Benjamin Storey and Jon A. Shields at Persuasion:
[R]eintroducing intellectual conservatism to our universities will temper, not accelerate, our polarization. Today’s partisan spirit is a reductionist one: tell me if so-and-so is left or right, a squish or a solid, a friend or an enemy, and that’s all I need to know. The spirit of the university should be the opposite: it should lead one to follow the arguments implied by diverse political stances to the strange, profound, hard-to-answer questions with which every human being must wrestle in determining how to live.
In this way, a greater presence of conservative thought in the classroom can help universities do their essential educational work better. It might also help them recover some of the good will they have lost. Public trust has been declining in part because Americans believe the university has become too sectarian. And while this view is pervasive among Republicans, large numbers of Democrats share it as well. According to a recent Gallup survey, nearly a third of Democrats say that universities do a “fair or poor job” of “exposing students to a wide range of opinions and viewpoints.”