As students return to college campuses across the country and reunite with friends and classmates, I am struck by the number of my own Ivy League classmates who will not return this fall. Three of my newly minted presidential peers, to be exact: University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill, Claudine Gay of Harvard, and Columbia’s Minouche Shafik. These losses have caused me, as president of Dartmouth, to reflect on the very purpose of a university as a home for intellectual inquiry and debate, and on what leaders can do to preserve that purpose.
Universities must be places where different ideas and opinions lead to personal growth, scientific breakthroughs, and new knowledge. But when a group of students takes over a building or establishes an encampment on shared campus grounds and declares that this shared educational space belongs to only one ideological view, the power and potential of the university dies—just as it would if a…