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........

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