The Best Protection For Students Isn’t Shielding — It’s Critical Thinking

In recent years, many of us have watched universities enact measures to protect students from “harmful” ideas, to avoid discomfort, offense, and ideological challenge. It’s a sympathetic impulse, aimed at well-being. Yet at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, we believe that the greater risk is not exposure—but exclusion. When we abandon debate and retreat into safe zones, we weaken students’ ability to think, to question, to act with both conviction and nuance.

Protecting students from controversial or uncomfortable ideas is often justified with good intentions: safeguarding mental health, ensuring inclusion, avoiding offense. But the unintended consequences are serious: Echo chambers grow, reducing exposure to differing viewpoints and limiting intellectual growth. Critical thinking atrophies when students are not challenged to question beliefs, weigh evidence, or understand complexity. As a result, these future leaders become brittle and lack the resilience needed to navigate ethical dilemmas, uncertain policy terrain, or polarized publics.

Higher education’s purpose is not comfort. It’s to build thinkers—people who can look at complexity, handle trade-offs, and operate well in a world that rarely offers simple answers.

Without intentional design, universities risk training graduates who can handle comfort, but not confrontation.

At Maryland Smith, we don’t just preach critical thinking—we build it into our curricula, programming, debates, and student culture. It is part of our guiding principles. Our strategy is to give students intellectual freedom, tools, and confidence—not to avoid controversy, but to engage it with civility and openness. The goal is to create environments where students learn how to think, not what to think.

Below are four core practices illustrating how we do this—followed by what leadership might take away.

DEBATES THAT QUESTION EVERYTHING — BUT RESPECT EVERYONE

Since 2018, the Campus Liberty Tour Debate Series, organized by the Ed Snider Center for Enterprise and Markets in collaboration with the Steamboat Institute, has brought to campus world renowned leaders and scholars that debate tough, real-world issues.

For example, the Nationalism vs. Globalism (2018) debate featured Nigel Farage and Vicente Fox debating trade, politics, and technology.  In “Pathways to Personal Prosperity and Achieving Your Dreams: Government Programs or Free Enterprise?” (2021), Charles Payne and Bakari Sellers provided contrasting perspectives on whether government programs or private sector/civic institutions offer more promise.

The upcoming 2025 debate on October 28, 2025 on Should the Government Ban DEI Programs will bring two leading voices, Ralph “Rick” Banks, Professor of Law at Stanford and Faculty Director of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice, and Jason Riley, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and Wall Street Journal columnist.

These events allow students to see experts with strong, contrasting views, and to follow evidence, arguments, and ethical trade-offs, rather than simply picking sides or echoing one ideology. Data from pre- and post- polls of attendees reveal that these debates foster active thinking that challenges their priors, resulting in a shift in their stances towards an issue.

REGULAR FORUMS FOR CIVIL, FACT-BASED DISCOURSE

Launched in Fall 2024, The Fact-Based Discourse Initiative (FBDI) is a newer initiative under the Ed Snider Center. Thought leaders model civil discourse and provide students with not only diverse perspectives but also ways and means to practice it themselves.

The inaugural event screened the documentary Undivide Us and featured an interactive discussion with Ben Klutsey, director of the Mercatus Center. The panel on “Social Media, Business Models & the Promotion of Extremism and Zero-Sum Mindsets,” featuring faculty and experts in social media, economics, and ethics that explored the causes and consequences of polarization.

Students regularly report that these are among the moments they grow most intellectually—learning to hold views in tension, to ask better questions, to listen as well as argue.

CULTIVATING LEADERSHIP THROUGH SELF-REFLECTION & REAL-WORLD PRACTICE

Smith Business Leadership Fellows (SBLF), a specialized cohort-based program introduced in Fall 2022, does more than expose students to debate—it gives them enduring principles to unleash their entrepreneurial mindset and work collaboratively to solve problems, whether in their immediate world or at a grander scale.

Within a four-course sequence utilizing the latest technologies that flips classrooms and enables deep experiential learning, students engage with two pillars: A Focus on Me where students understand and articulate their personal values, aspirations, abilities and purpose, and a Focus on We, where students collaborate and create win-win outcomes to tackle business and grand societal challenges. For example, in the course The Future of You, Business and Society, students think about how they can be part of businesses that can solve unmet social needs ethically and with purpose. The follow-on course Enterprising Leader (also a general education course fulfillment  available to all University students) provides them frameworks for personal leadership, inviting students to become the CEOs of their own enterprise—learning self-reliance, entrepreneurship, creative thinking, reflection, and practical business skills.

These courses push students not to memorize answers but to ask their own questions: What values guide me? How will I lead when the path is unclear? What trade-offs am I willing to accept? Mentorship by senior cohort members, guest speakers and networking with alumni augment the classroom—students meet leaders, reflect on values, and see lived examples of integrative leadership. 

INTEGRATING COURSEWORK & CO-CURRICULAR PROGRAMS

The above events and coursework are interwoven into the tapestry of student learning. Debates, discourses and speaker series are not mere “good-to-haves” or “one and dones.” They complement the course curriculum: students do not merely ingest, but analyze, argue, and revise to deeply engage in class based on what they see and hear.

For example, in courses like Challenge your Thinking, Challenge the Conversation, students are required to prepare, debate, listen and reflect on the topics featured in the Campus Liberty Tour and Fact-Based Discourse Initiative. This ensures that these events do not stay on the periphery, but shape students’ thinking as part of their academic journey.

Students have remarked on their increased ability to engage with current issues in both business and society—developing frameworks, navigating disagreement, and learning to give and receive constructive feedback.

WHY IT ALL MATTERS — AND WHAT OTHER INSTITUTIONS CAN DO

These practices are not side projects. They are central to the Smith School’s identity and mission:

• Students don’t just graduate with business knowledge—they leave with confidence in facing controversy, comfort with complexity, and commitment to purpose.
• They are better equipped for careers and leadership roles that demand integrity, agility, and empathy. In policy, industry, nonprofits, social enterprise—you name it—those are differentiators.
• This model helps protect academic freedom, viewpoint diversity, and institutional credibility. When universities explicitly teach students how to think, they resist the polarization that’s corroding public life.

Here are some takeaways and ideas for other institutions or leaders wanting to replicate or adapt:

• Design programs upfront that balance self-reflection and external challenge. Self-knowledge is foundational, but so is exposure to difficult ideas.
• Anchor debates in informed moderation. Invite speakers with strong credentials and contrasting views; ensure moderation that emphasizes respect, evidence, and audience questions.
• Offer real-world ambiguity. Projects, case studies, consulting engagement with clients—all force students to wrestle with trade-offs, not neat solutions.
• Build regular, co-curricular spaces for discourse. Not once-in-a-blue-moon events, but sustained conversations across topics: ethics, policy, markets, values.

Sheltering students from discomfort may seem to provide them safe spaces, but is stultifying them instead.

At Maryland Smith, we choose debate over dogma; inquiry over indoctrination; exposure over escape. Because the world doesn’t come with instructional manuals, and leaders don’t get a pause button when beliefs clash, or when stakes are high.

What we owe students is not a guarded bubble, but grounded courage—the kind that comes from engaging difficult issues with thoughtfulness and resolve.

If universities everywhere commit to giving students the freedom, tools, and frameworks to think for themselves—not just accepting what they are told—then we’ll not just produce managers and graduates, but thinkers, leaders, citizens able to carry forward trust, innovation, and moral clarity into a future that needs it.

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Prabhudev Konana is the dean of the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business. Rajshree Agarwal is the Rudolph Lamone Chair of Strategy and Entrepreneurship and Director of the Ed Snider Center for Enterprise and Markets.

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