Trump’s War on the Press and the Future of Free Speech — with Greg Lukianoff

Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), joins Scott Galloway to discuss the threats to free speech in America. They discuss Trump’s campaign against the press, why Greg worries AI could give those in power control over what people believe, and what FIRE’s research reveals about censorship on college campuses. Plus, Scott and Greg debate whether artists should be denied venues over their political views and how universities can encourage open debate. Follow Greg, @glukianoff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for the show comes from Alumni Ventures. We've said it before, diversification is our Kevlar vest. But do you know how concentrated your public stock fund actually is? A handful of mega cap stocks with an AI story are doing most of the work. That's not the diversification you think, especially when so much value creation is happening before companies ever go public. Alumni Ventures ranked a top 20 US venture firm by both Time and CB Insights, gives accredited investors a smart, simple way to assemble a blue chip venture portfolio and participate in the value creation that is occurring in private markets. You can sign up for free, see the weekly deal flow and decide for yourself. Or write one check into the Alumni Ventures Foundation Fund for a diversified portfolio of about 25 private venture deals.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  Go to av.vc-propg.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Not an offer to sell securities. Venture capital involves substantial risk, including loss of capital invested. See disclosures and fund offering materials for more information.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  Support for the show comes from Brex. If your best finance people are doing expense reports, chasing receipts or grinding through month end close, it's time to get Brex AF, agentic finance that eliminates that work before it starts. Learn more at brex.com/AF. That's brex.com/AF.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  If your best finance people are doing expense reports, chasing receipts or spending time on month end close, it's time to get Brex AF, agentic finance that eliminates that work before it starts. Learn more at brex.com/AF.

• 1:39Speaker 03

  My biggest fear is that people use the knowledge function of AI. Because if power can get its hands on the ability to tell everybody what is true, that's the nightmare outcome.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  Today's Prop G Plus deep dive is on free speech in America. We're joined by Greg Lukianoff, President and CEO of FIRE, which stands for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. We speak about the government's pressure on the media, whether AI bots have free speech rights and what's going on on college campuses. Plus, what does it mean to support free speech when you find the speech itself offensive? We've interviewed Greg before, incredibly pragmatic, very insightful, a real blue flame thinker, always enjoy our conversations and I'm sure you'll enjoy this one.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  Greg, where does this podcast find you?

• 2:31Speaker 03

  I moved up to the suburbs of New York City because that's where I was spending all my time anyway for media and fundraising, but I brought my whole family up.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  Oh, nice. So when we last spoke with you in July of 2025, we discussed free speech in America, the rise of cancel culture, campus protests and more. Since then, we've seen the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a government that's increasingly tried to silence dissent and the proliferation of AI tools that forces to question whether, you know, to trying to discern what speech is even real. What in your view is the most important topic or incident as it relates to free speech today?

• 3:12Speaker 03

  It's the ongoing campaign of Trump versus the media. We're seeing that really demonstrated dramatically by the exclusion of Politico and CNN and MSNBC from the White House press pool. That by itself is not as dramatic as his utter campaign against it. But the thing that I think we're going to be thinking about, you know, 20 years from now is whether or not we got AI regulation right or wrong. Because in terms of that being a boon for freedom of expression and for inquiry, it absolutely could be. It could also be a disaster.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  Give us the fulcrum between those two. Give us examples of how it could, it's like the godfather of AI, Hinton is saying, we could have good AI, we could have bad AI. Outline a future where it's bad for free speech and good for free speech.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  I've been trying to outline this on my Substack to try to explain what my biggest fear is for AI. And I'm going to agree a little bit with Michelle Foucault, even though I think he was dead wrong on the fact that power decides what truth is, I think that got completely short circuited by the, by scientific method and the enlightenment. But I do think that power wants to control truth. And it doesn't necessarily think that's a bad thing, that essentially, you know, this is the idea of having a ministry of truth, having misinformation be your primary guiding light. And my biggest fear is that people use the eventual regulation of AI at some level, which is going to happen, as an excuse to go into, you know, what we call on Substack, the librarian

• 4:44Speaker 03

  function, the knowledge function of AI. Because if power can get its hands on the ability to tell everybody what is true, that is, you know, kind of power that totalitarians would have dreamt of. So that's the nightmare outcome. The positive outcome is we use it as a way, as a distributed, small L liberal system for better understanding what the world actually looks like. And a great sort of disconfirmation, Karl Popper kind of way of trying to see what is true by figuring out what isn't.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  I'll start with the question I'm leading up to. Do bots have free speech rights? Because I think we're going to look back on this era and I worry that we're going to have erred on the side of free speech. First off, I find that anyone who lectures about free speech other than you is full of shit and is the first to suppress free speech.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  A lot of people are, unfortunately, they don't make us look very good.

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, whether it's Vance telling Europeans to embrace free speech as they kick CNN or whoever out of the White House.

• 5:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:45Speaker 00

  I believe platforms should be deleting, moderating when they see a bot, influencing the dialogue. And that is, the free speech isn't real. It's, sometimes, and I might be being paranoid here, but as me, I'm wrong. Sometimes I think two thirds of my comments are bots.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  That have, are serving a different alternative or objective that we're not even cognizant of. Do bots have free speech rights?

• 6:14Speaker 03

  They don't, but the people who created them generally do. But at the same time, given we're talking about private companies, why do companies actually tolerate bots to the degree that they do? I think it's partially because they help juice their traffic numbers and they make it look like there are more people out there. What you have to do in that case is kind of change the incentive structure to disincentivize the benefits of bots.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  I find that in the instance of corporations that use free speech as a shield for reckless spread of conspiracy theories, sometimes from bots and agents that don't represent free speech or don't represent the actual views of sentient beings. And I struggle with that balance. I want to talk about, you joined Jake Tapper on CNN to discuss one of the most noteworthy free speech incidents recently, and that is Macklemore and Ed Sheeran.

• 7:07Speaker 03

  Oh my God, I hate the fact that I have to keep talking about them, but yeah, go on.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  You, I, I called him an anti semi, which was probably, I don't know, maybe it was fair, maybe it wasn't. And that's all anyone's commenting now. No one's listening to anything I'm doing. Everyone's just commenting on Macklemore. But anyways, so I apologize in advance, but you were on CNN with Jake talking about this. Why do you think this specific incident has captured so much attention? What are your views on it? Because I think our views might be different on this one, especially as it relates to Robert Kraft deciding that he should not play it at the stadium.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  Well, you know, I've departed a little bit from my normal MO on this to just, just to say that I am concerned about the anti Israeli sentiment. I'm not Jewish, but I am concerned about the anti Israeli sentiment that has kind of taken over, spread from campuses where I think it's, it's reached a concerning point. So I definitely have, you know, I admit to some bias on this. But when it comes to my First Amendment and free speech analysis, I basically think three things. One, the First Amendment is on Robert Kraft's side. To be able to say that you can't use my private venue in order to perform because I don't like your message is within his right to do. However, the analysis should never end there. Just in the same way that we wouldn't cheer when a bookseller decides that I'm not going

• 8:31Speaker 03

  to sell any copies of Ulysses, they have the right to do that, but that's not great. People don't really think that's good. But the third one's the one that I think a lot of the people who are on Kraft and the other venue owners' sides are missing is attempts to squelch these point of views tend to make them more intense. And particularly if part of the narrative is that pro-Israel people have too much societal influence, then deciding this artist can't perform at my venue, it doesn't send a great message, it plays into conspiracy theories. And even though I'm sympathetic to Robert Kraft's opinion on this, I'm not, again, departing from what I'm supposed to do, but I'm not a fan of what Macklemore's opinions on this. But nonetheless, I don't like it.

• 9:16Speaker 03

  And I think Americans get concerned when artists are denied venues because of their political point of view.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  It's so interesting. I really like your take on this. I agree with you. I see it as a private venue and if I don't want someone in my house for whatever reason, sure, I don't, I can say, no, you're not invited and I don't want you here.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  But as your friend, if you decided to disinvite someone who was like a genius and who you were already been friends with, but you just don't like his one political view, I'd probably be, as your friend, be like, oh, come on, have him over and talk, you know? And that's what free speech culture is. The argument of free speech culture is essentially, free speech is useful, but it's super useful if people actually talk to each other and actually hear each other out and do all these things that actually make free speech more useful. You're not required to observe it and nor should you be. But at the same time, I think in a healthier free speech culture that America's had, people would have said something more like, well, I'm not buying tickets to him, you know?

• 10:12Speaker 00

  Just don't go. And to be fair, if Robert Kraft had called me, which he did not, I would have said, you realize you're going to juice his downloads.

• 10:18Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 10:19Speaker 00

  Granted, if it's not Tom Petty, I'm not listening to it, maybe Fleetwood Mac.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  That was my second concert.

• 10:26Speaker 00

  There you go. Well, you're, you're a man of great taste in music. He's just brought more attention to him and you're right, it's probably not serving the purpose of fighting antisemitism. The thing I did not like about it, and I'm curious to get your take here, is that people were conflating it with what's going on in the White House and banning media firms. And I saw that too as entirely distinct.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, no, these are not even on the same plane.

• 10:48Speaker 00

  In terms of AI, are my free speech or your free speech rights being violated when people strip mine your content and then resell it back to people? Does that have any overlap or can we take any cues on what to do there from, from theories around free speech?

• 11:06Speaker 03

  It's interesting because it's at the intersection of something that was very important for the success of, forgive the expression, the West, which is intellectual property. And intellectual property is like, I'm really starting to appreciate even at even deeper level, how important the patent system was for a lot of the progress and prosperity we take for granted today. Now, I also did intellectual property law for, for the one year I wasn't working at FIRE after law school. And I was troubled by it in a lot of ways. And when it comes to trademark and copyright, you know, there's, there's a major tension there where essentially, and we're talking about copyrighted works, that essentially you want knowledge to be free, you don't want it to be unreasonably withheld. So we

• 11:49Speaker 03

  have, you know, copyrights expire, for example, things go into public domain. The best argument for the AI companies is that essentially, they, you know, they, they, they have the same access to open information as everybody else does, and that they can use that. The best argument against it, of course, is that you are, in some cases, you know, stealing information from copyrighted sources at a scale that simply wasn't practical before. But the funny thing for me is, I know, for example, coddling the American mind, we got the, like, the notices of being, it was, you know, part of trained models. And they asked me if I wanted to, like, participate in one of those class action lawsuits. And

• 12:30Speaker 03

  my response was like, well, no, I'm actually kind of excited. I'm actually pleased that they're using my contribution in order to inform what it thinks.

• 12:38Speaker 00

  One year anniversary of Charlie Kirk's death. Any thoughts on where Americans stand on speech and what the, his murder kind of revealed about it?

• 12:50Speaker 03

  You know, I had a lot of criticisms of Charlie Kirk, also for not being great on, on freedom of speech, particularly of scholars he disagreed with. I think he was really bad on that. I did, however, after he was murdered, you know, go and watched some of the ways he actually debated with some of these kids, and came away much more impressed with it, for lack of a better word, than, than I expected. He was more patient, and in some cases nicer, than I expected him to be. And none of this matters for, also for what happened. The guy was murdered. And as best we can tell, the guy was murdered for trying to argue with people, you know, that he disagreed with, but usually in a pretty civil way. And I watched the way this is handled sometimes on the left. They've

• 13:32Speaker 03

  turned him into a caricature of who he was by the time he died. A lot of the stuff that people really object to what he said, I always try to, like, take seriously the possibility I'm wrong. So like my, after he was murdered, I tried to actually, you know, reevaluate him. And some of the stuff that I didn't notice is that some of his more that I would consider, you know, again, my own political opinion, obnoxious statements were before he actually started debating with students. And I thought, when you see people, you know, celebrating his murder, or refusing to talk about it, and that's something we found, by the way, in the FIRE research, is that as far as topics that students find very uncomfortable to talk about, Charlie Kirk is the new one that's been added to Israel-Palestine as

• 14:16Speaker 03

  things that students don't want to talk about. I think we've handled it, I think the right handled it terribly by going after people who said insensitive things about him being murdered. But I also think the left, you know, handled it pretty terribly by, in some cases, acting like, well, that guy just had it coming.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  Support for the show comes from Superhuman. There's a lot of potential for AI assistants to make your job easier, but not if every "ass" starts with you debriefing the entirety of the project from scratch. Ideally, you'd be following along from the start and ready to jump in as soon as you need help. Superhuman says they've got the solution. Superhuman Go comes from the makers of Grammarly. It can embed in the tools you and your team already use, always ready to help without having to switch apps or break your flow. It can help you make sense of a dense message thread, help you get ready for a meeting, or catch a typo before you hit send. And when you get stuck, Go can help you brainstorm, outline, or review relevant context so you don't lose your place. It's basically an AI assistant that's always on, always ready to help. Bottom line, Superhuman is built

• 15:26Speaker 00

  for people who take their work seriously and expect their tools to do the same. You can try Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly. Find out more at superhuman.com.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  Support for the show comes from Gusto. One of the things nobody tells you about starting a business is that you have to do a lot of incredibly tedious tasks yourself, like running payroll. But Gusto can help. Gusto is online payroll and benefit software built for small businesses. It's all-in-one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use, so you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere. Gusto helps you with automatic payroll tax filing, simple direct deposits, health benefits, commuter benefits, workers' comp, 401K, you name it, Gusto makes it simple. And they have options for nearly every budget. It helps you save time with built-in automated tools, offer letters, onboarding docs, direct deposit, and more. You can even get direct access to certified HR experts. Gusto is ranked number one on G2's highest satisfaction products list for 2026, and it's trusted

• 16:25Speaker 00

  by over 500,000 small businesses. And switching to Gusto is quick and simple. Just transfer your existing data to get up and running fast. Plus, don't pay a cent until you run your first payroll. Try Gusto today at gusto.com/profg and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com/profg. One more time, gusto.com/profg.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  Support for the show comes from USA Facts. I've interviewed countless politicians, and if there's one thing we all find disconcerting, is when they butcher the facts with some biased half-truth. Give us a break already. So when I had the chance to debate conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro, our natural response was bring it on. Why? Because it was sponsored by USA Facts, and each debate segment started with a presentation of government data and [bleep] facts, employment, government spending, income data, housing, and more. The topic? The American dream. Is it still within reach? We argued, we found some common ground, we actually debated, and there were no personal attacks. Watch the full debate on the USA Facts YouTube channel. We think you'll find it unlike any other debate. That is entertaining

• 17:36Speaker 00

  and informative. We hope you check it out.

• 17:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, FIRE, which is your organization, it's the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. So most recently, FIRE released its college-free speech rankings. You surveyed nearly 63,000 students across 262 schools, analyzed school policies, and tracked various free speech controversies and outcomes at certain schools. We have a tendency to just say higher education, but, but Bob Jones University is just much different than NYU.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 18:14Speaker 00

  Tell us what trends you saw as it relates to free speech across different, the different universities. What observations would you make?

• 18:21Speaker 03

  I would say, one of the most positive observations is how much leadership matters, and how schools like Vanderbilt, where Daniel Diermeyer, you know, takes the search for truth incredibly seriously, and he knows that requires conflict, he knows that requires structured friction. And they went from having not a great rank, ranking, to being, I think, number five nationally. Same thing with Dartmouth. Dartmouth, you know, rocketed to the top because of leadership. And how much difference a good leader who gets the centrality of the search for truth can actually make, even in a relatively short period of time, was something that gave me some genuine hope. On the other side, you know, the schools in, in, in New York City aren't doing so hot.

• 19:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, let's talk about that. My employer, NYU, is it fair to call my employer? Anyways, the, the campus I'm affiliated with finished dead last, below, literally, below every other school you ranked. How did that happen? Or what, what earned them dead last?

• 19:26Speaker 03

  A lot of the New York schools, it's been, been to a degree mishandling the Israeli-Palestinian stuff, you know, sort of vacillating back and forth between protests that they tolerate at one point, and then crack down on another, punishing some pro-Palestinian groups and professors have been pretty common in, in Manhattan, you know, for example. And what's interesting is, I remember when our Columbia ranked dead last, like, a couple of years ago, and there was a kind of surprise that UVA does as well as it does. When UVA came out and said, listen, we support freedom of speech, we do not allow you, though, to have indefinite campouts here.

• 20:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:09Speaker 03

  And like, how could that possibly be? They just strictly said you couldn't do those. And I'm like, no, because students can understand that. They're like, well, yeah, sure, you can indefinitely camp out. But if you try to split the baby in this way, and be like, well, we allow it to a point, and then we'll enforce it, we don't really know when, it might be when the president is testifying before Congress, this happened, you know, at Columbia, they're not going to trust you after that. Being consistent and honest is always going to get you more credibility than being wishy-washy and mercurial.

• 20:43Speaker 00

  Do you think we as faculty or as institutions should discern between students and faculty in the sense that? I was quite frankly horrified by my alma mater, UCLA, when kids were passing out bands to everyone but Jews and then basically, basically sequestering Jews from certain parts of the campus. And my thesis, and I stand by this, is that if me and my fraternity brothers in the eighties had started passing out bands to white kids and then blocked black kids from coming on campus, I think they would have called them the National Guard.

• 21:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:13Speaker 00

  And there was, seemed to be a certain tolerance for this type of intolerance that I found very upsetting. And I think you can grant, I think we should cut a pretty wide berth for an 18 year old. I'm, I am really glad a camera wasn't following me around when I was 18. They deserve to make stakes. They deserve to get punished, but they deserve, in my view, a lot of leniency and grace as they try to push the boundaries of what's acceptable and what isn't a culture. I have less empathy and I've gotten pushback, sympathy from my colleagues.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  And while I respect their free speech rights, when they say things that in my view are hateful or supportive of disruptive of the class or of the educational setting, or just say things in my, in my mind that any critical thinker would go, this just reflects really poorly on our faculty, that we as a private organization have the right to fire that person. And they can go to Washington Square and exercise their free speech. But I, I felt that the use of quote unquote, free speech rights was used to create cloud cover for people who would not be employed in most organizations if they showed up in the lobby and started saying any of these things. That's, that was a bit of a word salad. Your thoughts, Greg?

• 22:27Speaker 03

  I'm sufficiently obsessed, even though FIRE is extended beyond higher ed these days. I'm sufficiently obsessed with higher education reform that I started on my vacation this summer, writing a book about it, which is just going to probably be a very long sub stack thing about it. But when it comes to the actual standards of free speech, academic freedom, professionalism, the standards are different for professors and students. And in a way that actually makes perfect sense. Students have the highest, you know, level of free speech rights of any constituency on a college campus, if it's a public college. When it comes to professors, they have very strong, what are called extramural free speech rights, which basically means that they can, you know, spout, talk about, you know, other

• 23:11Speaker 03

  topics off campus, or in their expertise or not. They have very high intramural speech rights, which basically means they can criticize the university. But, you know, in the classroom, they're expected to be professional and they're expected to be germane. And that means that if you, and I, I may a culprit a case that I got wrong many years ago, that was at a, at Forsyth Technical Community College, there was a technical writing class, you know, something about like how to write for engineers. And of the 50 minute class, a professor spent 10 minutes on her opinion about the Iraq war. And at the time, I think it was my own political bias that made me want to take that case and defend Elizabeth Edo at, at

• 23:56Speaker 03

  that school. And it took me a while to realize I was wrong. That essentially, if you're teaching a technical writing class and you go so far afield to spend a substantial chunk of it, talking about your opinion on something that's completely unrelated to technical writing, they can punish you.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't, it's, like I say in my house, my kids don't have free speech rights. And I'm not sure if, if I were working at Google and I went downstairs and said, with a big Israeli flag and started, you know, they would have the right to say, this is disruptive. You teased, you're writing a book on higher ed reform. Give me two or three kind of big picture thoughts that it will be somewhat controversial or contrary to popular opinion about higher education that you feel we should consider. I just, I'm bragging now, Greg, I just joined the board of, of the Regents of the University of California.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  Oh, great.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  And I'm thinking a lot about higher ed reform because I can think of few products that have changed less in 50 years and survived. So give me two or three great ideas that big university systems should be considering.

• 25:01Speaker 03

  Well, my big thing, and it's tend to, the book's tentatively called The Academic Filibuster, which is about how like the standard for there being something wrong in higher ed keeps on, the goalposts keep shifting. And the worse it gets, the more people pretend there's nothing wrong. But as far as something that I think really matters is committing to disconfirmation. Essentially, you don't really know what's true. You know what isn't true. Like basically, the only way we have access to truth seems to be by subtraction. And institutions need to refocus on the, their priorities and the things that actually give them the special protections of academic freedom and legal protections and all, all of these kinds of things. And to me, I think the only thing that really justifies that

• 25:41Speaker 03

  special societal treatment is that they help us see the world more clearly when they're doing their job right, or can help us see the world less clearly if they're not. And I think that committing to search for truth, it, it, it is essential. And that's, that I hopefully that won't be too controversial. But the way you do that is not just people pinky swearing to be better. It's by having structured friction. It's by having things like, Daniel Diermaier was the first person, I don't think he called him this, but having like counter departments to basically be like, listen, if we have the following sacred cows in this department, we're not going to get rid of the department, but we are going to have people test to see if the empirical assumptions that would be true, if those

• 26:22Speaker 03

  political assumptions are true, and these departments hold up. We have to be much braver and much more ambitious in being like, let's see if we're not just standing on a, on a huge pile of BS. And frankly, when I look at modern scholarship, it is a weird hodgepodge of excellent, excellent research and a lot of junk. And we have to be able to sift and win over between those two. And the way you do that is again, not saying, I promise to be better. It's by having a, you know, a counter department saying, by the way, none of these empirical assumptions that would be true, if your dogma was true, hold up.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  So let me ask you more specifically about tenure, which I think has, serves and has served a really important role. That if you say something really controversial, upsetting at the time, whether it's women should be able to vote, or the world is not flat, that you're, you have some economic or not, or economic, cultural and speech rights, intellectual property rights that encourage you to push the boundaries and occasionally be, say something crazy that might end up being crazy genius or crazy right. I get, I get it. I worry that it is now essentially just bloat, that tenure at the business school, your views on dark water versus blue water economics just aren't

• 27:40Speaker 00

  that controversial. And that we should move to a system that's more reflective of the centers of excellence we're trying to be. Because what I find generally with tenure is that it's just Latin for student debt, that it just levies a massive amount of student debt because we have to create a system of lifetime employment for people just as they become unproductive. And they'll go to this, you know, they'll go to Galileo and free speech and make these very big sweeping arguments that know tenure is the basis of, of academic freedom and progress in our society. Your thoughts on tenure as it relates to reform of higher?

• 28:18Speaker 03

  Boy, I could talk about that one for a long time. But just to make it very simple, I came in very pro tenure. And by the way, I'm going to be 25 years doing this on October, October 2. You know, I got to work my dream job. But when it came in, you know, trying to consider like what was good for academia, I, I really was very pro tenure. And it's been one of the great disappointments of my career because in theory, tenure is supposed to make you braver, more, more courageous in defense of not just your own academic freedom, free speech rights, but everybody else's. You use it as an opportunity to boldly challenge orthodoxies that are local, not just national, the ones that are locally

• 29:01Speaker 03

  unpopular, not just nationally unpopular, which is often harder. And it just hasn't really worked out that way. I, I do know, and this is the heartbreaking part of it, there are absolutely amazing professors out there who owe their jobs to tenure and who do use it bravely. But those professors, in my experience, are overwhelmingly in, in the minority. So that's one of the reasons why FIRE has no position on tenure, other than professors must not be fired because of their political viewpoint or, or for, for finding something unpopular. But I think that given, it hasn't really given the professor that kind of, you know, steely spine that we expected. If anything, I think Meghan

• 29:45Speaker 03

  McArdle made this point, tenure seems to select for a certain kind of complacency and timidity of not rocking the boat kind of aspect. And I think you could end up with a much more dynamic place if you had, say, five year contracts with very strong academic freedom and free speech protections, but where you're not actually saying, I'm going to stay here for the rest of my life. That's, that this is, this is what I want to be doing, you know, three decades from now. That I think it would actually spur some greater dynamism if it was something that was more fluid.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  There's been a lot of controversy on campus about certain speakers being, where they face pushback, whether it was Ben Shapiro at Cal State LA, and UC Berkeley, Hassan Piker was cut from the University of Washington speaker series, and FIRE's own data reported 184 deplatforming attempts on college, of college speakers in 2025, with 172 counting this year. What really struck me though, was that according to your data, it looks like more attempts now are coming from the right to squelch free speech than the left. I'm used to people in Birkenstocks going crazy when some right wing person shows up. The best way to hurt them is indifference, is to ignore them. But that's neither, neither here nor there. Why do you think there's been a shift from, you know, the left trying

• 31:05Speaker 00

  to get, you know, block certain speakers and move to the right?

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Well, both things are still happening. It's just a question of degree. And since Trump came into office, there's been, you know, politicians have felt empowered to really go after higher education, not on the basis of the idea of real meaningful reform in the name of search for truth, but political score settling. It's become this very sort of vain, foolhardy sort of project to just kind of give to the left what they, what they perceived they were taking for a really long time, which is no way to fix anything. So, so in the past, certainly in 2025, it was the first time we'd ever seen like the number one constituency for censorship on campus actually be, at least in our 2026

• 31:50Speaker 03

  years of existence, be politicians themselves. Now, that's not historically unprecedented, but it's certainly not something we've seen in the last, you know, at least most of the last 50 years.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  I feel like we have failed as faculty to, to convince the students that

• 32:12Speaker 00

  The whole point of you being here is for us to offend your sensibilities. It's so strange that in this place where you're supposed to build a safe space to push the limits, the kids, quite frankly, are just such snowflakes. Our job is to create warriors, not wokesters. And I see it in class where a kid immediately identifies himself as being a bit right and a fan of Trump, and he is ostracized. He's immediately seen as morally deficient. And I'm trying to figure out, where did we go wrong? Like, how did this happen? It's one thing to disagree with someone, but to take it on as this person, I don't

• 32:55Speaker 00

  feel safe around this person, you know, that bullshit. Where did we come off the tracks here?

• 33:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that's a long story. And Coddling of the American Mind, the book that I wrote with Jonathan Haidt, you know, goes into depth a lot about where this came from. One part that I feel like is underappreciated is the refusal to create expectations of discomfort, but also to actually do something even worse, which is to kind of implant this sort of idea that if you feel terribly about something, if you feel panicked, if you feel passionate about it, if you feel harmed by it, that there's something inherently noble about that, that essentially your heart is doing the hard work that maybe your hands should actually be doing. You know, that's at the core of Coddling of the American Mind.

• 33:46Speaker 03

  I do think that part of it came from an idea that if we make students miserable enough, if we make them panicked enough about the future to see the world as a binary of good versus evil, that we make them overgeneralize in the name of social justice, that all of these things will somehow magically equal social progress as opposed to a cohort of miserable students who feel like they're always under attack because they're being told they're always under attack, but who are not great for free speech, academic freedom, or for their own mental well-being.

• 34:19Speaker 00

  I have a 19 and a 16-year-old, under the auspices of being a good dad without boring them and coming across as too serious. What would you want them to read or watch? What piece of media do you think does a great job, a thoughtful, almost sort of sublime way of helping them understand the power and the importance of free speech? What would that, what would that one piece of literature or media be?

• 34:43Speaker 03

  I'm just gonna say what immediately popped into my head. I wasn't thinking you were gonna ask about books. I would say, I think we'd be living in a much healthier country if, at least a year before college, students went out and had a real job for a year. I think that-

• 34:59Speaker 00

  Gap year.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, but not just a party gap year.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  Mandatory national service, I'm interrupting you.

• 35:05Speaker 03

  That would be, that's one of those things where I wouldn't want it to be imposed, but I would love it to be preferred by colleges, that essentially-

• 35:12Speaker 00

  Encourage national service?

• 35:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:15Speaker 00

  Make it so attractive they couldn't resist.

• 35:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, that essentially like, we prefer people who have gone out and worked, you know, before being admitted to the school or national service or something. And how does that teach free speech? It's partially because we are in these class silos to a large degree, and I do think that's a major problem. I think that I came in so much thicker-skinned than a lot of the other kids that I went to undergrad and law school with, partially because I've been working in a restaurant since I was 11 with people from all over the place. It's so empowering. It's the, it fights depression, it fights that anxiety, it fights that snowflake-ness, but it also teaches you about the give and take and the wide range of opinions outside of the weird elite that goes to vassar.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  It's so interesting because the connection or the word that bifurcates the fork in the road is empathy. And that is, I think some people think they're being empathetic and they accidentally end up suppressing free speech, thinking they're protecting the rights of a discriminated community, and what they're doing is not respecting free speech. At the same time, for me, I'm like you, I've had every services job in the world, and people with much different backgrounds, that empathy relates to, well, maybe I should just shut up and listen every once in a while. I know, I know. There's a lot of people whose shoes I've not walked in, and I should maybe just open my ears a little bit more. Greg, I always love speaking to you. I find you just so infinitely reasonable.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  Your bio makes it sound like you're gonna be much more dogmatic, and I find you exceptionally nuanced. Greg Lukianoff is an attorney, author, and the president and CEO of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. He joins us from his new home, or new place of residence in upstate New York. Greg, thanks very much for your time today.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  Thanks, Scott. Great seeing you.