Ethan Bronner, Columnist

Corporate America Is Obsessed With Debate on Elite Campuses

A new book from NYU Stern’s Jonathan Haidt examines the battle to protect students from offensive speech.

September 25, 2018 at 10:00 AM UTC

Ethan Bronner is the Israel bureau chief for Bloomberg News in Tel Aviv and senior editor for the Middle East. He spent 17 years at the New York Times, including as Jerusalem bureau chief.

Students, along with antifa and Black Lives Matter demonstrators, protest Mike Cernovich, an alt-right media personality and conspiracy theorist, who spoke at Columbia University on Oct. 30, 2017.
Photographer: Mark Peterson/Redux

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This article is part of the October 1, 2018 issue of businessweek.

The day Donald Trump was elected, the five-college Claremont campus east of Los Angeles went into mourning. Maria Klawe, the president of Harvey Mudd College, sent out an email expressing sympathy for anyone feeling “vulnerable and unsafe.” David Oxtoby, president of Pomona College, said, “On a day like this, the personal and the political cannot be separated.” Pitzer College President Melvin Oliver urged students to channel energy into activism.

Debra Mashek, a psychology professor at Harvey Mudd, looked around and thought, Surely not everyone is upset. There were students on campus who’d voted for Trump, and they were being ostracized. So Mashek—no Trump supporter, but a keen advocate of broad debate—created a course called I’m Right, You’re Wrong. She wanted her students to examine the sources and nature of their own assumptions and learn how others start from very different ones.