With college students returning to campus, and the brutal war in Gaza continuing unabated, many schools—including mine—are bracing for renewed protests. As president of Wesleyan University in Connecticut, I have already received demands from Pro-Palestinian undergraduates—not to mention emails from students, parents, and alumni demanding that I silence those undergraduates. Throw in the heightened tension of a presidential election in two months, and the coals on many campuses may only get hotter.

That’s a good thing. Colleges and universities should not retreat into some fantasy of neutrality. They should help students practice something that has become a prominent theme in the presidential race: freedom.

In the West, the student has long been conceptualized as someone on the path to freedom, to thinking for oneself in the company of others. It’s an idealized notion, to be sure, but a practical one as well. The proof of a good education is that one’s capacity to learn continues to grow after graduation—and that’s precisely what economies that prize innovation, and democracies that encourage deliberation and change, need from their participants. The student, practicing freedom on a path to maturity, learns how to attend to others; and paying attention is a key step in creating opportunities, righting wrongs, or helping those who are suffering. The good student turns out to be a good thinker, a good provider, and a good neighbor.

The good student doesn’t do this alone. Deeply embedded in the culture of American higher education is the notion of what literary historian Andrew Delbanco calls “lateral learning, the proposition that students have something important to learn from one another.” While we expect........

© New Republic