New York Times
Stanford deans Debra Satz and Dan Edelstein write about how the failure of colleges to provide a civic education has resulted in an intolerance of ideas. All college students in America used to take a Western Civilization course, which gave everyone a shared understanding to have discussions. With the free market ideology brought to education, schools started letting students take a range of humanities courses their first year, which is great, but resulted in a fracturing of shared knowledge. And the authors argue that this has led to students being unable to tolerate ideas that differ from their own—it's important to disagree, but it's equally important to know how to have those discussions rather than shutting them down.