Robert P. George and Cornel West at WP:
A university culture of civic friendship is one in which faculty and students recognize, and act consistently with the recognition, that reasonable people of goodwill can respectfully disagree about controversial — indeed, even the most important, life-defining, and identity-forming — questions. Does God exist? What constitutes living a good life? How should the Constitution be interpreted? How should policymakers go about addressing particular social concerns over which there is deep division in their communities?
This means — and this is especially crucial at nonsectarian universities such as Harvard, Columbia and Princeton, where the university does not officially endorse any creed, doctrine, worldview or ideology — people must be allowed to dissent (and express their dissent) even from the prevailing consensus, without others jumping to the conclusion that their mere disagreement means that they are malign, ill-motivated or evil. A university genuinely committed to the disinterested pursuit of truth would never permit external actors — from protesters and activists to donors and government agents — to influence how it treats holders of widely criticized views, whether those views are popularly mocked as supposedly “unenlightened” or slandered as “bigoted.”
When, for example, high percentages of faculty and students report that they regularly engage in self-censorship, or less than 3 percent of faculty on a campus say they hold conservative views, there are entrenched problems that demand the university leadership’s attention and redress. They require concrete efforts to increase viewpoint diversity, such as by ending discrimination on the basis of ideological commitments (whether explicit or unspoken) in admissions and hiring and doing better to reach out to those with underrepresented viewpoints and perspectives.