Sunday night, three friends of mine and I whipped up quite a spontaneous post-dinner conversation. As our tired jaws mawed through the midnight hour, we discussed a variety of topics, from the contents of the day’s newspapers to popular science to the way our respective schools are structured.

Yet, the most important thing I took away from the conversation was the need for us, as students, to exercise dissent and disobedience-both in our academic worlds and larger society.

It’s a fairly popular time for dissent. In Washington, reporters and editors are finally starting to give healthy coverage to the shady path to war that the Bush administration forged in 2002 and 2003-although most news agencies have been reluctant to publicly address their own failure to criticize or analyze what has turned out to be the false or forged evidence used to make the case for the invasion of Iraq.

In the more-hopeful world of movies, audiences are watching Edward R. Murrow (played by David Strathairn), deal one nationally televised blow after another to Joseph McCarthy-the ringleader of Washington’s red-scare fear mongers in the early 1950s, a kind of Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft and Paul Wolfowitz all rolled into one, with a monochrome alert system.

Good Night, and Good Luck, directed by (and co-starring) George Clooney, tells the story of the broadcast journalism legend and his team at CBS who refused to simply report the news and not offer context and comment. They realized that McCarthy’s witch hunt for Communists in government offices was unconstitutional, and said so.

More importantly, Murrow and his colleagues realized that every discipline is limiting if you simply follow the rules that have been set forth by your predecessors. They realized that the same rules do not apply to every story, that when a public figure is stomping all over your values you have the obligation not only to tell the world what he is doing, but tell the world why you believe he is wrong.

In short, they followed their conscience, not their training.

As students, we can learn a lesson from this. Just because we are being taught material in class does not mean we should simply memorize it and never deal with it, except to regurgitate it.

There is a world where the answers are not provided by a textbook or a teacher, and while some of us have already moved there-or at least visited it-I have a feeling that many of my fellow students don’t even know it exists.

What we are acquiring at this University-what I hope all professors (and not just the ones I have had) are giving their students-are tools, not solutions. Life will provide the problems soon enough-problems that our parents and teachers might never have even considered, and it will be our job to use the knowledge we have accumulated to tinker with them and understand them and find solutions-if they exist.

We are being conditioned, I hope, to use our imagination-whether we become pilots or poets, pediatricians or priests-and draw on the lessons of the past to confront the challenges of our day.

No one at this school should simply be trained to carry out a specific task in a specific way; that is not what a Jesuit university does. A Jesuit university educates the whole person, sharpening his critical eye and strengthening his conscience. And the graduate of a Jesuit university should be an innovator, not an imitator.

Remain true to the passion that drew you to your field, but do not be afraid to break the rules of your discipline when you know in your heart that they are restricting your growth-and the growth of your ideas.

Healthy dissent in our classrooms will undoubtedly lead to healthy dissent in our living rooms and boardrooms, newsrooms and state houses.

Remember, in the words of Edward R. Murrow: “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty…We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men-not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.”