At the beginning of the academic year, reprising this aspiration from C. Vann Woodward, Yale historian and author of The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), which Martin Luther King, Jr. said was “the historical bible of the Civil Rights Movement.”
The purpose of the university is not to make its members feel secure, content, or good about themselves, but to provide a forum for the new, the provocative, the disturbing, the unorthodox, even the shocking — all of which can be profoundly offensive to many, inside as well as outside its walls … . I do not think the university is or should attempt to be a political or a philanthropic, or a paternalistic or a therapeutic institution. It is not a club or a fellowship to promote harmony and civility, important as those values are. It is a place where the unthinkable can be thought, the unmentionable can be discussed, and the unchallengeable can be challenged. That means, in the words of Justice Holmes, ‘not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought we hate.’
Related: John Stuart Mill’s classic argument for freedom of inquiry and discussion, in the *Philosophers, Explained* series: