In an op-ed published (online) July 2, some students complained that an essay I posted on a web page hurt their feelings. The subject of my essay was the death of a generation of hemophiliacs from clotting factor infected with the HIV virus, and of large numbers of transfusion recipients from infected blood. If you have hemophilia in your family (it occurs in every population group), you would probably agree. My essay might be summarized by the slogan Hemophiliac Lives Matter.

Lives are more important than feelings. If you don’t believe that, then your moral calculus needs resetting.

You have chosen to spend four years of your lives, and a large sum of your or your parents’ money, attending university. The purpose of education is not to confirm or “validate” your “identity” or feelings—you could do that at home. It is to expose you to the broad range of human thought, to show you how different people and cultures have approached the fundamental questions of existence. In a Student Life op-ed “Welcome Class of 2023” published last fall, I used the divine right of kings as an example of how differently the problem of governance has been addressed in the past. Confrontation with new or different ideas can be upsetting—that is necessary, and even healthy, because it makes you think: Why did someone else think differently than I do; do I have something to learn from him?