First off, we are in college. We are given the opportunity to expand our minds and learn through both lectures from our professors and debates with our peers. We learn how to properly formulate our arguments and to understand why we think the way that we think rather than always speaking our minds using only our personal feelings as a way to justify our trains of thought.

For the first time in our lives, we are challenged. We are forced to question everything we believe, and doubt if we even know anything at all. But more importantly, we learn to think for ourselves without the influence of others.

But what has become an increasing problem is many college students are beginning to feel personally offended when others disagree with their beliefs.

Just because I disagree with you doesn't mean I hate.

I disagree with you because I should be allowed to express how I feel about your argument because this is not a one sided debate. While it is nice to agree with my peers, I have every right to feel like I can disagree with you as long as I do it in an appropriate manner. Free speech and hate speech are not the same thing. So if I want to tell you that I disagree with you, that doesn’t mean that I dislike you at all.

What I am trying to do when I disagree with you is to expand my mind to understand if another point of view will change your mind or change my mind. It could also teach me whether or not my argument is stronger or weaker and how to fix it. By challenging each other, we are learning more about how we can improve our arguments or be able to more firmly establish our beliefs through improvement.

When I disagree with you, we are both growing from this experience.

So the next time someone disagrees with you, don’t take it personally. Take it as an educational challenge.

Disclaimer: Personal attacks in arguments are definitely something to feel offended by because the person you’ve disagreed with about a subject has turned the debate into a personal problem when it wasn’t supposed to be in the first place.