"You don't really know how good a boxer you are until you face someone on the other side of the net." Facing opposition matters. This is the argument of Dr. Lyell Asher, who teaches at Lewis and Clark College and created the 15-part YouTube series Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults with Peter Boghossian. Lyell traces his free speech awakening to his father and Solzhenitsyn's A Warning to the West, but also to a rebellious middle school moment. When a teacher tried to stop flag burning, young Lyell argued so strongly for the right to burn it that the teacher offered him scissors, then yanked them away at the last moment. 

The real catalyst for Lyell came in 2010, when he witnessed his own institution misrepresent incidents and bury the truth. Then, three years later, the very same pattern repeated. His method for countering this? To make free speech concrete, not abstract. 

As Thomas Kuhn demonstrated with paradigm shifts, when you ask people to change their view of the universe, “you’re asking them to change everything in their lives." Lyell believes K-12 schools should teach each student how to articulate the position they don't believe (as inspired by an ethics class at Vanderbilt where he argued for capital punishment from the opposite side). "Free speech alone is not enough," he insists. "What you have to have is not just free speech, but a commitment to making sure that on every issue, students are exposed to the best arguments on each side." Because when ideas are "sharpened by opposition," they—and all of us—become stronger.

Check out the video series Why Colleges Are Becoming Cults at: https://youtu.be/0hybqg81n-M?si=6yEd4Sp9IA6wia2d