Controversy in universities is nothing new, but for several months now there has been increasing attention to cases of a new type of controversies, a particularly dangerous type if for no other reason than the fact it threatens the reason of being of the university.

In a few words, this reason is the full development of the human person, the enlargement of healthy minds, capable to critically engage the world and consciously direct it to a better state. A diploma? Sure, but do not let grades get in the way of finding what inflames your passion.

Universities, with this purpose in sight, are to be a place where students and professors engage with ideas and argue as to think better and argue better. More often than not, this will mean facing ideas we do not agree and do not feel comfortable with. But that is part of the point. Aristotle said “it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

A decision made in liberty is one where we have, so to speak, all the cards on the table, we really know what is going on—and thus can decide. It is the same with the mind. A truly free person must be able to contemplate and understand all sides of the argument.

Under the threat I mention, students and university administrators, some times working together, will persecute and shut down any voice that disagrees with the common assumptions and values of the majority, or what passes for the majority, of the community. Examples of this threat have been documented in various publications, such as The Atlantic, National Review, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Last year, Professor Laura Kipnis from Northwestern University wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education about what she perceived as a status quo of increasing paranoia regarding sexual assault on university campuses. Instead of engaging her arguments and considering whatever wisdom may be in them, students took offense and the university ended up launching a Title IX investigation—which was eventually dropped.

Students at Columbia University wrote in their student newspaper last year that classical mythological texts—in particular Ovid’s Metamorphoses—are “offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom,” on account of content that could stir up memories of abuse.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt and President of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) Greg Lukianoff wrote in The Atlantic about the negative consequences of this mindset, saying that “[a]ccording to the most-basic tenets of psychology, helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided.” In addition to this, imagine the richness of culture that would be lost trying to sanitize our syllabi (one other work that has come under fire is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby). Part of the point of those texts is for readers to grapple with the full range of human experience, and guess what, humanity is not always pretty.

When several law professors at Harvard Law School criticized the documentary The Hunting Ground in a letter, saying “it provides a seriously false picture…of the general sexual assault phenomenon at universities,” the filmmakers shot back. In a statement to Harvard’s student newspaper, the filmmakers said the professors who wrote the letter were creating a “hostile climate,” a declaration in which some saw an attempt to avoid debating the issues brought up by the professors.

A British writer once said that the “wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt […] It is no answer to say, with a distant optimism, that the scheme is only in the air. A blow from a hatchet can only be parried while it is in the air.”

Following this advise, I will now share what I, as a student who greatly values his time here and the education he has received, expect from Pace University should any similar controversy arise in this school’s future. I hope to lay the basis of an intellectually honest and engaged student body.

It is commendable that here at Pace, for example, students who strongly criticize Israel for its policies concerning Palestinians and students who see a threat to Israel in a Palestinian state can both gather and organize events where they share their arguments and ideas. I once attended one such event, and, though it could indeed be tense at times to be in the crossfire, hearing both sides passionately defend their respective causes, I felt invigorated. When I left that event, I felt that the Pace community was able to grow through the experience of clashing and arguing. Pace was alive, in an intellectual and civil manner.

This must be the case if—and hopefully when—other contentious issues are brought forth for students to consider. So if a group of students wants to organize a panel discussing what they see as the negative impact of homosexual couples raising children, they must be allowed to and the ensuing argument must be carried out in a civilized manner. If students want to address what they consider the benefits of passing assisted-suicide legislation coming to New York State, they must have the freedom to do it. If a student wants to organize a talk to argue that the benefits of fracking outweigh the drawbacks, she must not be stopped. The same must apply for both sides on things from gun control, abortion, and animal testing to tuition increases and curriculum changes.

Then Pace will truly be an intellectually alive and vigorously active community, committed to the enrichment of its students’ lives.