When Presidents Speak Out, They Encourage Students to Do the Same

Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University (DC), writes: When we teach students to raise their voices, we have to be willing to live with the noise. We talk a lot in higher education today about making students feel safe, and safety is an important objective to make learning possible. But real higher learning cannot occur in comfort; our work requires us to make students feel uncomfortable and uncertain and, yes, even angry. Our responsibility is to teach our students how to channel their passions, their demands, their anger, and their sense of purpose into persuasive expression that leads to action. When we teach our students how to exercise their freedom of speech well, we are teaching them how to be leaders for social change.