The Coddling of the American Mind with Greg Lukianoff Transcript

How do the ideas we teach young people shape the future of free expression in America? That's what Greg Lukianoff explores in one of our early episodes of Objectively Speaking.

President and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, Lukianoff joins Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman to examine how a generation of students came to embrace emotional safety over free expression — and what that means for the health of American democracy. Drawing on his work as a First Amendment lawyer and his own personal struggle with anxiety and depression, Lukianoff connects the rise of campus censorship to broader cultural forces: overprotective parenting, cognitive distortions embedded in institutional culture, and the gradual erosion of a free speech tradition that even the courts may not be able to protect forever. Watch the interview HERE or read the transcript below.

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JAG: Jennifer Anju Grossman

GL: Greg Lukianoff

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JAG: Hello everyone! Welcome to the 38th episode of The Atlas Society Asks. My friends know me as JAG. I am CEO of The Atlas Society. We are the leading nonprofit connecting young people with the ideas of Ayn Rand in creative ways. Today I'm so excited. We are joined by Greg Lukianoff. I'm going to get to his introduction in a second, but I want to remind you, if you are joining us on Zoom, if you're joining us on Facebook, if you're joining us on YouTube, please start teeing up your questions for Greg. Keep them brief. Just type them into the chat or into the comment stream and we'll get to as many of them as possible. Greg is a First Amendment lawyer. He is also the President and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, known to many in our audience as FIRE, which is a nonprofit dedicated to protecting free speech on college campuses. He is also the co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind as well as Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate. He is also the author of Freedom from Speech. Greg is also an executive producer of Can We Take a Joke?,a feature length documentary that explores the collision between comedy, censorship and outrage culture on both the Left and the Right. Greg, welcome. Thanks again for joining us.

GL: Thanks for having me.

JAG: Your organization, Greg, FIRE, protects free speech on college campuses and fights speech codes, but you fight against violations on both the Left and the Right. You say that there is pressure coming from both sides of the political spectrum. It may just be biased on my side, but it seems to me like most of those attempts to pen up free speech are coming from the Left. But elaborate, enlighten me.

When it comes to campuses, to the extent to which anything happens on campus, campuses are overwhelmingly, outside of religious colleges, Left-leaning. That's administrators and professors, the whole thing.

GL: Sure, FIRE. We're nonpartisan and we defend free speech from all comers. Definitely because of the culture where the question always that seems most on people's mind is, “Is it more the Right or the Left?” When it comes to campuses, to the extent to which anything happens on campus, campuses are overwhelmingly, outside of religious colleges, Left-leaning. That's administrators and professors, the whole thing. A lot of times it's a pretty reasonable assumption when you know one side of the spectrum is in charge, if you're going to get in trouble on campus, then that's the political leaning.

Generally when people get in trouble for things that offend the Right, it comes from off-campus, it comes from politicians, it comes from legislatures, that kind of stuff. We defend students and professors in those cases as well. But what does frustrate me from the culture-war lens is that we have an awful lot of cases that aren't all that political. They're just a story as old as time. When people have power, they tend to see people who dissent from them as being threats. They have this pesky thing called free speech that interferes with their ability to punish these people, but nobody's looking, so let's get them. We see an awful lot of cases that aren't all that political. 

During COVID we've seen an awful lot of cases that are not really political. They're about public relations. There was a case at NYU that got onto—oh, and by the way, you caught us on a good day because today we came up with our “10 worst schools for free speech” list. If you look at it, it's all over the political map. But a lot are universities acting as selfish protectors of PR. One of the ones that really backfired was New York University right at the beginning of COVID decided to tell its doctors that they weren't allowed to talk to the press unless they ran it by the media department. It's like, so a media flack is going to tell a doctor who also teaches what he or she can't say to the media. We do see a lot of cases like that. Now, of course, the political-correctness-run-amok cases, those absolutely happen. I can talk about some examples of those. But free speech has to be for everyone or it's for no one.

JAG: Well said. One of the things that I really liked about reading your book and listening to it on Audible, which was an excellent recording, is you talk about some of these larger cultural forces that are at play. You start off the book in a humorous way of saying that you and Jonathan went to seek a guru and he told you guys these great untruths. Tell us a little bit about the three great untruths that students are being taught, and what are the consequences of encouraging people to think in that manner?

The book is more or less trying to figure out what was so different about students who were hitting colleges around 2013, 2014. They were less tolerant of speech. They were more likely to demand new speech codes, to demand people get disinvited from campus.

GL: The idea is that it's as if we're giving a generation of citizens, students, the worst possible advice. So, in this scenario that we open up with, the supposed guru tells us three things: What doesn't kill you makes you weaker. Always trust your feelings. Life is a battle between good people and evil people. We're both like, this is the worst advice we've ever heard. This doesn't make sense in terms of pragmatics. This makes sense in terms of moral philosophy. Then we just turn around to the audience and say, then why are we teaching our children all of these lessons, if you think about it? So, the book is more or less trying to figure out what was so different about students who were hitting colleges around 2013, 2014. They were less tolerant of speech. They were more likely to demand new speech codes, to demand people get disinvited from campus. But they're also more likely to justify those attempts in sort of quasi-medicalized language saying that, it’s not that it would just be the case that this person's coming to campus, and I despise this person, and I think I hate their political views, which is also as old as time. It was, this person can't come to campus because it will be medically harmful in a psychological way not to the person making the argument, but some other person over there. This hit campuses like a lightning bolt in 2013, 2014.  Prior to that, students had actually been our best constituency for free speech and then suddenly turned a switch. 

So, the whole book is trying to figure out where this was coming from. We highlight all the different ways in which we're conveying these messages to young people that are dysfunctional, that are the great untruths, that essentially words can hurt you forever and are likely to hurt you forever. Not true. That you should always trust your feelings, that if you feel something, something has to be done. That's a cognitive distortion. That's something that if you decide that every impulse has to be met with either action on your part or worse, action on someone else's part, that's not functional. Then, of course, the very classic idea of life is a battle of good people versus evil people. That's not most of life. Most of life is that people are complex. This is the kind of sophistication you're supposed to be learning in higher education. But surprisingly, in elite circles, the morality play has actually gotten shockingly simple.

JAG: Well, so as we have a lot of Objectivists who are joining us today and watching us on our various platforms, and I want to encourage all of you who are joining us to bring your questions for Greg, but it is an audience that's particularly interested in how do we think objectively to avoid cognitive distortions, avoid confirmation bias. One of the things that was the most surprising to me in your book, and because, as you say, you really talked about it as something that happened rather suddenly so often when we talk about things that are cultural trends, political trends, we use that old metaphor of the frog boiling in the pot. This was just actually more instantaneous. 

One of the things that you cited was that, well, it's not so much, or it is maybe partially that it's politically biased administrators or politically biased professors. You say that campuses were just struggling with more of a mental health crisis, that all of a sudden they were seeing students that were coming to campus that had various degrees of sort of a fragility. Tell us a little bit about that, and what are some of the things that contributed to it?

I'm very candid about my own issues with anxiety and depression in the book, much more candid than I'd actually been with anybody. I just put it in the book and tried to pretend that I was talking to an old friend and realized that I really revealed a lot about myself.

GL: Yes, so it was interesting because we wrote the original article, Coddling the American Mind, the thing that led to the book, in 2015. But I began thinking about it way earlier, and I'm very candid about my own issues with anxiety and depression in the book, much more candid than I'd actually been with anybody. I just put it in the book and tried to pretend that I was talking to an old friend and realized that I really revealed a lot about myself. But as I was recovering from anxiety and depression, I learned cognitive behavioral therapy and CBT, and Objectivists will very much appreciate this. It's about not just arguing with others fairly. It's about rules for arguing with yourself fairly. 

One of the things that I think is underappreciated for all of the moral philosophy about how irrationality can make you not just wiser, but also happier. There aren't always the best examples of that. I'm a big fan of a lot of stoic thought, for example, but I do think it's really quite profound that the most successful intervention for anxiety and depression of the last 75 years has been an internalized talk therapy where you investigate your own thoughts. You don't ask yourself, am I seeing the sunny side of the street? You're not saying it's not power or positive thinking. You just ask yourself, is this rational? The thing is, you can know all this stuff intellectually. So if students, if people are listening and they're saying to themselves, well, I know this intellectually, it's not good enough. You have to actually turn it into a habit. The way you do that is by writing down when you have a thought. 

I always give the example of, you go on a bad date, you get back, and you say, in a pit of despair, I'm going to die alone. These are the things that people think. They think these exaggerated catastrophes, thoughts. But what you do in CBT is you write down the thought and you very methodically evaluate it and ask, is it a distortion? Something like that; catastrophizing is one distortion. That's mind reading. You don't actually know if the date went poorly. That's fortune telling. That's looking into the future. That's binary thinking, essentially, that either something has to be great or something has to be terrible. You run all these things past yourself, and by the time you actually get it back to reality and just say something to yourself like, well I was sad because the date didn't go well. It suddenly has lost an awful lot of its power. Profoundly, this is one of the great interventions for anxiety and depression. 

2013, 2014, switch. Students were coming in with this cognitively distorted thinking, and it manifested in hostility to speech, the idea of obsession with safety, essentially because they viewed not just themselves, but other people as extremely fragile.

Where am I going with this? Back in 2007, I started noticing that administrators on campus seem to be modeling cognitive distortions. They seem to be saying, do catastrophize, do overgeneralize, do engage in binary thinking because you're always in danger. Which is also like catastrophizing. But the students didn't seem to be buying it. They seemed to just be rolling their eyes at it. 2013, 2014, switch. Students were coming in with this cognitively distorted thinking, and it manifested in hostility to speech, the idea of obsession with safety, essentially because they viewed not just themselves, but other people as extremely fragile. That's where you first started hearing language about safe spaces. We predicted from 2013–2015, that if this is the way these students coming in are thinking, this is going to result in something. I'm a lawyer, but I dabble in a lot of social science. We were expecting maybe a little tiny curve up on anxiety and depression, but due to these new trends, it was like the anxiety, depression, manifested, unfortunately, in suicide. Suicide rate doubled for young women between 2007 and 2019. They also continue to go up for men. It was much, much worse than we thought. It was really experienced as a crisis on campus. I think that campuses are doing things that are making it worse.

JAG: We recently had Lenore Skenazy, who you quote. Yes, she was spectacular. She identified some ways in which media-inspired fear was leading parents to overprotect their children. Then the process of limiting kids’ opportunities to develop more resilience and coping skills. What advice do you have for parents and teachers to raise stronger, more independent adults rather than weak, anxious, forever children.

GL: Well, I say this as a parent of a three- and a five-year-old boy, Benjamin and Maxwell. I even do this series called Catching up with Coddling on my blog. The eternally radical idea where I do these things called coddling caveats because I felt like we were told by our editor and some other people not to admit that you're an anxious parent yourself. I'm like, people desperately need to know this. I'm not recommending anything here that I find easy, myself, and my wife sometimes has to remind me of my own values on this stuff. But you have to encourage them to face their fears like that essentially. When something scary comes on TV, particularly if it's not genuinely “Oh God”; if it's just something that one of my son is saying he's spooked about for some reason, then watch it to the end, watch the whole thing and you'll see where it ends and you'll get through it and you'll feel good about getting through it. 

You have to help your kids face their fears. You have to give them some responsibility, you have to give them some independence and you have to give them some time on their own to play on their own.

So, basically make sure that you're challenging them. The research, by the way, as I went deeper into it after the book, the research on not dealing with phobias early, well, it's actually they're not even necessarily phobias, they're just aversions at first—not dealing with an aversion to dogs or pets—the research is horrifying on how not addressing that can lead to someone who has all sorts of avoidance issues and eventually develops many phobias. That's what they grow into. You have to help your kids face their fears. You have to give them some responsibility, you have to give them some independence and you have to give them some time on their own to play on their own. This is something that when we were coming into the book, we were not expecting to pretty much universally hear from a development psychologist that no, they need free time. They need free time for their own childhood. Directed play outdoors is better. Giving your kids a certain amount of freedom, not scheduling them from 6 a.m. to midnight, is really crucial. It was funny writing this because I live on Capitol Hill in D.C., and these parents they're the kind of people who want to send their kids to fancy schools. I'm like, wow, they're doing the exact opposite. That's exactly what we noted in the book. 

That essentially, and to be clear I'm a first generation American. When I was a kid we were bottom quartile and we were very clear in the book that a lot of the issues we're talking about are not issues faced by people in the bottom half of the social economic stash. The issues there are very profound and very different. Since we're mostly interested in what happened largely at elite colleges, we were talking more about issues that hit sort of the upper quartile, in some cases frankly in the upper 5- or 1%, the people who go to some of these fancier schools, and to some degree the over-parenting to try to make sure that someone can get into a Princeton or Stanford or Harvard, it's rational because if you're concerned about your kid’s future, sending them to a fancy school—unfortunately, in my opinion we wildly over-reward that at the moment—there is some rationality to the paranoid-parenting part. 

But the obsession with safety is a little bit odd. For this reason, pretty much all of us above a certain age grew up in more dangerous times where we were more in greater danger of being killed in a homicide, killed in an accident, killed in any variety of ways. By every measure it's safer now than it was when the rest of us were growing up. The idea that you have especially safety-obsessed parents coming out of the late 90s was a little bit ironic because it was possibly the safest time in human history to be a kid. Literally being sure you give kids independence and also not to play too much into the hands of the safeties. A smart, independent kid who's used to actually figuring out things on his own is ultimately going to be safer in all sorts of circumstances because they know what to do rather than panic or hide.

JAG: All right, so those of you who are joining us, ask your questions of Greg, of parenting, of politics, of course, free speech. Greg, one of the most eye-opening pieces from you that I saw was an opinion piece that you wrote for the Wall Street Journal and in it you argued that there is no guarantee that the courts will continue to protect free speech. It's something that we tend to take for granted. But why in the world would judges and lawyers move away from First Amendment protections?

The First Amendment was not interpreted in any meaningfully legally strong way until about 1925, which is shocking, but it wasn't really found to have much legal force until 1925. That required a lot of cultural changes happening.

GL: Well, because it's really important for people to know the history of even the First Amendment in the United States. This might be shocking to people who don't know the history very well. The First Amendment was not interpreted in any meaningfully legally strong way until about 1925, which is shocking, but it wasn't really found to have much legal force until 1925. That required a lot of cultural changes happening. But there was at least a strong tradition of freedom of speech in the United States. What happened was before 1925, that tradition started to fade away. The law, to a degree, was forced to pick up the slack to a degree, because the repression, particularly during World War I and under Woodrow Wilson, was getting really bad. The Supreme Court figured out a way to revivify the First Amendment. All throughout the 20th century, it was this phenomena of free speech culture, a cultural norm of free speech being resuscitated. At the same time, there was a legal norm of free speech being expanded. 

For all of my life, I didn't totally realize I was living in a weird little historical bubble of freedom of speech being pretty universally validated. Right and Left agreed. Not always in every case, of course, but who would expect that? But largely, if there was a defining characteristic of being left of center when I was a kid, it was being pro-free speech. That's all started to fall apart. As the culture shifts downstream, potentially the law itself will shift too, because people start interpreting law in terms of their adjusted framework of the culture. I went to Stanford for law school. I had teachers who were the proponents, the actual people who wrote the speech codes that were defeated in the mid-90s. They wouldn't talk about this. They knew this wouldn't be possible with a lot of students. But they wanted to. After being free speech purists in the 60s, even by the mid-80s, a lot of these people were saying, “No, you know what? We're in power now.: They wouldn't put it this way, but: “Now that we're in power, we see free speech more as bothersome. It has some negative effects if people can say racist or sexist or harmful things. Let's do away with this. Let's figure out a rationale to undermine this.”

People in K through 12 are being taught that free speech is the argument only of the bully, the bigot, and the robber baron. I always have to explain, free speech only exists to protect minority points of view. This usually just isn't taught.

A lot of this has unfortunately found its way into regulations. It's actually also found its way into international law. Some of these theories that were cooked up by scholars on campuses that benefited from free speech figured out ways to undermine it. The overall point of the Wall Street Journal piece was simply that free speech culture is ultimately what protects and informs what freedom of speech means. That's being undermined right now to a large degree. I think people in K through 12 are being taught that free speech is the argument only of the bully, the bigot, and the robber baron. I always have to explain, free speech only exists to protect minority points of view. This usually just isn't taught. They don't even understand what I'm saying. I'm like, no, no, historically, the rich and powerful that you're concerned about were protected by being rich and powerful. Then when you started having democratic countries, the 51% was protected by the vote. In parliamentary systems, they had all the power in the world. You have a big chunk of humanity suddenly protected. 

The only reason you need free speech is to protect minority opinions. This was something that is the reason why the gay rights movement, the women's rights movement, the civil rights movement, they all sung the praises of free speech because it's what made those movements possible. But the reason why everything's been turned on its head is that academia, one of the richest, most powerful, most influential institutions in the world, pretends it's not really all that powerful. It's a nice, little, “Oh, we're just trying to make the world better”, without owning its own power. Therefore, it's not willing to say, “Oh, actually, we're power. We don't really like free speech anymore. We're going to teach you ways to undermine it.| They don't explain that to their own students. We end up having to explain that to a degree. It's led to this ridiculous idea that free speech is actually the argument of power when it's completely the opposite.

JAG: All right, we're going to take a couple of audience questions, so please keep them coming and we'll mix them. We have a question from Aaron Tao, actually a student and one of our Atlas Advocates. He asks, as of the moment, there's no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. Do you see any upcoming cases before the Supreme Court that could potentially change that?

What I'm worried about is when people who were educated in my generation or earlier all go the way of the dodo, that appreciation for free speech might not be as common in people who are educated, who graduated law school even five or 10 years later than me.

GL: This is true, and it's a common misconception that hate speech is not protected in the United States. It's common because that's the way it's talked about.  Students get the impression that it isn't protected speech, but it very much is in terms of the short-term and the upcoming Supreme Court for the next several years. I'm not super worried. I think this goes to what is called the bedrock principle in First Amendment law, that you cannot ban things simply because they're offensive. It's too subjective. It gives the government way too much power. It just doesn't work very well. It's funny because other countries have these laws and I hear about how they're enforced when I go over and speak at conferences there. I'm like, you think that's working? You're trying to figure out which cartoon will get you sent to jail. For some reason the one on the left will get you sent to jail and the one on the right won't. This is ridiculous. I do think that the prohibition on hate speech is going to remain in the law for some time. What I'm worried about is when people who were educated in my generation or earlier all go the way of the dodo, that appreciation for free speech might not be as common in people who are educated, who graduated law school even five or 10 years later than me.

JAG: I made a mistake. Aaron did graduate from graduate school about four years ago, and that must be why he's been such a wonderful supporter of The Atlas Society. But he looks very youthful; Aaron, so let's take it as a compliment. Vicki has a question. She's interested in the nuts and bolts of what tends to happen when you approach a university and you file a complaint and you say, we're going to challenge you on this. Do they tend to back off pretty quickly? Do they put up a fight? Is it different every single time?

GL: It goes in fits and starts. It changes from year to year how universities react when they get a letter from FIRE. The overall process is either someone submits a case to us online or we hear about it on social media or on Facebook and then we contact the professor or student who's getting in trouble. Increasingly, it's actually been more from news reports that we find them. That being said, in a really busy year, when I first started, nobody knew who we were, so maybe we'd get a couple hundred cases submitted. This year we got 1500 cases submitted. Yes, and that's up 50% just because this summer was so hot in terms of what is called cancel culture. Really, really intense. 

What happens generally is, first, for case intake, we try to figure out—well, honestly, lately there's been some amount of triage trying to figure out—who the most seriously ill people are and who are the ones we can't help. Then we look into it. Usually we will send a letter to the university explaining this is our understanding of the facts. Do we have this right? The old and the model that we've always had, that still works actually in a number of cases, is that if sometimes they get back to us and they fix it before it's done. Interestingly, when we were less known, that worked more often, which I don't entirely understand why. I wouldn't expect that in my early days. I think it's partially when universities learned to adapt to us. I think there was a period where university presidents figured out I want to pretend I'm going to punish this guy for what he said. I'd really rather not. I know we'll be on the losing side of a lawsuit, so I'll pretend I'm punishing him. FIRE comes in and they go, Oh, what? FIRE made me do it. I felt like we became a little bit part of the ecosystem, which is why we had to mix it up a little bit. 

Every so often you see, we get a case that's just so bad and the record is so clear because we take getting our facts right extraordinarily seriously that it's just like, okay, everything, press release, lawsuit, the kitchen sink, this one's gotta go.

We do a lot more litigation now. We added our first ever vice president of litigation, Darpanish Chef. We got her from the Institute for Justice. She's amazing. We just also added the former head of the First Amendment Lawyers Association: Ronnie London is going to be running our fund. We're going to have a fund to help professors who get in trouble with litigation fees. So, we have to make a decision in a lot of cases. If the university won't budge, do we do a press release right away? Is this something that would be good for an op-ed, to get more attention on it? Is this something where we should go right into court? So, it depends on the individual cases and every so often you see, we get a case that's just so bad and the record is so clear because we take getting our facts right extraordinarily seriously that it's just like, okay, everything, press release, lawsuit, the kitchen sink, this one's gotta go.

JAG: I talked a little bit about the beginning of your book and the guru giving great untruths. Another thing that I thought was surprising in the book was, after reading a lot of depressing trends and things that were very alarming and eye-opening, at the end you actually struck an optimistic tone. As the book went to press in May of 2018, you had identified a few green shoots of positive countertrends, predicting that, “Things will improve and change may happen quite suddenly at some point in the next few years.” Now we're still a few months short of the three year mark, but I think a lot of what's happened especially in the past year would have been very difficult to predict.

JAG: In that time period, did things get better or did they get a little bit worse?

GL: They got worse.

JAG: I just wanted to check.

GL: We're always trying to be constructive. That actually sounds even more optimistic than the way we would usually explain it. Because when you ask Haidt and I, back then, when people wanted our honest opinion, we're like, it's going to get worse. It's going to get worse before it gets better. It has to get better because this is unsustainable. But it got much more intense. Honestly, that's been a lot of my career. First of all, when I started in 2001, it was easier to get in trouble for what you said on campus than I understood, even though I'd worked all over the place and had a good sense of the grand picture of censorship. And there were ebbs and flows up until 2013. But then in 2013, with the students actually suddenly being really bad on free speech, and not just the administrators, it was a whole nother ball game. Maybe 2016 wasn't that bad. But then you started actually seeing violence on campus. That was the Milo riots and the Heather Mac Donald at Keller Mount McKenna in California, Middlebury. We actually saw a professor get assaulted trying to protect her sparring partner, Charles Murray. That was all in the book. 

Have things gotten worse? Yes, the places where there are some green shoots are:  There's more awareness of this space to a big degree. It's very hard to claim that this isn't a problem anymore.

But since then, have things gotten worse? Yes, the places where there are some green shoots are:  There's more awareness of this space to a big degree. It's very hard to claim that this isn't a problem anymore. As far as Catching Up with Coddling, the series we're doing, we’re updating our findings in that the most. The clearest green shoot is actually Lenore and the work that Let Grow is doing. The idea that kids need more freedom is something that we're making real headway with. Heterodox Academy being set up is really important, a scholarly counterbalance to universities. But, yes, I still think it's going to probably get worse before it gets better.

JAG: Do you anticipate changes with the change of administration? Do you think that's going to have an effect or do these things happen outside of the political realm?

GL: Now, I will give Obama credit that he, when it came to free speech, when publicly asked about this stuff, he was actually really good. Like, He talked about talking across lines of difference. He even mentioned we don't want people being coddled. After the article came out, we're like, all right, okay. But his Department of Education, we fought with tooth and nail. Because here's something that I feel sometimes people have just been tricked into believing. The vehicle for clamping down on speech that was proposed at places like Stanford and elsewhere, to make it sound like they weren't really just going after speech, was to reclassify offensive utterances as a form of harassment. 

Now, harassment is unprotected speech if it's defined as actual harassment, which is a pattern of discriminatory behavior directed at an individual. That's serious, severe, pervasive, all these things, not just having an opinion, but they were trying to move the ball so that harassment then became, you could use that, essentially. I remember being in law school, and I wasn't going to look at the new harassment policy. It's like, I don't want people to be harassed. But when you look at the history of the litigation in dozens and dozens of cases, that's the way they tried to get away with it. They tried to claim, “Oh, well, that opinion was harassing.” It's like, actually, opinions are not supposed to be harassing. Opinion pieces are not supposed to be harassing. Unfortunately, that started to get baked into the law and the Department of Education, because there's this weird interrelationship between what comes out of higher education and what ends up in the law. 

During the Trump administration to his credit...they fixed a lot of that stuff. They gave due process back to the accused. They limited the definition of harassment to actual harassment.

By 2011, when I felt like a lot of other things were getting better, the Department of Education got much, much worse, and they issued letters that decreased people's due process, for one. But then they redefined harassment as any unwelcome speech, and they tried to cabinet with “of a sexual nature.” But in most jurisdictions, it became 14 different additional categories, including any unwelcome speech of a political nature in one jurisdiction, which is ridiculous. It's like unwelcome political speech is now laughably unconstitutional. We have to fight that and fight that. During the Trump administration to his credit, and really, Betsy DeVos, who gets maligned a lot. They fixed a lot of that stuff. They gave due process back to the accused. They limited the definition of harassment to actual harassment. 

Now, we think the Biden administration will probably try to put some of that back. We're pretty confident he won't put all of that back, not necessarily out of the kindness of his heart, but because there have now been like 160 lawsuits that universities have lost that have cost them a ton of money both on the due-process ground and on the freespeech ground. We think also, frankly, partially due to FIRE's work and working with journalists, now people have hundreds of stories of how this goes wrong, rather than in 2011 when these issues were much more obscure. “Remember how much of a disaster those public policies were?” is now an argument you can make.

JAG: Speaking of your work, you mentioned that you just today came out with the list of some of the most egregious campuses who are some of the worst offenders.

Higher education cannot work if you can't ask serious questions and answer them in a sober way because someone can come up with an explanation of how it's offensive.

GL: Oh, my goodness. Well, we do a 10-Worst list every year. Every year it's just such an interesting grab bag of cases in terms of cases that I think have the most concerning impact on academic freedom that I've seen. Among them is a case at St. John's College where a professor of History was trying to talk about the Columbian exchange. When Europe discovered the New World, they found potatoes, they found new animals, there was trade, and it transformed the world. The question for the historian was, “Was all of the pain and all the difficulty caused by that, was it in the end good for human progress?” Apparently this got construed as him saying, and this is completely unfair, that quote, unquote, slavery was worth it. That is not an argument this guy made at all. He's actually doing something that you have to do in a serious study of history: talk about pluses and minuses of different, oftentimes pretty morally terrible events. That's what serious people do. He was suspended for that. He was suspended. He's not allowed on campus at this point. It's like, no, this will not work. Higher education cannot work if you can't ask serious questions and answer them in a sober way because someone can come up with an explanation of how it's offensive.

JAG: Vicki has another question, she says, You said free speech violations come from both the Left and the Right. In your time with FIRE, have you seen a recent increase in violations that correspond with what you discussed about coddling of students?

GL: Have I seen more based on the safetyism concerns?

JAG: Yes. Or, also, are they more in public versus private higher education? The other thing that you had mentioned, which I thought was interesting when you're talking about the different economic levels, was that those at the very bottom end, that were at the lowest income, while they may have had more unsupervised time, they were also more likely to experience severe traumas that would have incapacitated—

GL: Adverse childhood experiences. It's an interesting area of study and it does tend to correlate that if you have drug abuse in your family, if you've experienced the most common one, of course, is divorce. But when you go through all of these lists, the potential harm of ACs seems real. But in terms of economic class, one thing that I found interesting, and the data seems to be supporting this as well, we actually have two new data mavens at FIRE, which has just been so much fun for me, that when it comes to the really hot, what's colloquially called woke ideology, it tends to be dominant more at the more elite colleges. It's like the idea of a luxury belief essentially. This pans out also in our survey data. When you go to the schools that have a critical mass of working class students, you have very much fewer of these hot ideological topics. You still have cases where an administrator or president throws his weight around and wants a professor or student punished. The stuff that's as old as time or one thing that we've seen tons of over the years, and I hope we're turning a corner and defeating them: free speech zones where universities are actually trying to say with a straight face, we love free speech so much, you can only be in this 20-foot-wide gazebo (that was Texas Tech University, by the way). Back in the day we saw these ridiculous limitations. 

When it comes to the stories of students being able to get someone fired, being able to get a student expelled, that kind of stuff, that tends to be more of a problem at the more elite schools.

But when it comes to the stories of students being able to get someone fired, being able to get a student expelled, that kind of stuff, that tends to be more of a problem at the more elite schools, which really has me working on a preface for the second edition of Coddling the American Mind. The thing that I thought was influential was increased indoctrination in K through 12 because the anti-bullying movement really spiked up in 2000. Bullying is bad. I think that it was about time we did something to address it. I think actually certainly nobody needs to be physically cruel to each other as they were when I was a kid. But I think that unfortunately some of that curriculum got taken advantage of to tell people to tell students that they are physically more fragile than they are, that emotional feelings always have to be addressed, and that the world is separated into good guys and bad guys. So I think that some of the ideology was taught more directly than I previously thought. Because the thing that we've had a hard time figuring out, we talked about all these causal threads, but why the discontinuity was so sharp, the major change that we saw, that lines up perfectly and the research is strong on this, is the first generation to have iPhones, social media in their pockets since they were little. But I do think that there are some other factors at play that we might have missed.

JAG: Speaking of social media and iPhones in your pocket, a lot of times when social media companies deplatform people or don't allow people on their platform, we're certainly seeing—well, it's a little bit relative, but we have seen significant numbers of people that were following us and liking our content—they've either just been deplatformed or they're just leaving because they are not happy with those platforms. But the argument from libertarians, that gets repeated as well: They're private companies and there's no First Amendment issue here. Nothing to see, move along. But I think you guys discuss that there are some negative consequences of a cancel culture and a safetyism culture, even when it's perfectly legal. Tell us a little bit about that.

GL: Yes, I end up defending free speech culture a lot. I have this debate at reason.com with my friend Ken White, who thinks that free speech culture is more of an amorphous excuse that really just means people you don't think should get in trouble. But I take it more seriously than that. I think that I'm the bad American when I go abroad. The way I explain, you're supposed to basically say, Oh, well, this is your way over there. But our way is just our little parochial way. I obnoxiously say no, actually, First Amendment jurisprudence in the United States is some of the smartest thinking through how you have free speech in the real world ever done, that it actually is really pragmatic, it limits the harm of censorship by trying to have very narrow categories of speech rather than a nonstop balancing test. My position when it comes to social media companies is they should as much as possible be borrowing this wisdom because it makes a lot of sense. 

But the thing that I really try to do, I have an article on Eternally Radical Idea, which is where I talk about the lab-and-the-looking-glass theory, that essentially the marketplace of ideas is a great metaphor that Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis came up with. But it's only about this much about free speech. That's the free speech where you're trying to decide who is factually correct is the marketplace of ideas. Free speech is huge. Free speech is all about people as they actually are. So one thing that I've learned, particularly from studying free speech as it applies to academia, is that we're using the wrong metaphor. I use the-lab-and-the-looking-glass that essentially the humanist project is to know people as they are. This is important to democracy. This is important to the project of human knowledge. This is important to science, with psychology, obviously. From that conclusion, you have to remember it's always important to know what people really think and why. 

Am I safer for knowing less about the world? Is ignorance safety? How could that possibly be? Obviously, it's not.

As soon as you start looking at that from more of a scientific, a little bit of detachment and looking at what we're trying to know about the human race, the idea of censoring people for their opinion starts to look ridiculous because it's like, what do we achieve there? I know less about the world. Am I safer for knowing less about the world? Is ignorance safety? How could that possibly be? Obviously, it's not. I think that what's going on with social media companies, it has to be informed by both the law and the philosophy behind it, or else it's going to make some serious mistakes. I think it has made some serious mistakes. I do think that some of the things that social media gets bashed for have actually been not as bad as people have claimed, including Mark Zuckerberg who took a lot of abuse for saying we don't want to be the arbiters of truth. He was absolutely right about that. 

Truth exists, but knowing it is not easy and you need to test it, you need different opinions, you need experimentation, all this stuff. The idea that Zuckerberg is like, Oh, well, this is surely true, should be policing, that does put them in a very difficult situation. I think there's a lot of wisdom that they can gain from existing law. But I do think it's sometimes funny, particularly when conservatives want to get rid of section 230, because if they did, I can guarantee you the people who would suffer the most from that would actually be social conservatives.

JAG: Very interesting. All right, there probably are a couple that are watching us right now, and we might have time for one more question, so please type them into the comments. Greg, you were talking about defending the American jurisprudence of free speech abroad. Recently, France's education minister under Macron expressed concern about American ideas on race, gender, post-colonialism as undermining French society and interpreting them as an attack on French heritage. Do we have similar leadership in this country to make a statement or who are you seeing in the political sphere that are doing a good job in terms of free speech in the political sphere?

GL: Some of the people who have been best: Ben Sasse talks about this as a real problem. David French, of course, former good friend and former president of FIRE, is very good on free speech. Amash has been. When it comes to people more on the left, it's difficult because it's so easy to get a pile on from your own side if you say, actually I think wokeism is dysfunctional, for example, but I think it doesn't mean they don't know that. It's funny watching people on the left bash Obama, and the thing that was hard for my conservative friends to understand was that I lived in San Francisco, I worked for the ACLU in San Francisco. When I would go there, I'm like, no, no. What you're missing is they genuinely think he's a neocon, if it gives you any idea of how far out the spectrum actually goes. 

But I think that people are seeing how dysfunctional this is. I think what's going on at the New York Times, for example, with people getting fired for allegedly hurting people's feelings, there's just so many different cases at the Times that at least it's in public view. I'm hopeful that something that can't be sustained won't be without a major disaster. But we'll see. One prediction that Haidt and I have made a lot, though, is that the current crop of students coming out of elite higher education are going to bring down some companies. Because if you think everything in your company is actually about internal conflicts among the individual students, how do you provide a product? I've heard this from business leaders that it has been dysfunctional and I think we're going to learn a lot more about how it doesn't work.

JAG: All right, Rad Wizard is asking, what is the name of your book? Rad, it is The Coddling of the American Mind. I'm going to ask The Atlas Society folks to throw in a link in the comments section so people can order it. Also, we're going to throw in a link to the FIRE website. Dana Erickson asks for help, she says, I have a 14-year-old that we're trying to get out of public school and asking for books. Well, Dana, we will be happy to provide you with copies of our graphic novels and would encourage you to have your daughter, I'm going to assume that it's a daughter, think about joining our book club that we have at The Atlas Society. Greg, as we're wrapping it up, if you could run through again where we can follow your work and tell us also a little bit about, without revealing anything before your deal is signed, what are some of the issues that you're looking at going forward?

GL: Oh, boy. Well, you can find me at fire.org or at theeternallyradicalidea.com; they both go to the FIRE website, but we have the URL. The Eternally Radical Idea is where I write my own thoughts on free speech and recommend books and have some fun to recommend things for nerds and albums every month. But I try to have a little bit of fun there. In terms of the next big thing, well, after the preface and after I'm working on a legal textbook on first amendments, which I really shouldn't have agreed to do, but after that, the next book that I'm considering at the moment is one that's about the shift in who defends free speech. I jokingly refer to myself as the last of the old ACLU, the youngest member of the old ALCU. I think that we all saw this coming in the 90s, that essentially the defenders were going to switch and that we were going to end up that free speech once again was going to have to be fighting for its life and that there's a relatively small group of us. But we think the world needs to know that that shift has happened and that they can still count on us to defend their speech.

JAG: Well, Aaron Tao calls you The Last Jedi. We're really thrilled about the work that you're doing. Those of you who are watching us, who care about free speech, definitely make sure that you get his book. But consider supporting FIRE with a tax deductible donation, of course. The Atlas Society also just came out with our latest Draw My Life, “My Name Is Free Speech.” We've been having a steady stream of free speech advocates on our webinar. If you like our work, if you're enjoying our webinars, we'd also love it if you would support us. So, Greg, thank you. Wonderful to see you. Especially that you've just told me all of the projects that you're working on, the deadlines that you're under, I'm all the more grateful for your taking the time to come on and join us today.

GL: Absolutely. Real pleasure. Stay in touch.

JAG: All right. Thanks everyone. See you next week. Bye.

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