The beginning of a new year inevitably leads to reflections on the year past. Among the most significant stories in higher education in 2015 was the outbreaks of student unrest across the country, and what it portends. Do the events at Mizzou, Yale, Amherst, Brandeis, Claremont, Brown and other residential colleges and universities in North America signal a triumph of narcissistic political correctness, the final step in the closing of the American mind and the coddling of her youth? Or do they signal a new era in which higher educational institutions will genuinely welcome all the students they have recruited?    

It is too soon to tell.

Western civilization and universities grew up together. At true universities, ideas collide, the past meets present, and each generation of students remakes the knowledge and experience of the past, claiming it as their own. Those institutions are the foundation of the future, of creativity and of change, and they have always been sites of conflict.    

Unsurprisingly, student protests are as old as our universities, and such protests often catch fire at different places simultaneously. The student riots in 1229 closed the University of Paris. Fearing the contagion would stoke the still simmering unrest at Oxford University that had just resulted in breakaway Cambridge University, administrators and town city officials appealed to the Vatican. The resulting agreement made universities independent of local ecclesiastical and secular authority. Over the centuries, the same innovative forces at play in the Middle Ages would repeatedly express themselves in forward-looking unrest at universities. The worldwide student protests of the late 1960’s would again close the University of Paris and many institutions in the United States. Those protests led to more student-focused modern universities.  

It is clear that we have entered another period of great change, at least in universities in the United States. New College and its students are, as we were in late ’60s and early ’70s, very much a part of the debates on other campuses nationwide. How do we reconcile free speech with the need to use language that respects others and furthers the exchange of ideas? How do we disagree respectfully? How do we truly welcome individuals of all backgrounds, and truly embrace difference? How does the ideal of a physically safe, but intellectually challenging, classroom environment translate into an age when smartphones and social media make every foolish comment embarrassingly public and allow a small number of individuals to anonymously bully and shame another person?  

These are not questions with obvious answers, but they merit addressing. And enduring answers will, as always, require that different generations and different people listen to one another and build a new consensus. As in all periods of great ferment, spectacular foolishness and great entitlement mix with legitimate concerns and it often takes time to sort out what is what (although most of us think that we know instantly).   

Although it is not clear what will emerge from the current unrest, I’m optimistic that discussions locally and nationally will lead to a better and more inclusive environment for all students. For it is to those students to whom will fall the task of safeguarding and advancing our democracy. 

Donal O'Shea is the president of New College pf Florida.