Disagree with Your Professor!

The Heterodox Academy Campus Chapter and the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University recently hosted an in-person event titled “Disagree with a Professor,” which provided a forum for students to participate in “a spirited conversation with a faculty member about a provocative topic.”

The stances advertised on the Heterodox Academy’s website as discussion topics were (1) “Mail-in voting was a bad idea. Everyone should vote in-person on Election Day,” (2) “Forget the Electoral College; we should abolish the Presidency,” (3) “We are less prepared for the next pandemic now than we were before COVID, despite significant advances in our ability to detect, analyze, prevent, and treat infectious disease,” (4) “Grading of students by the professor who teaches the class is biased. It should be eliminated or supplemented with evaluations by unaffiliated evaluators,” (5) “The world is a safer place in the 21st century than ever before,” and (6) “Geography is the force that drives history.”

To be perfectly blunt, these claims do not strike me as even slightly “provocative.” Then again, Stanford — like most campuses across the country — does not have a reputation for achieving and celebrating viewpoint diversity. (The student newspaper reported that almost 96 percent of Stanford-affiliate donations went to Democrats in the 2024 presidential election cycle.) So perhaps these topics are incredibly stimulating in an environment that largely lacks intellectual heterogeneity and vibrant debate.

Putting aside which specific topics or opinions are best suited as propositions for a “Disagree with a Professor” session, I think the event design is genius. Plenty of people — writers at National Review, lawyers at free-speech advocacy groups, and professors who support academic freedom, among others — have stressed that college students refrain from sharing their beliefs on campus. Even worse, students sometimes express what they know to be false (“trans women are women!”), often due to concerns that even slightly departing from the instructor’s ideological commitments will elicit a bad grade. (If those considerations seem invalid, consider the polling data showing that over four in ten U.S. and Canadian academics would not hire a Trump supporter.)

And that’s why the event structure is smart: Creating a setting where the explicit purpose is to disagree, coupled with the implicit condition that whatever happens won’t result in a C+ mark that causes a stellar GPA to plummet, encourages students to engage in productive dialogue with an authority figure. Although the principal benefit is facilitating the pursuit of truth, a “Disagree with a Professor” series might cultivate mentorships (and perhaps even friendships).

Of course, one might readily object: “But college itself is meant to be a place for disagreement, where students pursue truth without regard to whatever letters appear on the final transcript!” And yeah, that’s completely correct. But, at this stage, baby steps are good, and baby steps are a necessary precondition to becoming a marathon winner. I genuinely believe that, if each professor opened the first class of the semester by saying, “The goal of this class is for you to change your mind on something, and I don’t care which thing you change your mind about or in what direction you move,” then there would be noticeable improvements because the self-censorship is so severe. Although regularly hosting something like “Disagree with a Professor” gatherings will not fix the underlying structural issues at most colleges, it is an easily implemented practice that attempts to remedy some very significant ills, and its potential to facilitate desirable change gives cause for hope.