Back in September, students at the University of California at Berkeley organized a “Free Speech Week,” to be headlined by ex-Breitbart goad Milo Yiannopoulos. The school administration supported the event, for valid reasons: Chancellor Carol Christ declared her wish to “permit speakers … without discrimination in regard to point of view.” But eventually the speakers Yiannopoulos promised—like Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist and Breitbart CEO, and writer Ann Coulter— dropped out of the event or claimed they never agreed to appear in the first place. Meanwhile, Yiannopoulos and his student hosts failed to file the required paperwork to confirm speakers and book campus venues. In the end, the vaunted “Free Speech Week” amounted to a 20-minute Yiannopoulos photo op before a meager crowd of about 100 people, and it cost Berkeley around $800,000.

In retrospect, one of the most important insights we can take away from “Free Speech Week”—and the spate of campus speaker controversies in 2017—is about the power of pretense. In chasing what Christ called “sharply divergent points of view” at virtually any cost, colleges have backed themselves into a corner, privileging the magnitude of divergence over the substance of it. Thus, vitriolic and ostentatious disagreement has overshadowed good-faith, evidence-based discussions about the very issues over which we disagree.

The real intellectual crisis on campus is not threats to free speech, but threats to the quality of speech. Like much of the media, colleges have capitulated to a Trumpian version of debate that treats lying, demagoguery, bluster, mockery, and bad faith as equally valid approaches to ideological argumentation. This approach subordinates the pursuit of truth to a pernicious “both sides” logic that treats all statements as equal simply because they’re politically divergent, even if they’re radically different in merit. Whereas the national press, no matter how rigorous in its reporting, will be derided by right-wingers as “fake news,” colleges can help correct our national epistemic crisis, putting truth and rigor above shock and provocation.

Shallow “both sides” thinking—that the only way a college can provide diverse viewpoints is by offering a podium to people more interested in harassment and demagoguery than in exchanging ideas—prevailed on campuses this year. Gavin McInnes, the Vice co-founder and “Proud Boys” founder, was invited to speak at DePaul University and NYU in 2017, and in the latter case the student hosts were careful to clarify that not all of them agree with McInnes’s views, but that inviting such provocateurs is important for preserving free speech on campus, a kind of bitter medicine for left-wing campus culture. The University of Connecticut College Republicans, under the pretense of providing students with “alternative viewpoints and civil discourse,” brought Gateway Pundit correspondent Lucian Wintrich to campus for a speech on why “it’s OK to be white.” Similarly, the Columbia University College Republicans’ 2017 speaker list included master troll Martin Shkreli, currently incarcerated after being convicted of felony securities fraud; Tommy Robinson of the far-right, anti-Islam English Defence League; and “pizzagate” conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich. “If you’re just listening to the same side,” said the president of CUCR, “you’re not gonna learn anything about the other side.”

But students don’t need to hear from white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, and vindictive provocateurs to get acquainted with conservative ideas. In fact, inviting such speakers has the opposite effect: It conflates conservatism with an extremist fringe, and thus begs to be dismissed by largely liberal student bodies. It’s precisely because students know that white nationalism and conspiracy theories aren’t worth debating at college, with college resources, that they largely reject speakers ahead of time, and are far from attentive listeners when these speakers show up.