listen to someone they viscerally disagreed with, and respond civilly. Indeed, as Jesse Singal writes, "As of yet, there are no reports of widespread psychological trauma out of Lynchburg."

Which brings us to the second thing. Speaking in Des Moines at a town hall meeting about college costs, President Obama spoke up against the increasing tendency to coddle college students’ tender sensibilities:

"It’s not just sometimes folks who are mad that colleges are too liberal that have a problem. Sometimes there are folks on college campuses who are liberal, and maybe even agree with me on a bunch of issues, who sometimes aren’t listening to the other side, and that’s a problem too. I’ve heard some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. I gotta tell you, I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. I think you should be able to — anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, 'You can’t come because I'm too sensitive to hear what you have to say.' That’s not the way we learn either."

President Obama is absolutely right. College isn’t supposed to be about having our prejudices reinforced. It’s supposed to be about learning how to think about ideas, and even to change one’s mind in the face of new arguments and evidence.

It’s also about learning to address ideas one doesn’t agree with. As Aristotle said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” You can’t do that if you’re not willing even to hear unacceptable thoughts.

President Obama was perhaps inspired by a recent article in The Atlantic by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, "The Coddling of the American Mind.” Lukianoff and Haidt describe in some detail the way in which college sensitivities have undermined teaching, to the point that some criminal law professors — in law schools — are afraid to teach about rape, and where “trigger warnings” and concerns about “microaggressions” rule the day.

Rather than respond to such complaints with a suggestion that the complainers might be better off under professional psychological care than enrolled in institutions of higher learning, university administrations have tended to go along, even though the complainers represent a rather small fraction of the student body. The result has been a sort of arms-race of oversensitivity, in which each complaint is trumped by one still sillier, until we have reached the situation that Lukianoff, Haidt — and Obama — deplore, in which student mental health may actually suffer, and professors worry that they’ll be pilloried for saying that something “violates the law” because the word “violates” may trigger rape anxieties.

In Monty Python’s Holy Grail, the knights decide to skip a visit to Camelot because "it is a silly place.” With college costs (as President Obama has also noted) skyrocketing even as students seem to be learning less and finding greater difficulty obtaining suitable employment after graduation, higher education administrators should worry that more and more students will draw a similar conclusion. Perhaps President Obama’s warning will get their attention.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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