This can be a painful lesson for freshmen, but its inculcation is one of the most significant returns on their tuition dollars. Unfortunately, when senior academics who ought to be models of dispassionate inquiry instead act as tenured inquisitors rooting out heretical speech, they subvert this central objective of academia. It s no wonder that other university citizens often meekly fall into line. It ought to now be apparent why standards of decorous speech appropriate for dinner parties do not apply to universities. The former involves taking pleasure in the company of people as they are.
Universities exist precisely to make people other than what they are.
In social encounters we take care to observe limits, but higher education aims to stretch those limits. Polite conversation conveys information, but university discourse effects transformation. The preceding is not to be taken as an encomium to the purity of the Ivory Tower. In universities at least as much as anywhere else, vast floods of words pour forth to no useful end. Nothing would be lost if they had died aborning.