IT'S ALMOST LIKE "CONCERNED PARENTS" ARE JUST HYSTERICS:

I teach at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. We're a school of nearly 8,000 students between grad and undergrad. We're historically a regional school for southern Massachusetts, and though we've had some academic milestones in recent years, we bear more of a resemblance to the majority of the roughly 5,300 institutions in American higher education than, say, Oberlin, Yale, Berkeley, or the University of Virginia.

Think of how many of those 5,300 schools you've actually heard of. Now think how many you've seen mentioned in conversations about what does, or should, happen in a college classroom. U.S. News and World Report's top 25 colleges--where, inevitably, most of these stories are set--have around 250,000 undergraduates enrolled per year. There are roughly 16 million undergraduates around the country at any given time. Those other 5,275 schools with millions and millions of students are where the vast majority of college learning in America happens. Whatever side you take on various arguments about speech at elite universities, you're participating in a conversation that willfully ignores this truth.

A large portion of our student body at UMass-Dartmouth is first-generation college students. Many are first- or second-generation immigrants, and many others come from white working-class families. This combination reflects the makeup of the university's surroundings but also higher education across the country. By 2016, more than half of all college students in the United States were the first in their family to go, and by 2020 more than a quarter were either immigrants or the children of immigrants. It is impossible for classroom conversations not to reflect that diversity of background. And all of this is saddled with the weight of the unfamiliarity of the college experience, the enormous promise that our culture heaps onto the achievement of getting into college followed immediately by the anti-intellectual skepticism increasingly associated with the actual practice of higher learning. Plus, just for good measure: the debt.

For a professor at a school like mine, the tension created by these circumstances defines the job. The trick isn't convincing students to drop their dogmas. It's convincing them that the stuff we're talking about could matter in lives already complicated by many other things--that they could create a space of excitement or pleasure, one worth the commitment. I think their sense of the purpose of college is constantly shifting, and often under stress. My conceptions of my own teaching, my values and goals, are always under scrutiny and changing as well. Each class is an act of enormous shared challenge and, ultimately, faith.

I teach in an English department, primarily creative writing and journalism classes. My courses are all built around discussion. What I find most foreign in accounts of "free speech" on campuses is the depiction of militancy among students, a monolith of kids who, in these representations, apparently show up at age 18 secure in their views and voice and the power of that voice in an academic setting. Instead, what I observe to be the biggest hurdle for my students is the challenge of allowing themselves to speak, which means feeling at home, engaged, and empowered enough to validate their own perspective as worthy of the discussion. At the beginning of each semester, there is reticence to get into debates in class, but it isn't coming from some sense of political fear and self-silencing. It's an act of negotiation, the students coaxing themselves toward a feeling of agency, security, investment, and hopefully community. In my experience, students work really hard to make others feel welcome because they're going through the same process. They are, by and large, far gentler with one another's ideas than their own.

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