For 15 of my 25 years of active duty, I was fortunate to have been assigned to the faculty of the U.S. Air Force Academy here in Colorado Springs. I was hired by the Political Science Department after I completed my first operational tour as a “finger-on-the-button” guy in the ICBM world, stationed just north of Colorado at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. During that duty I would sit nuclear alert at one of the then-20 Launch Control Centers buried beneath the soils of Colorado, Wyoming, or Nebraska, controlling part of the then-200 ICBMs that made up our wing.

I enjoyed missile duty, and since my eyesight wasn’t good enough to become a pilot, it was an opportunity for a guy with glasses to get a job at the “tip of the spear,” a truly “operational” assignment. We targeted our nation’s potential adversaries (did you think, even after all these years, I would confirm whom we targeted? Nope), and I found fulfillment in knowing those nations that might wish the U.S.’s destruction couldn’t do anything about it, because of the threat of massive retaliation from, you know, ICBMs.

That said, I was thrilled to be selected to teach at the academy. After a stint in graduate school to earn my master’s degree (and then later, another tour to grad school to earn my Ph.D.), I found myself in a classroom, looking into the eyes of a room full of cadets. These young men and women were, by and large, quite bright, many having arrived at the academy with perfect GPAs and other remarkable achievements in high school.

Stay up to speed: Sign up for daily opinion in your inbox Monday-Friday

And so, on the first day of classes, I would ask these bright young folks what the difference is between high school and college? Think about that for a moment and ponder what your response would be.

After they mulled the idea for a bit, and after I heard a few of their ideas, I would put forth that my sense of the difference comes down to how we treat alleged knowledge, often in the form of textbooks. I said that in high school, generally speaking, books represented knowledge. Learn what’s in these books and you’ll graduate.

College, I posited, was different. In college, we say that this book represents the author’s claim about what was knowledge, what was true. It was now up to us, as adults, to evaluate those claims based on logic, evidence and reason. Only then are we in a position to truly evaluate assertions made by others. And often times a single “true” answer simply wasn’t there. Of course, I’m talking about things like political science, and not, say astronautical engineering where there often are, indeed, correct answers.

As you likely know, or at least suspect, the academy’s student body trends quite a bit to the right, politically. Ironically, that is not because the conservatives do anything to keep more liberal or moderate thinkers out. Rather, those groups (perhaps as the continuing echo of Vietnam) tend to not consider military careers. That is a mistake by my fellow liberals. I won’t claim being a liberal for more than 25 years of active duty wasn’t without its challenges, but I’m quite proud to have served my country in uniform for a quarter-century.

So, back to the students. I also told them on day one of class whatever they argued, I would take the other side and make them defend their positions using the aforementioned logic, evidence and reason. Just because, say, a student’s mommy and daddy believed something was not sufficient “evidence” to back up a claim.

I specialized in teaching the required course on American national government and national security and I taught thousands of cadets over the years. And with only a tiny handful of exceptions, the cadets responded well to having their belief system challenged, and learned to support ideas only if the ideas were supported logically.

Of course to do this, I had to have the cadets be confronted by thinking that was different than their own growing up, often sharply different. For example, I once taught an honors section of the American government course and I deliberately used a leftist, heck near socialist, textbook, which looked at American government, industry and other matters rather differently than they were used to.

The book was very well written and reasoned and the cadets worked very hard at trying to refute those ideas the author mentioned that offended their usual way of thinking. So, I invited the author of the book, a leftist professor elsewhere, to come to the Academy and meet with the students. They prepared for weeks, trying to anticipate his arguments. When he finally came to the academy and met with the students, both sides came away changed. The cadets realized thoughtful and caring people can be patriots even when they differ with you, and the author had an eye-opening experience realizing the military is not made up of thoughtless automatons.

I mention this because in a recent Colorado Politics story we learned the academy’s library staff, under orders from the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, are currently going through a list of books to decide which should be banned from the library, else they somehow pollute the minds of the cadets with different thinking.

This is, of course, profoundly wrong and frankly dangerous.

Do we really want to create military leaders (and the current cadets, in 30 years or so, will be the nation’s military leaders) that have never had their thoughts and ideas challenged? Do we really want a military that has never had to see things from both sides? Do we really want a thoughtless and under-informed officer corps? I know I don’t.

I’m quite sure the textbook I used for the honors section those many years ago will, or would be, banned from the academy library, as it dared to criticize the American government. And banning books is a relatively short jump away from burning books.

And we must ask ourselves, what type of governments bans books? I’ve always believed the cure for “bad” speech (such as hate speech) isn’t to ban the speech. Rather it is to have that speech considered next to a flood of other people’s speech denouncing the rotten ideas. More speech is the answer, not less.

Look, there are many things one could say about the current administration and in particular, the current civilian leadership of the military. I’m horrified National Guard troops have been nationalized in California, and I’ll be profoundly scared if, as threatened, a certain guy with bone spurs orders the U.S. Marine Corps to move on American citizens. I would hope, in that case, we will find military leaders of great character who will refuse such an unlawful order.

Many years ago, in the 1930s and 1940s there was a radio commentator named Walter Winchell. He was influential and his style of fast-paced style is still seen in some in the media today. He was highly controversial, and I certainly don’t agree with him on too many things. But he once said, and I paraphrase a bit, “the job of a free press in a free society is to inform. Not that it will do so perfectly at any one time or from any one source.”

Simply put, to be informed today, you must consume your news from a number of sources, and you must use critical thinking to help you toward whatever the truth truly is. Logic, evidence, and reason are in your tool kit.

So rather than ban books, let’s embrace the widest possible range of ideas and come reason together, shall we?

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.