I teach graduate students of business and public administration about ethics, about values and norms, and yes, sometimes we traverse into politics by way of headline news. We talk Friedman and we talk Rawls. We talk Hillary and Trump. We talk freedom and fairness. As I tell students on the first day of class, if there is not something you disagree with, then I am not doing my job.

This week I learned there is great occupational hazard in my line of work. I don’t want to leave class one night in a neck brace, as Middlebury professor Allison Stanger did after merely introducing a speaker she actually disagrees with..but was totally able to treat civilly.

Whoa. Watch out for illiberal liberalism.

Repulsed by that sad, raucous scene, last week over 100 Middlebury professors signed a statement of principles calling for freedom of thought and civil discourse.  I love this line:  “The purpose of college is not to make faculty or students comfortable in their opinions and prejudices.”

Today, I signed a statement penned by Ivy league “ideological odd-fellows,” Robert George and Cornel West — great friends who happen to disagree on lots of things.  Sounds like the life I lead.

I especially like their call for  intellectual humility — the amazing thought that we may not be totally omniscient about everything.  And that there is truth out there, and we need each other in the quest to find it.  And that democracy depends on doing just that.

None of us is infallible. Whether you are a person of the left, the right, or the center, there are reasonable people of goodwill who do not share your fundamental convictions. This does not mean that all opinions are equally valid or that all speakers are equally worth listening to. It certainly does not mean that there is no truth to be discovered. Nor does it mean that you are necessarily wrong. But they are not necessarily wrong either. So someone who has not fallen into the idolatry of worshiping his or her own opinions and loving them above truth itself will want to listen to people who see things differently in order to learn what considerations—evidence, reasons, arguments—led them to a place different from where one happens, at least for now, to find oneself.