Davidson College professor Gerardo Martí argued in an Oct. 10 essay for Inside Higher Ed that colleges should outlaw certain speakers: “Universities serve as legitimating institutions. To place a perspective within their walls signals that it merits serious study, that it has crossed the threshold from private belief to public knowledge. This conferral of legitimacy makes curatorial responsibility critical.”

The curatorial approach is wrong. Of necessity, universities must at times curate and make distinctions of legitimacy: When hiring faculty or establishing departments, universities must set standards rather than randomly appointing every idiot as a professor.

But it does not follow that these high standards must be applied to every moment spent on every inch of campus. We don’t want colleges to hire idiots, but it’s extremely dangerous to apply the “no idiots” rule to every extramural utterance on a campus by a speaker or by a professor.

If we compelled professors to make accepted, true statements every time they opened their mouth in a classroom or a conversation or a social media outlet, pretty quickly the only words professors would feel safe to utter would be the scripted, approved messages of those in power.

We must not make the mistake of believing that because universities may function as “legitimating institutions,” every idea uttered on campus must meet academic standards.

When you accept that universities are “legitimating institutions” and they must ban illegitimate ideas, then academic freedom is left in tatters. If all speakers must be carefully controlled to ensure they do not say anything unacceptable, then surely all professors must be even more carefully monitored to ban anyone who violates academic standards in any words they utter.

The only alternative to mass repression on campus is allowing all ideas to be heard and rejecting the fear that a bad idea might be whispered in any corner of the campus.

Martí states the obvious: “No university can present every possible outlook in equal measure, nor should it.” However, the question is not whether a university should ensure “equal” status, but whether the university should ban certain ideas. We can prohibit censorship without making the mistake of thinking that all dumb ideas are entitled to equal presence in a university. We can reject the idea of banning books without compelling the campus library to purchase books with the same budget for every viewpoint and without requiring that the Holocaust deniers have equal shelf space with actual historians.

Citing the dreadful Trump regime’s “compact” with colleges, Martí claims, “At the center of this struggle lies a persistent illusion: that the university should provide a platform for ‘every perspective.’” But that’s not true. The compact explicitly tries to prohibit some perspectives, requiring colleges to ban programs that allow people to “belittle” conservative ideas. The belief that universities should allow a platform for “every perspective” is a complete rejection of the Trump administration’s repressive approach, and not the source of it.

To the contrary, it is the proposal to prohibit certain bad ideas that shares common cause with the compact. Trump’s authoritarian minions and Martí may fundamentally disagree about which ideas to ban, but they have a common endorsement that someone in authority should be granted the power to censor on campus. We can’t defeat the repression of the Trump administration by announcing that colleges exist to deplatform bad ideas. Defending principles of free speech will not guarantee their protection, but it’s far more likely to succeed than throwing free expression in the trash can and hoping that the people left in charge will agree with our wise ideas and allow them to be heard.

And it’s a lot more persuasive to tell the public that colleges should not ban any ideas than it is to convince people that universities should ban their particular ideas because they’re stupid. Once you open the door to deplatforming ideas, every censor will want to be a part of the action. And even if Martí might envision wise professors choosing which speakers to ban, it’s far more likely that politically manipulable administrators will make the choices.

This month, Weber State University’s 27th annual Unity Conference on “Redacted: Navigating the Complexities of Censorship” was canceled after the university demanded censorship of slides by speakers, supposedly to obey a state law banning diversity. Calling for more “curation” of campus speakers will only magnify the opportunity for this kind of censorship, whereas an absolutist approach to free expression is the best way to establish clear rules protecting speech.

What, exactly, is so terrible about a student hearing a lousy idea on a college campus that they can—and do—encounter on the internet every day? Donald Trump was not elected president because his voters learned that supporters of his terrible ideas were allowed to speak on college campuses and therefore those ideas must be true.

University platforms should not—and do not—provide prestige, and the prestige of higher education does not—and should not—control the world. It is delusional to imagine that we can change the world by censoring all the “bad” ideas from the “good” places like college campuses. We cannot curate our way out of a crisis of democracy. We certainly cannot censor our way out of a crisis of repression.