Like many of its conservative alumni, I have a complicated relationship with Harvard.

I grew up in a small town in Kentucky, where I went to public school. I attended college at a small Christian university in Nashville. I never had a thought that I could attend Harvard Law School. But friends urged me to try.

When I got in, it was so shocking that it felt miraculous. I knew it would change my life — and it did. It gave me some of my closest friends, it gave me career opportunities I couldn’t previously fathom, and it kindled in me a love for constitutional law.

At the same time, the school had profound problems. The student culture was remarkably intolerant and contentious. This was the height of early 1990s political correctness, and I was sometimes shouted down by angry classmates.

In 1993, GQ published a long report from the law school called “Beirut on the Charles,” and it described a place that “pitted faculty members against faculty members, faculty members against students” and where students were “waging holy war on one another.”

The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. In the 30 years since my graduation, the school has continued to change lives, and it has maintained one of the least tolerant cultures in American higher education.

For the second year in a row, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression (where I served as president a number of years ago) has ranked Harvard last in the country in its annual free speech rankings. The environment, FIRE determined, was “abysmal.”