Greg Lukianoff On The Fight To Protect Freedom Of Speech

Freedom of speech is a cornerstone of open societies, allowing us to express ourselves freely and challenge the status quo. Greg Lukianoff, President and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and New York Times best-selling author of several books, including The Coddling of the American Mind and The Cancelling of the American Mind, joins Robert Glazer as he discusses the critical importance of free speech in maintaining a healthy society, highlighting its recent challenges. He also delves into the evolving landscape of campus censorship, influenced by ideological shifts and social media dynamics, advocating for robust protections of intellectual freedom amid growing challenges.

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Greg Lukianoff On The Fight To Protect Freedom Of Speech

Introduction

Our quote for this episode is from Noam Chomsky. “If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don’t like.” My guest, Greg Lukianoff, is on the front lines of the debate over free speech in America. Greg is an Attorney and the President and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, also known as FIRE. He’s also the New York Times bestselling author of several books, including The Coddling of the American Mind and The Canceling of the American Mind.

Personal Background

Greg, thanks for joining me on the show. I always like to start with childhood. Given that free expression and free speech are such a foundational element in your life’s work, I did want to ask you, do you remember when you were first introduced to these concepts growing up, and where do you think your passion for them came from?

Actually, I’m giving a commencement address for the first time in my life at the University of South Florida Medical School. I’m a little intimidated, I’ll be honest. My second earliest memory was being caught between my mother and father. My mother is ethnically Irish. She grew up in Britain and thinks of herself as British, so she has an exaggerated sense of politeness. My dad is ethnically Russian, grew up in Yugoslavia and thinks of himself as Russian. He has an exaggerated sense of brutal honesty.

The first time I got a Christmas present that I hated, it was this plastic drum from my Auntie Rona. I hated it but I was looking at my mom, realizing I had to be polite and looking at my dad, I realized I had to be honest. I went back and forth. I started crying like any four-year-old would do. My sister, I remember being like, “Poor baby doesn’t like his gift and starts crying.” I wish I could have been like, “No, but this is my first time facing a fundamental paradox.”

The tension between being polite and honest is something I’ve been aware of my whole life. Almost as soon as that, I was aware of the fact that my family had to flee the Soviets and the Bolsheviks because my grandfather fought the Bolshevik Revolution. I’m not aristocracy. I’m related to Serfs going back. We were murdered by the millions under the Soviets. A lot of us were given the nickname Kulaks, which were basically peasants who did well.

I was very aware of totalitarianism and authoritarianism, and I grew up in a neighborhood that had a lot of kids who were either immigrant from Vietnam or their parents from Korea, from some authoritarian regimes, in South America as well. We all took freedom of speech very seriously and sometimes puzzled at Americans for not appreciating it enough. Now, to be clear, I was raised in the 1980s and I was a teenager in the 1990s. Pretty great time. Free speech was something where there would seem to be bipartisan consensus.

It wasn’t a controversial topic.

It wasn’t like I feel now, which is like it’s freaking out a little bit that, not exclusively, but overwhelmingly, a lot of the people who are most concerned about free speech in the United States either have some connection to totalitarianism in their family or have lived over there.

The more you get away from being connected to the opposite, the more you don’t understand what it means, it seems like.

We didn’t have to worry about that quite as much when we at least appreciated that the Soviet Union was a great evil and the Eastern block was oppressed. Watching people on Twitter now be like, “Stalin wasn’t that bad.” It was like, “What?”

A lot of people seem to celebrate these systems to which they have never lived in or been subject to.

Living in Eastern Europe after the fact, because like a lot of people are like, “Yeah, sure.” If they’re trying to appear reasonable, they’d be like, “Stalin, sure, he is a mass murderer, but later it wasn’t so bad.” I’m like, “Yes, it was.” It wasn’t as murder, to be fair. In terms of the people I was dealing with when I lived in Prague in the ‘90s, they were people who were jailed. There were people who were beaten and they were, it also created a dynamic where they were afraid to be themselves because they knew their friends might turn them in.

Joining FIRE

You joined FIRE in 2001, and at that point, I think the organization had been around for a couple of years, and you had gone to law school, your background as a lawyer. What was the organization’s scale and priorities when you arrived?

It was only about a year and a half old. I was 1 of 6 employees. I was hired to be the first legal director of FIRE. I hyper specialized in First Amendment in law school. I took every class that Stanford offered on First Amendment. When I ran out, I did six credits on censorship during the Tudor dynasty of my own creation. I also interned at the ACLU while I was in school. I did put crazily put all my eggs into the First Amendment basket, hoping that I would find a job in it.

The good news about specializing that well is that it meant when Harvey Silverglate contacted the then head of Stanford Law Kathleen Sullivan who she would recommend as someone to be the first legal director of FIRE, she actually recommended me by name, which remains like the biggest compliment I’ve ever gotten in my entire life. It was very small scale. We were fighting for free speech on college campuses. It was right after 9/11, so overwhelmingly, my cases were oftentimes highly unsympathetic cases of speech. A lot of times, with threats coming from the right after 9/11. I immediately got used to getting lots of hate mail.

That in itself is an expression of free speech.

Having a baptism of fire was helpful to me, to character of the whole organization to be indifferent like, “We’re going to defend free speech no matter what.”

Free Speech

Let’s say the deal that both sides hate is the right deal. Let’s start at the top, because I think one of the things that’s gotten lost when you talk about the mission of FIRE, but is the definition of free speech in your mind, what is it not? I think there’s a lot of things around like it doesn’t mean you’re free from consequences. I think people have totally mistaken the free speech in the public domain and what it means from the government or private. Given this is your expertise, could you set the foundation for us on that?

Surprisingly, I have a very expansive view of what free speech means, and I tend to think of it as the big Boolean circle around everything from the scientific method to academic freedom to certain aspects of small liberalism expression all live. I think that that’s the bigger term, freedom of speech. Of course, sometimes critics are like, “There are rules when it comes to academic freedom.” Yeah, the First Amendment interprets what the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment means in different contexts to make sense. Yeah, it is true in the academic and scientific context, you have certain rules, but that doesn’t make it any less about the sharing of ideas, about the idea that like thought experiments are always allowed, the idea that you can question because as soon as you can’t question something, then you’re talking about fundamentalism as Jonathan Rauch would call it.

I tend to think of free speech as being very expansive. I think that we do something very smart in First Amendment law. Rather than do what the Europeans have done, in my opinion, in a way that it has been disastrous in some cases, an ad hoc balancing of like, “We believe in free speech, but maybe this cartoonist should go to jail and this one shouldn’t.” I’ve watched these debates and been like, “This is nonsensical, but okay.”

What we do in the United States instead, and I think this makes a lot of sense from a psychological standpoint for judges, is we more or less have choice architecture, which is saying that rather than having balancing tests all the time, we’re going to have specific walled off categories of speech that are not protected. Oftentimes, frankly, because they’re arguably more like action in some cases. For example, true threats, not protected. To be clear, nor should they be. I actually think failure to investigate true threats, particularly online, has led to some hostility to free speech that we wouldn’t need to live with.

Saying, “I’m going to kill you,” in a circumstance where it seems likely that this might actually be carried out, that’s not protected nor should it be. Discriminatory harassment is not protected, which is a pattern of discriminatory behavior directed at an individual. Now, it has to take place in a regulated environment. That includes things like the workplace or in higher ed, but we think that that should be a very high bar or else, as it’s happened throughout my entire career, to be clear, harassment rationales have been abused to go after speech that’s offensive.

Here’s the thing that a lot of Europeans don’t understand about the distinction between American law and European law. We have something, from a 1989 case, called Texas v Johnson that’s about whether or not you can burn an American flag. We have something that is our bedrock principle when it comes to free speech. You cannot ban speech simply because it’s offensive. I think that this is a great rule for a genuinely pluralistic multicultural society because we can’t even agree on what’s offensive. It’s different from person to person from year to year. It’s different across genders. It’s certainly different for different religions, but also people from different countries, and certainly different between my mom and my dad, which made this apparent.

You cannot ban speech simply because it’s offensive. This is a great rule for a genuinely pluralistic, multicultural society because we can’t agree on what’s right.

A lot of the stuff that people will bring to me be like, “Mr. First Amendment, I bet you believe that what happened at Berkeley where they swarmed a speech by an IDF soldier.” They broke windows and forced them to flee. That is classic mob censorship. That’s intimidation that’s illegal for all sorts of appropriate reasons. A lot of times, when people bring me examples of things that they think are especially outrageous, actually most of the time, at least in the US, they’re pointing to things that I’m like, “Yeah, actually, that’s a threat.”

The leadership on campuses has been deplorable, but the difference between sitting down and protesting someone and blocking students from getting to class or intimidating them or getting in front of the door is a different thing. To me, when you’re interfering with someone else’s ability to live, that crosses a line.

When we talk about mob censorship, what they’re doing is they are asserting their own. Just because I don’t like you, these people behind me are not allowed to hear you. That is the very heart of censorship.

Versus don’t go listen to that person.

Sure, or protest outside.

That’s your definition. One of the things that’s been made complicated, I’m curious of your thing on this, and I’ll give an example. Not necessarily it’s my belief, but illustrative. When you talk about hate speech and threatening speech, I think we used to have a clear definition of what that means, but now there are some people who have muddied that line. Someone says there are two genders. That’s their argument, and then that is also thrown into hate speech. How does one adjudicate that?

Those are two very different things. Threats are not protected, nor should they be. Intimidation is not protected. As I said, discriminatory harassment is as well. Certainly, assault and violence are not protected. I’ve seen a lot of that, unfortunately, on campuses. Hate speech in the United States isn’t a thing. It’s not recognized by law, nor could it be partially because of the First Amendment bedrock principle that essentially can’t be, that it’s offensive.

Racial slurs are protected in the United States. A pattern of behavior where you follow someone around shouting racist words at them, that could be intimidation. That could be discriminatory harassment. It can be part of a pattern, but the words themselves are not magically unprotected because they’re offensive. I think the beginning of the end for free speech on campus started with the hate speech movement. The goal of banning racist, sexist speech started by people like Richard Delgado and Mary Matsuda and other of the founders of Critical Race Theory in the late 1970s going up through the mid-1990s. I think that hate speech has been an absolutely amazing PR win for pro-censorship forces, but I will always oppose it.

The Coddling Of The American Mind

One of the things I’ve said is that books are like wine. I think the best one, and I heard someone say he doesn’t judge a book before ten years, which I thought was interesting, and the best ones get better and better over time. The worst ones have their moment and then turn to vinegar pretty quickly. In 2018, y you and your co-author Jonathan Hyde published a book called The Coddling of the American Mind. It was based on a popular article of the same name you wrote a few years earlier. My rule on books is like, when 3 to 4 people mention it from different concentric circles, it goes on my night table. It might sit there for a while, but when I read that book, I’ve recommended it to probably 100 people at this point.

It was one of the most important books I had read in the past ten years because I was in this sweet spot of my kids weren’t in college yet. I had been out of college for twenty years. I missed what was going on. I had no idea. I had no context with it, but it was shocking we led up to this. I think the insights in that book turned outright prophetic in 2024 with what we’re seeing going on. If you could rewind the clock back to 2018, 2016, how did you and Jonathan come to collaborate? What were you both seeing that you were like, “This is going to be a problem?”

It starts with a very light, easy and breezy story about me getting suicidally depressed in 2007 and being hospitalized as a danger to myself. This came from being president of FIRE. I’d gone from being a legal director to president in 2006. There was something genuinely exhausting about being in the culture world all the time, and having, in some cases, conservatives literally wanting to get in bar fights with me for some of the cases we took on and having girlfriends mad at me that I defended Republicans. It can be profoundly alienating, particularly if you’re living in a place like I was living at the time, Philadelphia, where I didn’t have a lot of friends and family around. I got depressed, and the culture was a huge part of that.

As I was recovering, I was studying cognitive behavioral therapy. I think it’s no exaggeration to say CBT saved my life. It’s something that works relatively slowly. You have to practice it all the time for it to work. I fairly feel like I need to brush up on it. Basically, what the incredible wisdom of CBT is that when you have these irrational thoughts that come up that are like you go on a bad date and you immediately say your romantic life is over to yourself. It’s not the power of positive thinking. It’s the power of critical thinking. Taking that thought and writing it down and actually asking yourself, “Is this is this rational?” And then asking, “Is it a cognitive distortion?”

Cognitive distortions are things like catastrophizing, mind reading, which means like what’s in the other person’s mind, fortune telling that how things will work out over generalizing all of these bad, lazy mental habits that when you’re anxious and depressed, you have a lot more of them like everything is doom. Everything leads to the awful things people are thinking and saying about you, all this stuff that simply doesn’t stand up to rational to, to rational scrutiny. Meanwhile, since I was working on campus, I was looking at the way administrators were behaving towards students back then and the rationales they were using to censor. It seems like they’re actually telling students, “Do catastrophize, do over generalize, do engage in cognitive distortions in general.”

Do assume the worst and everything.

Thank goodness the students aren’t buying this, because back then, the students weren’t. However, that changed dramatically, suddenly, right at the end of 2013, but particularly going into 2014. It was so dramatic that I’ll get a lot of us hopped on the phone, like, “What happened on campus?”

I’m very curious about why then? What was the time implication?

I’ll come back to that. Something dramatic was going on in 2014. It wasn’t a subtle shift at all. Students who had always been good on free speech suddenly weren’t. There were a lot of times they were justifying their censorship through medicalized rationales. What they were saying was, “This person can’t be on campus because it might be catastrophic to some other group on campus because they have evil thoughts in their heart and mind reading.” All of this oversimplified, moralistic language was also usually said in the language of trauma as well. I was like, “These are cognitive distortions.”

Where is it coming from? It’s so funny because I came to this totally separately. The way you get over trauma is you do CBT. It’s about facing the fears. It’s very interesting that you bring this up. I didn’t realize this was the genesis.

That’s where it came from. I told my staff about this idea I’d been thinking about for a long time, combining the free speech, academic freedom argument with cognitive behavioral therapy. I got crickets because I thought this was a weird idea. I brought to my new friend, Jonathan Haidt, and he thought it was great, and he thought it was super fascinating. In 2014, we decided to write an article, which I titled, by the way, Arguing Towards Misery.

The editor fought you on the title.

We lost and ended up being The Coddling of the American Mind title.

It worked for you.

Yeah, it did. I got stuck with it again for the book. I wanted to call that Disempowered because I felt like that’s what we were doing to young people through cognitive distortions. That’s what led us down the path to doing this, basically saying that the same things that are going to be threat stack and freedom and free speech are also going to be disaster for mental health. At the time, the data wasn’t out. We knew the stories from campus and how mental health facilities were saying they were overwhelmed. When the data came out, unfortunately, and as it’s continued to get worse, the threat to academic freedom of free speech was profound.

Trigger Warnings And Behavioral Outcomes

I come from the business world where when you don’t get the outcome you want, you change the behavior. Extensively, trigger warnings, and all these things are done to protect people. The overwhelming data is that people are worse off, more depressed, more mental health. The data’s pretty clear. The trigger warnings actually don’t work. Why are people doubling and tripling? This is, to me, like parenting philosophy. If you say to someone, “This parenting philosophy doesn’t work,” and they double and triple down on aspects of helicopter parenting. Why is behavior so disconnected from the obvious outcomes? Is it because people can’t admit maybe they were wrong. This is eminently confusing to me.

It’s the great lesson of the 20th century that we didn’t learn. It’s ideology. Ideology makes even bright people stupid. Essentially, if you have a particularly rigid political ideology that oversimplifies the universe, but it can be a calming force. Also, by the way, it allows you to win arguments in dormitories. In the 1980s and ‘90s. It has a tendency to stick in an environment that has insufficiently low levels of disagreement, also known as viewpoint diversity. Viewpoint diversity in higher ed has been declining pretty consistently over the years. Some departments, it basically doesn’t exist.

The great lesson of the 20th century that we didn’t learn is that ideology makes even bright people stupid.

They’re teaching opinions.

They’re teaching ideology. Some of that ideology that was once a little bit like not exactly scoffed at, but greeted with a fair amount of skepticism like intersectionality have become treated a little bit like gospel. Almost like sacred ideas. Every motivation is mixed. There is the motivation for peace and quiet on campus and that that’s manifest in a lot of FIRE cases that we see over the years. There’s also the ideological component that if you believe in a simplified dynamic of oppressor versus oppressed or, for that matter, if you’re concerned about the Office of Civil Rights Department of Education investigating you, you have some incentive to investigate things that people claim are discriminatory harassment but fall far short of that.

A lot of things conspired to create an environment in which there was a lot of policing of freedom of speech going back decades and was certainly already more pronounced than I was expecting it to be when I began in even way back in 2001 because of the ideological bent of administrators and of campuses themselves it had an ideological component as well. This got reinforced over and over again. Here’s one of the harder problems to solve. How did it end up in the minds of students? One, the kind of students who tend to go to elite colleges in particular are people whose parents tended to go to elite colleges as well. Certainly, they learned some of these ideological ideas and the first great wave of political correctness and from ‘85 to ‘95, but also, these ideas took off in education schools and, therefore, have been taught downward through K through 12 all throughout the United States.

Why specifically 2014? Haidt and I both think that social media both acted as an accelerant, that it sped a number of things up, that it caused the fire to get larger but also created new trends. It created new weird platforms like Tumblr, for example. For that matter, on the right, 4chan were argument places where battling for truth was never the point. It was basically like cheap way to win arguments without winning arguments.

In my more recent book, The Canceling of the American Mind, and I always had had the lucky break of getting to write it with a absolutely brilliant 23-year-old named Rikki Schlott, who was twenty when I first started working with her. She points out that it was absolutely true that a lot of these tactics that we now use to cancel people or get them to shut up or delegitimize them, they were already arguments that she was making in grade school. A lot of these tactics that we call winning arguments without winning arguments to use ad hominem to dismiss your opponent, they borrowed tremendously from the ideology that was coming out of campuses and coming out of K through 12.

Was she someone who felt she broke out of that as a reformer?

Yeah, she did. Absolutely. She was not trying to engage in this herself, but she watched it happen. Those were the students who started hitting campuses around 2013, 2014, people who had been on smartphones, who had been on social media.

Who had seen this, “If you yell enough and whatever, you can subdue the other side.”

If you use some ideological arguments that nobody wants to contradict, particularly in low viewpoint diversity environments, you’re going to win. Not that you’re going to persuade anybody, but you’re going to scare off people. One of the things that since canceling came out, I’m like, “We are literally arguing as a society like junior high school.”

Debating versus arguing. In academia, it was always that whatever you put out there had to be challenged. I think you guys said it in the book somewhere, but one of the things that stuck out to me was historically, you’d put out a position or a paper on campus, and other people would question your opinion and bring new facts or put out a dissenting opinion or otherwise. Soon it became, “No, Greg. I’m not going to dissent or argue or actually bring logic to your argument. You need to take down your argument because I don’t like it, and it’s offensive.” It’s a totally unacademic approach to education.

It’s easier. It allows you moral certainty. It allows you a sense of righteousness. All these things are inappropriate for intellectual endeavors. Basically, if your intellectual endeavors can conveniently end up getting you to say, “What I believed in the first place is proven correct,” you should probably not trust that. I think we’ve taught a generation of younger people to be much more comfortable in a situation in which their preconceived notions are constantly being proven correct.

If your intellectual endeavors can conveniently end up getting you to say, “What I believe in the first place is always just proven correct,” you should probably not trust that.

The Three Untruths

Talk about a little bit about the three untruths, because I think that was interesting. One of the ones that stuck with me, I don’t remember if it was an untruth or a sub-part of that, was that trust your feelings that your feelings are always right. I think you guys had an example of the subway in New York where people are supposed to report in and trust their feelings if they see something. I don’t know, 100,000 calls a year, there’s one incident. Statistically, people’s gut instinct is wrong in 99% of those cases, but we’re telling people that whatever they feel is truth. Can you talk a little bit about the untruths? I think those explain a lot of this.

The untruths have a funny story. When Haidt and I were working on the book, we started going deep into intersectionality, and I realized we were starting to write a book that I didn’t want to read. I thought that one of the effective things about the original coddling article was what we do in my family to give each other advice. We’re very independent-minded people, and we’re not the people who will necessarily accept if one of us lectures the other one on precisely what to do. We tend to make fun of what the dumbest option would be like. I remember saying to my sister, Alex, “Alex, you should you should hold onto that anger and you should ball it up. Every morning, when you get up, you should fixate on it.”

Basically, give obviously stupid advice to make the point that, “I don’t care what you do, just don’t do that.” That’s what we used in The Coddling of the American Mind as a way to make our ideas more accessible. The idea of going to a guru, who’s supposed to be this genius on wisdom. The advice he gives us is what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker, always trust your feelings and life is a battle between good people and evil people. We actually added a fourth, by the way, in The Canceling of the American Mind, which is no bad person has any good opinion.

That ties interestingly to number three, because once you put them in that bucket, then they can never say anything or be anything of value.

It explains so much of the ad hominem in the way we argue on the internet, which is more or less like, “I’m not going to prove you wrong on your actual substantive argument, but I’m going to show that you’re a bad person, and that means I don’t have to listen to you anymore.”

In the context of the Middle East now, there’s plenty of fault on both sides but inability to even nuance or say, “I support Israel, but I don’t support Netanyahu.” Everything is nuanced.

You mentioned the great untruth, number two, always trust your feelings. That’s the one that sounds superficially the nicest. Trust your heart but there is no wisdom tradition that tells you to uncritically always listen to your heart. A lot of growing up, a lot of becoming a mature, responsible person is not listening to your feelings. This gets you to the cognitive distortion of emotional reasoning.

We feel like this is being taught in K through 12 and in higher ed, that essentially if you feel something, that it must somehow be true or it must somehow mean something. Of course, I can imagine people listening to me like, “Of course it means something.” Yes, but it’s often not what you think it means. I think her name is Susan David, she had a great distillation of this. She said, “Emotions are data, not instructions.”

It’s subject to a lot of prejudice. Let’s pretend as a kid, three days in a row, I got beat up with someone by purple hair. I might determine that a fourth person with purple hair is threatening, but they are not. There’s understandability. I was threatened but they’re actually not. My body’s doing a whole judgment thing. I understand why it’s doing it, but it’s not right a lot of the time.

A lot of times, when you’re critical about what you’re feeling, and like you learn in cognitive behavioral therapy, you realize you’re an emotional creature flailing around. I remember as a kid feeling incredibly blue one day, and since I was religious when I was a kid, going to my mom and being like, “I think God’s trying to tell me something because I’m suddenly sad.” My mom says, “Greg, have a piece of cheese.” I was so mad, I was like, “How dare you dismiss my connection to the almighty and my understanding of the universe.” Of course, I had a piece of cheese, and within an hour, I felt a lot better. Sometimes, to say your feelings are not infallible is a massive understatement.

Free Speech On College Campuses

The events in the last six months, I think, have been confusing and eye-opening for a lot of people. Talking about nuance, I want to dive into something that I think is a little bit misunderstood and get your opinion on it. When Claudia Gay and Liz McGill gave their now I’ll call disastrous testimony in front of Congress about anti-Semitism on campus, and the now famous, it depends on the context lines, I think one of the reasons people were so upset is that they tried to invoke free speech as a defense for why they had not cracked down on hate speech or anti-Semitic behavior on their campuses. From my perspective, the problem with the response, and I’ve written is two parts. One, I think you could actually make an argument that what they were trying to say, and some of it was not wrong. The principles of the answer.

I think the problem for a lot of people, it was disingenuous and incongruous with over a decade of behavior as you’ve studied one in an article. I wrote this since I couldn’t recap it better, I figured I’d read it. I said, “Does anyone believe for a single second that the same, it depends on the context answer or invoking free speech principles would’ve been acceptable in response to similar threats to other minority groups on campuses? Had these litter leaders equivocated for calls about hate crimes or extermination of black students or students in the LGBTQ community, they would’ve been fired or forced to resign at the end of the day?” For those who heard this and they were like, “Funny that they were going to the free speech,” can you explain more why this was so disingenuous? Maybe particularly because I think Harvard and Penn were the two poorest-ranked schools in your free speech assessment.

I want to brag a little bit about the campus free speech ranking, because it’s something that, from my very first days at FIRE, people wanted us to rank schools according to how good they were for free speech. I take my social science seriously. It would be arbitrary if we tried to do it based on what we’re seeing. We got the capacity to do, every year, the largest study of student opinion ever conducted on the environment for free speech on campus. We were able to put together the most comprehensive database of professor cancellations, student cancellations, de-platforming and speech codes together.

When you combined all of these with a variety of pluses and minuses if you handle the de-platforming case, then you get a plus, if you banned a speaker, that’s a minus, Harvard and Penn were dead last out of 248 schools. Harvard actually got a negative score that we rounded up to a zero in in order to be more fair. Penn was not too far behind. They did terribly.

It wasn’t the time to go hide behind it.

I think the only way they could have handled that testimony other than being much better on free speech was to come up and say, “We’ve been unreliable on free speech in the past. I, myself, Claudine Gay, should have stood up for the free speech rights of Ronald Sullivan.”

People haven’t looked at the case of Professor Ronald Sullivan. It’s fascinating. It’s a terrible case.

Also, Carol Hooven or I should have been more suspicious of the coincidental investigation. They’re all terrible cases. First apologize for being inconsistent in the past. Next, say, “Antisemitism is a real problem in elite higher education. That’s also been our fault to a large degree for the oversimplified ideology we’re teaching young people,” and then start defending free speech.

I thought that Stefanik was being unfair in that she was demanding a yes or no answer to the question. I give actually the respondent some credit here. They’re like, “You’re saying calls for genocide.” What you are hearing on campus are students shouting intifada. By the way, something that I think is incredibly insensitive and offensive to shout, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Now you have to bring it back to that because one, is there any question that shouting chanting, “From the river to the sea,” is protected? No. When it comes to the motivation that this is a call for genocide, I don’t think that’s what a lot of the students think they’re saying. I think when they’re saying Intifada, they think they’re saying resist. There’s an incredibly embarrassing yet wonderful article by The Wall Street Journal where they talk to some students who said they don’t know.

They showed them the map, “Here’s the river, here’s the sea. That’s the whole thing. Did you know that?” Generally, they didn’t. They became a lot less comfortable with the chant in that case. I think that the argument that things are either protected or unprotected depending on a larger context is actually correct. I, also, however, think that particularly Claudine Gay comes from a discipline in which the word context is wildly overused. She could have explained it so much better and they didn’t. Do I think the double standard thing is absolutely why they had no chance of convincing anybody at that point? Yeah, that’s why. To this day, by the way, I call this the silver spoon rule like the golden rule, but for elite higher ed, particularly Harvard, is they are so unwilling to admit they’ve ever done anything wrong.

Preferred Speech

We haven’t talked about it, but what explains preferred speech and how that’s dominated a lot of college campuses? The concept of how free speech seems to have been bent in terms of preferential dialogues.

When you have a low viewpoint diversity university when it comes to professors and you have an administrative class that not only has, in some cases, virtually no viewpoint diversity, they actually think ideological concerns are part of their jobs in many cases and some amount of orthodoxy policing. One thing that people don’t know about DEI administrators, and we talk a lot about this in The Canceling of the American Mind and in my follow up, The Coddling of the American Mind, is how often they are involved in organizing some of the shout-downs a and helping along some of the campaigns against individual professors.

You’re saying the jury should not be speaking for the plaintiff or the defendant.

The idea that there is a preferred speech on campus, it’s simply a fact. I thought that the October 7th response was so indicative because that double standard that I was referring to, they were making the argument that what I think is rightfully understood by Jewish students sometimes as sounding an awful lot like a threat to them is something that they’re going to bat for.

A couple of weeks before, they’d been in very somber terms talking about the hateful violence of fat phobia, and it’s like, your bias is apparent to everybody, but sometimes it doesn’t seem you. That’s one of the reasons why I think the appreciation and trust in campuses, the trust in expertise generated by higher ed is so low at the moment. They can’t see how much they’re stacking the game in favor of arguments they like, as opposed to ones that they try to make, in some cases, entirely taboo.

We hear the term thrown around someone who withheld money from Harvard, snowflake, but one of the concepts that you share in The Coddling of the American Mind is how restricting speech trigger warnings and this policing of discourse are hampering kids’ ability to learn resistance. One of the interesting things that I read, Tim Urban wrote a similar book that built on your work. One of the things in that book that was fascinating was how he talked about this concept of rape law.

This was a women’s advocacy thing, but professors were dropping it and afraid to teach it because it was almost impossible in the context of trigger warnings. They were like, “I’m not going to teach this at all.” It was shocking to me to learn that. What is the consequence of this diminished resilience or this ability to not fall apart when something doesn’t go right, when something you don’t agree with or otherwise? It seems to have real societal consequences.

When it comes to the trends in rape law, that was something that I saw in action even when I was in law school but took on a life of its own. One of the reasons why you talk a lot about the law regarding rape in criminal law classes, at least you used to, is partially to as a way to explore state of mind and different standards by which you can find someone guilty, whether or not it’s strict liability, for example.

It’s an interesting body of law. It’s on a horrible topic, but lawyers were always understood to be adults, at least we would hope, capable of discussing difficult things, including criminal law. Professor after professor saying that they’re scared to teach this or they don’t teach it anymore is so disastrous. Who is it harming the most? Victims of rape.

People don’t have the ability to make a case. The analogy sounds so crazy. I’m sure there’ll be some test case of someone applying to med school and saying they’re grossed out by blood and guts and they don’t want to do the labs and that’s harmful to them. I know that sounds crazy, but how can you be a doctor? That’s why I’m not a doctor. I’m terrible around any of that stuff but it seems like it’s a requirement of the role and of the job.

You were asking what the long-term problems with this is, and I think a lot of the long-term threat is actually quite profound because one of the things that we point out a lot in The Coddling of the American Mind is that we’ve gotten young people used to intermediated relationships where essentially, if you have someone who is mean to you, then appeal to authority to correct that problem. We have this in kindergarten, but we also have this in K through 8, and then we have it in high school.

It’s funny, my son’s school actually has a policy of self-advocacy. They do not want the parents involved at all. I think it’s great. They teach the kids, “If you don’t like the tech, you go ask for extra credit.

Some of these trends, I’m hopeful that maybe we help contribute to. I was happy that my kids’ school actually had doubled recess. Other parents might not be asking me that, but I am. When it comes to the intermediated relationship, and of course, HR in corporations oftentimes functions like that, particularly if you have some of the ideologies embedded in HR that you see on campuses. I’ve seen this go very wrong for a number of companies. That’s not good training for teaching people to live in a free society. That essentially, “How do we solve our problems?” Authority.

I never thought of that that way. Quickly, you start to defer to authoritarianism. The problem is everyone believes it’ll be their type.

Cancel Culture

That’s so typical. It’s something that we used to have better societal norms for dealing with. I talk a lot in canceling about old idioms that were excellent that we underappreciated that were nice pieces of wisdom.

I love to hear some examples. I was going to ask you about that book.

Including walking a mile in a man’s shoes, like basically don’t judge a book by its cover, to each their own, not my cup of tea. All these things that we would actually say were more or less like good small democratic habits, which is to check yourself. You’re not the only person in the world. You don’t know everything. You don’t know what another person’s been through, for goodness sakes. Pump the break on judging people too much and don’t be so arrogant to think that you understand things that you don’t. Sometimes, people disagree, and that’s okay. These are all ones that you’ll barely ever hear anymore. My co-author who’s 23, not that wildly younger than a lot of us who grew up with us, but yeah, she didn’t hear these things growing up.

They’re all super familiar to me. Let’s talk about The Canceling of the American Mind for a little bit, a comprehensive exploration and a cancel culture across the us. I think we need some definitions here on cancel culture. I’m curious of yours. This is what I see then I’d love to hear your example, but to me, there’s a difference between somewhat upsets me or I don’t like a store or something like that. I opt out of it and a lot of people hide behind the opposite of like if you have a show and the advertisers don’t like what you said, they have the ability to not advertise.

Let’s pretend you say something I don’t like or do something I don’t like. There’s a difference between me opting out of our relationship and wanting to pull away and me using significant resources to try to make sure no one else interacts with you or buys from you. That seems to be the difference. Always in a free market society. I don’t want to advertise, but then there’s a difference between me trying to make sure that no one does anything with you. How would you define cancel culture nowadays? I think everyone uses a definition in their favor. They love it when it’s on their side. It’s like free speech. It’s the same context. They think it’s great when it’s on their side and not on the other side.

That’s a normal part of human nature, if highly unfortunate, we haven’t been doing enough to fight. That aspect of human nature, certainly FIRE spends a lot of time fighting it. Our definition of cancel culture, we’re trying to make it a historic argument for it, basically to say that cancel culture is a good term. It’s the most popularly understood term for the weird phenomena that started happening after 2014, where people started losing their jobs for their opinions or for the jokes that they made, not when they were at work.

The way we define it, and I’m a lawyer, so it may sound a little technical, but cancel culture is the uptick of campaigns to get people fired, de-platformed, punished, expelled for speech that would be protected under the First Amendment. By the way, I’m making a little bit of an analogy towards public employee law, which brings in a tremendous amount of nuance and common sense. I explained that a little bit more in the appendix of the book, but I don’t want to bog down the definition too much, and the culture of fear that resulted from that uptick. We showed that that uptick absolutely happened, particularly for professors. It was extremely dramatic, the number of professors who’ve lost their jobs over the recent past.

They lost their jobs for things within the classroom or within their work environment or for things completely outside of it.

It depends. We have cases where someone cracked a joke on Twitter and lost their jobs. We also have cases where someone had something in a research paper that got them in trouble, even though it wasn’t academic misconduct. It was a finding that students didn’t like. It’s the whole, it’s the whole gamut of protected expression. One of the shocking things is how many tenured professors we’ve seen lose their jobs. When I started in 2001, I saw plenty of professors punished for inappropriate speech.

Now, we’re like 40-plus of the firings that we know are tenured professors. We’re pushing 200 firings a thousand attempts to get professors punished, about two-thirds of them successful in some kind of punishment of the professor. To put that in historical scale, you the standard number of professors punished under the red scare of eleven years of McCarthyism is around 100. Actually, it’s about 62 communist professors was the number that they had at the time. We know that it’s about twice that in an environment in which the law as actually protective in a way it wasn’t back then. The university thought they could fire communist professors for being too doctrinaire and not being reliable professors.

The law’s established, and it’s already an environment where there’s a million other ways to punish a professor without the extreme step of getting them fired. One of the scariest things that we show in the book is how much of this is coming from students. It takes a lot of chutzpah for a for a student to actually decide, “I’m going to actually go after my professors now and sign petitions to get them fired for a lesson I didn’t like.” That went off the charts in 2017, and it kept on rising all the way through about 2023.

It seems crazy and counterproductive. There’s been an example you shared in the book. To me, there’s this difference of, as you said, the campaign. If I don’t like something, I can withdraw, but then using all of my energy to a campaign to get everyone else to share the same belief, that is where the cancel comes in. It seems the zero-sum game. The example of the university, I don’t remember what it was, I’ve read it several times, but this has happened multiple times.

A conservative speaker or someone comes to a campus, there is a liberal mob of students who assault them or prevent them from speaking or otherwise, and basically cancel them. What happens? The alt-right group of people look up the names of all of these kids, dox them, expose them. It shows that spending their time trying to ruin people’s lives doesn’t have a net gain for society, for yourself because I’ve seen these stories where this loop happens over and over. It doesn’t seem like it’s worth it for anyone.

That’s exactly the opposite of what we need to be encouraging in higher ed. I call it an unscholarly certainty that we’re encouraging. On every issue, you should be able to engage in thought experimentation, debate, and devil’s advocacy, and these are all incredibly difficult things. Not even just debate, but like what are the other possible theories of why this historical thing happened? In The Canceling of the American Mind, we talk about an example where there was a professor who taught this amazing lesson on how China’s moving from the gold standard to the silver standard led to a global transformation worldwide that will eventually lead to the first transpacific trading relationship between Spanish Bolivia and China.

The question after this utterly fascinating PowerPoint was the Colombian exchange or the European discovery of the “new world” was it worth it? It didn’t lead the question at all. Even though there was only something like 12 students in the class, or maybe 20, suddenly 1,000 students had signed a petition asking if the Columbian exchange was worth it. It was asking students to defend slavery because slavery was part of what would eventually happen in the colonies.

Were other students at the school, but not in the class?

I think it was other students at the school, but I think it was actually even include students who weren’t even at the school with 1,000 people signing it.

The answer would be no, it wasn’t worth it because of these horrible impacts of slavery, if you wanted to make that argument, right?

Yeah, exactly but putting students in the uncomfortable position where they’d have to think about that, it’s weird.

For most of history, you got up, you didn’t have maybe enough clothes to wear or enough food to eat. You were fundamentally uncomfortable, so you got used to that. When things went right or whatever, maybe it was the aberration, do we flip too far where people are more comfortable as a baseline with this comfort? Things aren’t going to go right all the time and they’re not going to be perfect, and you’re not going to have this gene to handle it anymore, this ability to handle it.

Actually, given you put it that way, did you read my short book?

I haven’t read that one yet. I’ll add that to the desk.

That is where I make precisely this argument, that essentially a predictable problem of comfort, which we call a problem of progress in The Coddling of the American Mind is that people get less comfortable in a society that’s progressing and becoming more affluent and allowing people to live in communities that reflect their values. It means they are more politically homogenous, which sounded so nice in the 1970s, but as some serious downsides, we’ve learned that it’s predictable because certain other things are getting better.

There’s a category of things that actually will start to get worse. One of them is an appreciation for freedom of speech because freedom of speech, done correctly, is uncomfortable. It’s something that is challenging. I do actually think that we’re fighting a predictable societal trend towards people having intellectual and emotional comfort as if it’s a right that we have to name and point out, because I think it leads to a lot of dysfunctional and potentially even authoritarian outcomes.

The one thing that David Heinemeier Hansson said, who was on this show, and I think he grew up in Finland or Norway. He went back and had a great appreciation for the difficulty of the American project. He said, “My country, we tend to agree on a lot of things because we are homogeneous.” You are bringing together all of these cultures, all of the ideas, and so the expectation that everyone’s going to agree on everything is very far from reality. I actually never thought about it before I heard him explain it in that way, that this is endemic. He called it the project that that we have here. It makes it harder, but at the same time, all the more important, I guess.

I get this a lot lately, too, that when the right’s mad at us for, fighting like a bad piece of free speech on friendly legislation or the left gets mad at us. I think we’re heading into probably a period of some pretty serious geopolitical instability of it. I think that it’s going to be tough to get out of this no matter who wins the election in a situation that isn’t chaotic. That leads to all sorts of geopolitical implications. I get this argument from both sides that essentially, it’s like, the stakes are so high, your little free speechy thing is not that important anymore. I have to be like, “No, that’s completely the opposite.” When the stakes are very high and when the rules of the road, the Bill of Rights matter more, not less.

Personal/Professional Mistake

Greg, last question for you. What’s a personal or professional mistake that you’ve made that you’ve learned the most from? Maybe in the context of free speech, it would be interesting, but I’ll leave you wide open with that.

It’s funny. The ones that immediately come to mind, I’m like, “Can I actually tell that?” I hope I don’t reveal too much. I got to be a little cagey about this hiring. One thing that I’ve definitely realized is that interviews give you a lot less information than people. They give you the illusion of information about somebody. Still, spending time with people that you’re considering fi finding a good job with is absolutely key. I made a very big hiring mistake that I won’t get into details about with someone that I realized that if I had spent more time with him, I would’ve actually been like, “Right. No, this is totally foolish.”

It actually led to a situation in which someone who was much younger in the organization got a chance to show what she was made of and that worked out great. I think I’ve learned more from being a boss and running an organization and taking it from being very small to quite significant. That’s the biggest learning experience of my life.

I’ve heard that a lot and a lot of the good hiring leaders I know have some meal or driving experience, or how do we spend time in the real world because people will show themselves the more you give them opportunities to. It’s funny because I actually had this idea, and then my team told me it was a horrible idea, and so I didn’t do it. I read an article about a CEO that did the same thing. It proves nothing’s original. Back when I was hiring, we would typically sit down for a meal with someone to talk. I remember one person who was on their cell phone the entire time and texting, and you’re like, “This isn’t going to work.”

My idea was actually whatever they ordered, I was going to work to the restaurant to bring them the wrong meal. There were three options there. There’s the, “I’m going to eat the wrong meal and not going to say something.” That’s going to tell you something in itself. “I’m going to rudely send it back.” A lot of people don’t realize when they’re being rude, or, “I’m going to nicely say, ‘I’m sorry, but this is the wrong meal.’” it would tell you a lot. It’s funny because there was an article of CEO that actually did that. I thought it would be indicative of someone’s character.

I actually think that’s a pretty good one.

For me, it’s the middle one. I know someone that did a very similar thing where he always got in the car with them driving to his family’s house for the final round interview for the executive team. Are you lawless breaking speedlights? Are you aggressive but within the boundaries or are you absolutely timid? It was a very similar thing and they thought it was fairly helpful.

At FIRE, we don’t hire anyone unless we’ve done a five-day ayahuasca trip with them.

It might have all kinds of other legal implications.

It turns out it’s a terrible idea. I think a lot about what actually speaks to speaks to people’s character. The main thing that we do try to get at is are you comfortable defending speakers you detest? There are right and wrong answers to that, but also how uncomfortable it makes somebody.

Closing

I could see that mattering a lot. All right, Greg, where can people learn about you, FIRE and the books? Where should they go?

TheFIRE.org. Please sign up. We have a million-person, strong, free-speech army-like people who will sign letters and will help us actually fight the cases you can’t win or that would be too slow to win in court. We do need your help. We need to spread the word about FIRE. I’m also on I’m also on Substack, The Eternally Radical Idea, which is a reference to freedom of speech, which I believe is radical in every in every generation. It’s always a radical idea. You can find my books wherever books are sold, both The Canceling of the American Mind and The Coddling of the American Mind, but also my first book, Unlearning Liberty and my little tiny booklet.

I’m going to add that one to the list. Greg, I’m glad we made this happen. This isn’t the type of topic we dive in normally, but I think it’s pervading companies, families and organizations now, and I think, hopefully, you’ve provided a helpful framework for people to sharpen their own pencil and their own philosophy and ideological thinking about how this impacts their workplaces and their families and their lives.

It was real pleasure chatting with you as well and thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk to your audience.

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Episode 402

Greg Lukianoff On The Fight To Protect Freedom Of Speech

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