[continuing an argument from earlier…]
I think that intellectual diversity and academic freedom are good baseline values, but that they are not so obviously a positive value in pedagogy. Students genuinely look to their instructors for information about approaches to pursue, and not all frameworks (etc.) are of equal value. Let us suppose that I subscribe to theory P and you to theory Q (≠ P). Necessarily one of the following must be true:
(1) P and Q are mere notational variants (i.e., weakly equivalent or better).
(2) P is “more right” than Q or Q is “more right” than P.
In the case of (1), the best pedagogical practice would probably be to continue to propagate whichever of {P, Q} is more widely used, more intellectually robust, etc. For instance if Q is the more robust tradition, efforts to “port” insights and technologies from Q to P contribute little, and often quite difficult in practice. Of course this doesn’t mean that P and its practitioners should be suppressed or anything of the sort, but there is no strong imperative to transmit P to young scholars.
In the case of (2), the best practice is also to focus pedagogy on whichever of the two is “more right”. Of course it is often useful to teach the intellectual history, and it is not always clear which theory is out ahead, but it is imperative to make sure students are conversant in the most promising approaches.
In the case of computational syntactic formalisms, weak equivalences hold between minimalist grammars (MGs) as formalized by Stabler and colleagues) and most of the so-called alternative formalisms. It is also quite clear to me that insights largely flow from minimalism and friends (broadly construed) to the alternative formalisms, and not the other way around. Finally, efforts to “port” these insights to alternative formalisms have stalled, or perhaps are just many years behind the bleeding edge in syntactic theory. (1) therefore applies, and I simply don’t see the strong imperative to teach the alternative formalisms.
In the case of computational phonology, there is also an emerging consensus that harmonic grammar (HG) of the sort learned by “maxent” technologies) have substantial pathologies compared to earlier formalisms, so that classic Optimality Theory (OT) is clearly “less wrong”. I am similarly sympathetic to arguments that global evaluation frameworks including HG and OT are overly constrained with respect to opacity phenomena and overgenerate in other dimensions, and these issues of expressivity are not shared with imperative (i.e., rule-based) and declarative (i.e., “weakly deterministic” formalisms of the “Delaware school”). (2) thus applies here.
Of course I am not advocating for restrictions on academic freedom or speech in general; I make this argument only regarding best pedagogical practices, and I’m not sure I’m in the right here.