Debate is Dead.

How Safety Killed Intellectual Growth on Campus

I still remember the tension in Dr. Sides class at Cal State Northridge. We were debating affirmative action, and the discussion had grown heated. Two students, one conservative, one liberal, were locked in an increasingly passionate exchange about fairness and merit.

Debate on college campuses is now dead.

Then Dr. Sides raised his hand.

"Stop," he said firmly. "You're both making this personal. You're attacking each other, not the arguments. Let's try this differently: Michael, I want you to steelman Sarah's position. Tell me the strongest possible version of her argument. Sarah, you'll do the same for Michael."

What happened next was transformative. As each student worked to articulate their opponent's best case, something shifted. The defensiveness lessened. The conversation became slightly curious. We weren't just tolerating disagreement, we were learning from it.

This was the norm at CSUN in my time there (Circa 2005). Professors regularly orchestrated these uncomfortable discussions, knowing that intellectual growth happens at the boundary of what we find comfortable. They intervened not to shut down debate, but to elevate it, insisting we separate arguments from individuals, demand evidence over emotion, and engage with ideas we found challenging or even offensive.

It was messy. It was uncomfortable. It was rooted in Enlightenment values: the conviction that rational thought, open dialogue, and rigorous debate were not just academic exercises but the foundation of a free society. We were being trained not just to think, but to think with people who fundamentally disagreed with us.

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Fast forward to today, and that classroom feels like an artifact from another era.

According to recent data, over 80% of college students now report self-censoring at least some of the time on campus, with 21% saying they self-censor often. Even more striking, 42% of faculty reported being likely to self-censor in classroom discussions, citing fear of being misunderstood or targeted by student complaints.

The classroom I experienced has been replaced by something fundamentally different. Trigger warnings precede potentially uncomfortable material. Safe spaces offer refuge from challenging ideas. Students can opt out of readings or discussions that might cause distress. Speakers are disinvited not for advocating violence or hatred, but for holding unpopular opinions on contested political questions.

The intention behind these changes seems noble: create environments where all students feel safe and included. But the result has been a dramatic chilling effect on exactly the kind of intellectual exchange that universities were designed to foster.

In their book The Coddling of the American Mind, First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt identify three fundamental ideas that have become embedded in modern campus culture, ideas that, despite good intentions, are actively harming young people.

The Untruth of Fragility: What doesn't kill you makes you weaker.

This is the assumption underlying trigger warnings and safe spaces: that encountering challenging or upsetting ideas is psychologically damaging, and that students must be protected from emotional discomfort. But this is precisely backwards. As Haidt and Lukianoff argue, psychological research shows that resilience comes from facing and overcoming challenges, not from avoiding them. By treating students as fragile, we make them so.

The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.

When we allow students to opt out of material because it "makes them uncomfortable," we're teaching them that feelings are a reliable guide to truth, that if something feels wrong or offensive, it must be wrong or offensive. But feelings are not facts. Sometimes the most important truths are the ones that make us uncomfortable. By elevating emotional response over rational analysis, we abandon the very foundation of scholarly inquiry.

The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.

This is perhaps the most corrosive idea: that those who disagree with us are not simply wrong but morally compromised, that political disagreement is a form of violence, that we must protect ourselves from contamination by opposing viewpoints. This line of thinking makes genuine debate impossible. If your opponent is evil, why bother engaging with their arguments?

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These three untruths have transformed how students approach disagreement. Instead of seeing debate as an opportunity for growth, they see it as a threat to their wellbeing. Instead of learning to separate ideas from identity, they view intellectual challenge as personal attack.

The cost of this shift extends far beyond the classroom.

When we shield students from uncomfortable ideas, we deprive them of the single most important skill for functioning in a pluralistic democracy: the ability to engage productively with people who see the world differently. In my CSUN classroom, I learned that I could passionately disagree with someone while still respecting them, that good people could hold positions I found objectionable, and that my own beliefs became stronger, or changed entirely, when subjected to rigorous challenge.

More personally, I learned the limits of arguing from emotion. It's painful to write about because I'm still embarrassed in a sense that I believed some things so passionately based on emotion rather than data. Had I been in an environment that taught me to trust my feelings over facts, I might still be arguing from ignorance.

The current campus culture doesn't just fail to teach these skills, it actively undermines them. Students learn to avoid rather than engage, to seek comfort rather than growth, to view disagreement as harm. Then we send them into a world that will not coddle them, that will not provide trigger warnings, that will not allow them to opt out of uncomfortable realities.

We're also losing something at the societal level. Universities have historically served as laboratories for democracy, places where people from different backgrounds learn to negotiate disagreement through reason rather than force. When universities abandon this mission in favor of protecting students from discomfort, they fail to produce citizens capable of sustaining democratic institutions.

Rebuilding a culture of robust debate on campus won't be easy, but it's essential.

• First, we must abandon the language of safety when discussing ideas. Physical safety is a right; intellectual comfort is not. Universities should be challenging, even uncomfortable places. That's not a bug, it's the entire point.

• Second, we need to reframe how we think about harm. Reading an argument, you find offensive is not violence. Being exposed to ideas you disagree with is not trauma. Discomfort is not damage. In fact, learning to sit with discomfort, to engage with ideas that unsettle you, is one of the most valuable skills education can provide.

• Third, professors must reclaim their role as intellectual guides rather than emotional caregivers. This means actively orchestrating difficult conversations, teaching students to steelman opposing arguments, insisting on evidence over emotion, and modeling how to separate intellectual disagreement from personal attack.

• Fourth, students themselves need to embrace intellectual humility. This means recognizing that you might be wrong, that people who disagree with you might have insights you lack, and that the purpose of debate is not to win but to discover truth.

• Finally, we must reconnect with the Enlightenment values that made universities engines of progress in the first place: the conviction that reason can overcome prejudice, that open inquiry trumps dogma, and that the best response to bad ideas is not censorship but better ideas.

The classroom I remember at CSUN wasn't perfect. Debates got heated. People said things that upset others. But we learned, really learned, in a way that the current culture of emotional safety makes impossible. We learned to think critically, argue rationally, and engage charitably with those who saw the world differently.

That's not just good practice. In an increasingly polarized society where different tribes inhabit different realities, it might be the only thing that saves us.

The question is whether universities will remember their purpose in time, or whether an entire generation will graduate having never learned how to think with people who make them uncomfortable. Based on the data, we're dangerously close to the latter. It's time to choose the hard path of genuine education over the comfortable path of intellectual coddling.

Our democracy depends on it.

What do you think? Is free speech really dead on campuses, and how do we revive it? 👇