Damon Linker has an interesting article in The Week relaying his teaching experience at Brigham Young University:
The combination of crusading moral indignation and hypersensitive self-protectiveness has the potential to stamp out genuine liberalism at some schools, transforming them into institutions devoted to insulating students from provocation and free thinking rather than to exposing them to it.
…In my experience, liberalism in the classical sense often thrives where many scholars and academics would least expect to find it — in institutions of higher learning that are unlikely to get swept up in the illiberal currents currently washing over so many of the nation’s campuses. I’m talking about schools with deep, serious religious commitments.
I happened to spend two years in the late 1990s teaching at one of these schools — Brigham Young University, wholly owned and run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — and it was a clarifying experience.
Check out the full article for his admittedly surprising (even to this active Mormon) experience.
I like that he is calling out people for being close minded and pushing against ideas that don’t conform with their own.