It is a truism that higher education should help “teach people how to think.” This is an important goal, but one more stated than understood.

“Teach people how to think?” What on Earth does that mean? Art Janik’s Wednesday column made me think about it. He compared the recently passed Anti-Terrorism Act, which includes greater wiretapping powers and ability to detain legal immigrants, to “the Red scare of the 1950s … the government conducted a witch-hunt to rid the United States or all communists. Being or helping a communist was worse than murder.” Janik continued, “Replace ‘communist’ with ‘terrorist’ and you can see how the whole phenomenon repeats itself.”

I like a lot of what Janik’s written this quarter. But I worry here that he sets up an abstract principle — “freedom” — on too high a pillar. Freedom is good. Impositions by the federal government on groups that are “different” are bad. That said, are there no possible conditions where a greater role for Big Brother could be justified?

Under the new law, he writes, law enforcement officials can conduct searches without a federal warrant when they have reasonable suspicion of an imminent crime. That “reasonable suspicion” part is real. That does not mean our courts will let the feds break down every door in the United States with no provocation. Meanwhile, such a provision might help prevent the next Sept. 11.

I guess I am a lot less worried about a new J. Edgar Hoover and a lot more worried about a faceless terrorist blowing up a nuclear power plant south of Chicago. What’s more important, “freedom” or the lives of human beings? If the federal government claims it needs greater ability to detain immigrants and hold them for seven days — not forever — on suspicions of “terrorist” behavior, are we so sure this is not a good thing after Sept. 11?

Given that, so far at least, all of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Arab men, should this factor not be allowed to play a limited role in police discretion when attempting to investigate and prevent future atrocities?

I fear that the Anti-Terrorism Act, in other words, might be a rational response to the latest crisis of history. (If I’m wrong, they did have the sense to put in sunset acts. This means that parts of the act will fade away eventually, unless Congress takes another active vote to reinstate them.)

Let me stress something: I hate all this reasoning. I really, absolutely hate it. And it flies in the face of most of my liberal commitments to an open society. But it would be stupid to watch the open society go up in a nuclear puff because we were worried that it was becoming too closed.

I think this all lies at the core of “learning how to think”: being willing to consider the possibility, even desirability, of your core personal values just being completely wrong. Now the irony: This kind of pure learning is something teachers in a classroom setting are generally quite bad at. You have to do it yourself. Academics can only give you the tools.

Ultimately, most of us change our values through real-world experience. And I really hope that our imminent experience doesn’t confirm my fears and prove Janik wrong.