Damon Linker grits his teeth at the egregious illiberality of college campuses — did you see the “trigger warnings” report in the NYT over the weekend? — and says in his experience, true liberalism, in the old-fashioned sense of free thinking and a toleration for unpopular ideas, may well be found in unusual places:

In my experience, liberalism in the classical sense often thrives where many scholars and academics would least expect to find it — in institutions of higher learning that are unlikely to get swept up in the illiberal currents currently washing over so many of the nation’s campuses. I’m talking about schools with deep, serious religious commitments.

I happened to spend two years in the late 1990s teaching at one of these schools — Brigham Young University, wholly owned and run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — and it was a clarifying experience.

In some ways, BYU was a profoundly illiberal place. Nearly every member of the university community — 28,000 students as well as thousands of faculty members and administrators — was a Mormon, the vast majority of them deeply devout. As a non-Mormon, I had almost no chance of having my visiting professorship converted into a tenure-track position. My two-year contract included the requirement that I abide by the university’s strict honor code, which mandated that I shave my beard, refrain from uttering curse words, and forswear alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and tea for the entire duration of my employment.

And yet I was perfectly free to teach whatever I wanted in the classroom. And I did. I taught large introductory lecture courses in ancient, medieval, and modern political thought, including some of the most radical writings of Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Marx. I also taught advanced seminars on Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. We were free to discuss anything in class, including Nietzsche’s suggestion that “God is dead.” The only stipulation was that I not personally endorse these views — which was fine with me, since such an endorsement would have been a form of attempted indoctrination and therefore inimical to the liberal education I hoped to impart to my students.

Read on in the Linker piece to see what happened when a couple of Linker’s students complained to his superior about what today would probably be called a triggering episode they encountered in Aristophanes.

UPDATE: Reader Aaron writes:

I am an Episcopal priest (moderate Anglo-Catholic). My undergraduate degree was from a small Southern Baptist college. My M.Div was from a large Episcopal seminary. Without a question, the small Southern Baptist college did a better job of presenting a wider range of views than the Episcopal seminary. The chairman of the Department of Religion taught all of the doctrine courses. I could guess his personal opinions. Nevertheless, he methodically presented as many views as possible along with a bibliography of suggested reading on each of the subjects covered. Once a student asked him his personal opinion on a controversial subject. He responded with a smile, “Kind of getting personal aren’t you.” His approach was typical of the faculty at that small, relatively fundamentalist college. They presented as many views as possible. Unfortunately for them, the views I adopted were vastly different from those commonly held by Southern Baptists.

The professors at the Episcopal seminary rode their own personal hobby horses for 3 years. I felt as if their intention was not to teach but to indoctrinate. We were to accept their opinions as our own and promulgate them in every parish we served. Dissent was met with appeals to emotion not reason. I expected more at a seminary in a denomination that so prides itself on not asking it’s members to leave their brains at the door.

My current theological views are much closer to those of my seminary professors. However, I received a broader theological education at the Southern Baptist college than at the Episcopal seminary. As an Episcopal priest, it saddens me to have to say that.