It’s absolutely not. The balance of power has shifted toward the students in recent years (for better or worse). If a professor is able to “punish” “contrarian

It’s absolutely not. The balance of power has shifted toward the students in recent years (for better or worse). If a professor is able to “punish” “contrarian views,” it is only to the extent that the rest of the students get behind it. But I also think the punished views are at most socially punished in all but outlier cases. Having worked in higher ed for a bit and then transitioned into tech, I can say that students are over quick (on both left and right) to chalk up a bad score (read: “b” when I thought I deserved an “a”) to a biased attitude toward content rather than a substantive objection to the quality of argument. One thing that is true of humans in general: we will more easily find the holes in the arguments we disagree with, and what’s more, most students have similar ish ideas (especially the “contrarian” ones), so after two years of teaching a class on (say) the history of the civil war or gender in 18th century literature, the arguments are going to be familiar enough that you can just pattern match on them.