Opinion | Go Ahead, Sean Duffy. Let Your Daughter Go to Harvard.

Take it from me, Sean Duffy: You can let your children go to Harvard. It will be good for them, and it will be good for Harvard.

Ordinarily I’m not in the business of weighing in on individual college decisions, but Duffy, the secretary of transportation, has made his family’s internal discussions as public as he possibly can.

The secretary has a reality television show (yes, you read that correctly), and last week a clip circulated online in which Duffy and his wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, co-host of “Fox and Friends Weekend” and (along with Duffy) a former reality television star on MTV, talk about prohibiting their daughter from going to Harvard as an undergraduate.

The clip begins with Campos-Duffy saying that she’s “nervous” about her daughter, Paloma, going to Harvard. “We spent a lot of time nurturing and providing formation for our kids,” she said, “giving them an environment where they are steeped in faith and values.” It worried her to even think about dropping them off at a school that would “undermine that or try to undo all those things.”

The scene switches to a conversation between Duffy and Paloma, in which Duffy tells his daughter, “If I send you there, I think what happens is they have professionalized figuring out how they can take good young girls like you and I think corrupt their minds.”

Duffy told Paloma she didn’t have to believe what he believes, but he did not think that Havard gives students a “well-rounded picture” of competing ideas.

Paloma’s response was remarkably mature. “But I went to an extremely conservative school in high school,” she said, “and I’m part of an extremely conservative family, and then if I go to a liberal setting, that’s a way more well-rounded education than if I go to a conservative high school and then go to a conservative college.”

“But they’re so good at it,” Duffy replied. “You’ll see young people go to a conservative school with a conservative family, and they get perverted and contorted.”

Lots of people mocked the clip, but I had a different response; it was … relatable.

I had a very similar conversation with my father 35 years ago. We weren’t at the kitchen table. We were shooting hoops in our backyard as we pondered whether I should go to Harvard Law School. Like Paloma, I had grown up in a religiously and politically conservative home, and I had gone on to a religiously and politically conservative college.

Harvard was neither religious nor conservative. It was also in the midst of intense ideological battles, in which conservative students were sometimes ruthlessly booed, hissed and heckled, merely for stating their views.

I’ve also had different versions of this same conversation with Christian and conservative parents for decades — they look at the news of campus censorship, they see the left-wing monoculture (especially at elite universities), and they wonder if they’re sending their kids into the lion’s den. The concern seems especially acute with young women — that they’ll leave home as Laura Ingalls and come back as Lady Gaga.

Before you laugh at that idea, please realize that this perception is almost entirely the fault of elite educational institutions. They’re the ones that have created a left-wing ideological bubble. They are often extraordinarily intolerant of dissenting views. Peers and professors do sometimes make life difficult for conservative students.

I’ve experienced this myself, both as a student and as a lawyer. In my legal career I represented student after student who were subjected to a sometimes-shocking level of censorship, stigma and isolation at the nation’s most exclusive universities. Harvard has been one of the chief offenders.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (I’m a former president of FIRE) currently gives Harvard an F rating for free speech, ranking it 245 out of 257 colleges and universities it measures. Sadly, 47 percent of Harvard students report self-censoring at least once or twice a month; 79 percent of Harvard students say that shouting down a speaker can be acceptable, at least in rare cases; and 32 percent say that using violence to stop speakers is also acceptable, again in rare cases.

That’s a sign of a sick free speech culture. That’s Harvard’s fault, not Sean Duffy’s. And no one should think that the environment is all bad. Conservatives will make liberal friends, including some who last a lifetime. My three years at Harvard were also three of the best years of my life, in part because they were so challenging.

In reality, the ideological monoculture is more harmful to liberals than conservatives. Paloma is right; given her conservative upbringing, exposure to very liberal students at Harvard would have given her a well-rounded education.

Her liberal cl***mates? Not as much. When you are surrounded by like-minded people, your ideas are less likely to be tested, and — just as dangerous — it becomes easier to believe that disagreement with you is a sign of ignorance or malice.

But here’s the key distinction: Intolerance is different from indoctrination. Radical peers, professors and administrators are far better at stigma than persuasion, and mockery does very little to change a person’s mind.

In fact, for Christian parents who are worried about their children’s faith, there is robust data showing that Christians with a college degree are more likely to attend religious services weekly.

All this becomes obvious the moment you actually meet college students. I’ve taught (and teach) at both the college and law-school level, in both religious and elite secular universities, and not once did I perceive my students as little lumps of clay, ready to be molded however I pleased. Instead, my students are people of conviction. The best students are full of both conviction and curiosity. They’re eager to learn. The worst have conviction without curiosity. They’re eager to tell me exactly what they think I’m doing wrong.

I’m convinced that every person — especially those of us who live in the world of ideas — should spend time in a place where he or she is a distinct religious or ideological minority, even when it’s hard. It can be among the most clarifying and rewarding experiences in life.

In a conversation last week between MSNow’s Katy Tur, my friend Mona Charen and me, Mona, the policy editor at The Bulwark, reflected on her own experience as a conservative at Barnard College in the 1970s. She referred to a quote of John Stuart Mill’s: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”

When I was in law school, I appreciated the fact that my ideas were being tested by the smartest people I’d ever met. There was no way for me to skate through a conversation — much less a cl***. That was worth the scorn, as annoying and painful as that scorn could sometimes be.

But few things taught me that I belonged there more than those moments when my cl***mates would say, “I’ve never heard that argument before” or “I’ve never even met anyone like you before.”

We learned from one another, and we still learn from one another. There are times when my friends and cl***mates can even hear the echoes of our longtime debates and disagreements in my columns. I was a conservative and a Christian when I met them. I’m a conservative and a Christian now, but I’m a better Christian and a better conservative because they tested me. In the absence of that testing, I shudder to think what I’d be like today.

To see what right-wing bubbles can do to the Christian mind, one need only look at the strident, conspiratorial — and often downright dumb — discourse in so many parts of the religious right today.

None of Harvard’s sins justify the Trump administration’s attacks on its academic freedom. And I absolutely wonder why a secretary of transportation has a reality television show, but no one should mock Duffy for his concern for his daughter’s spiritual welfare. Watching that moment (however scripted it was) did give you an insight into countless conversations in conservative homes across the country.

That conversation with my father many years ago was also hard. And it was more than a little sad. I wasn’t just leaving my home. In many ways, I was also separating from the denomination I grew up in. I was leaving my home and my spiritual family. There were precious few churches of Christ in greater Boston. I think any parent can understand this concern.

But we made the decision together. I was going to go. It was going to be hard (I didn’t know a single soul within roughly 700 miles of Cambridge, M***.), but I went because of my faith, not in spite of it. My father and I quoted the words of the Apostle Paul to each other, which were written in an infinitely more perilous time for Christians. I told you I was from a conservative Christian family.

“God has not given us a spirit of fear,” Paul writes in Second Timothy, “but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”