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greg lukianoff

belated

see FIRE

coddling bk with haidt

fig leaf:  Lukianoff practiced law and interned at the ACLU in Northern California.

intro had aclu BS, when asked trotted out silverglate? said long assoc w/ NY civ rights org?

pseudo-lib

nrvous brkdwn now evang for behav cogn therapy

claimed trigger and safe space minor bit that got blown up by others?

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after-words-greg-lukianoff

nOVEMBER 7, 2023

After Words
Greg Lukianoff

Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression president Greg Lukianoffargued that the right to free speech is being threatened by “cancel culture.” He was interviewed by Reason Magazine’s Matt Welch.

NEXT ON "AFTER WORDS," GREG LUKIANOFF ARGUES THAT THE RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH IS BEING THREATENED BY CANCEL CULTURE. HE IS INTERVIEWED BY "REASON" MAGAZINE'S MATT WELCH. "AFTER WORDS" IS A PROGRAM FEATURING GUEST HOSTS, INTERVIEWING TOP NONFICTION AUTHORS ABOUT THEIR LATEST WORK. Show Less Text

00:00:24

IT HAS BEEN FIVE YEARS SINCE YOU COWROTE "THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND." SINCE THEN, THERE HAS BEEN QUITE A NUMBER OF BOOKS TO COME OUT TALKING ABOUT FREE SPEECH, THE RISE OF LIBERALISM IN PLACES --ILLIBERALISM IN PLACES WHERE FREE SPEECH IS SUPPOSED TO RAIN, COLLEGES AND ETC. WHAT MOTIVATED YOU TO WRITE THIS, AND HOW IS "THE CANCELING OF THE AMERICAN MIND" DIFFERENT FROM WHAT ELSE WE SEE? S...

:{:{I HAVE BEEN PROMOTING FREE SPEECH ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES FOR 20 YEARS. I AM AN ATTORNEY THAT HAS SPECIALIZED IN ACADEMIC FREEDOM FOR YEARS NOW. I HAD AN OPPORTUNITY TO WRITE A FOLLOW-UP TO "CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND" THAT COULD BE REALLY INTERESTING, BECAUSE WE DISCUSSED THE AMAZINGLY BRILLIANT 20-YEAR-OLD NAMED RICKY SCHLOTT, A GEN Z YOUNG WOMAN, A HUGE FAN OF "CODDLING THE AMERICAN MIND." SHE CAME UP TO ME AND SAID, I DROPPED OUT OF SCHOOL DURING COVID BECAUSE I SOLVE THE PROBLEMS YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT, AND I WANTED TO WRITE ABOUT THE THEMES IN "CODDLING." SHE WAS SUCH A GREAT WRITER, WE IMMEDIATELY MADE HER A FIRE FELLOW. }:

AFTER A YEAR OF WORKING WITH HER, I WAS SO IMPRESSED AND THOUGHT WE SHOULD WRITE A FOLLOW-UP TO "CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND," AND WE WILL AT THE INSIGHTS OF AGENCY YOUNG WOMAN. WHICH IS GREAT, BECAUSE "CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND" WAS ABOUT GEN Z YOUNG WOMEN. PEOPLE ARE STAKING THERE AND TYLER -- THEIR ENTIRE IDEAS ON THE IDEA THAT CANCEL CULTURE IS A HOAX OR DID NOT HAPPEN. IT DID NOT JUST HAPPEN, IT IS THE KIND OF THING THAT WILL BE STUDYING IN 50 TO 100 JUST LIKE WE STUDY THE RED SCARE TODAY.

:{I WAS LIKE, I'VE HAD IT, I AM GOING TO PUT THIS IN ONE BOOK AND MAKE THREE PRIMARY POINTS. ONE, CANCEL CULTURE IS REAL, HAPPENING ON AN HISTORIC SCALE. WE TAKE ON BOTH LEFT AND RIGHT, WHICH IS IMPORTANT.

THE MIDDLE PART IS BASICALLY ABOUT RECONCEPTUALIZING HOW YOU THINK ABOUT CANCEL CULTURE, TO THINK ABOUT IT AS ONLY THE MOST EXTREME WAY OF WINNING ARGUMENTS WITHOUT WINNING ARGUMENTS, THAT RATHER THAN PERSUADE SOMEBODY, WE HAVE LEARNED THIS VERY JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL-LIKE TACTIC, WHICH I ARGUE IT DOES IN SOME WAYS COME FROM JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL, TO SCARE PEOPLE OUT OF DISAGREEING WITH YOU FOR RUIN YOUR LIVES IF THEY DO. }:

:{THE THIRD IS TO FIND A PROCESS TO FIND A WAY OUT OF THIS MADNESS AND MAKE PEOPLE UNDERSTAND THAT CANCEL CULTURE IS NOT JUST ABOUT THE MORE THAN 1000 PROFESSORS THAT HAVE BEEN TARGETED, IT IS ABOUT WHAT IT DOES TO TRUST AND EXPERTISE.

IF YOU SEE THAT, FOR EXAMPLE, CAROLE HOOVEN AT HARVARD, WHO WAS FORCED OUT BY ADI ADMINISTRATOR FOR GOING ON FOX NEWS TO PROMOTE HER BOOK, FOR SAYING THAT WE SHOULD BE KIND TO TRANSGENDER PEOPLE, SHOULD USE THEIR PRONOUNS, BUT AS AN AUTHOR ON A BOOK ABOUT TESTOSTERONE, WE HAVE TO RECOGNIZE THAT BIOLOGICAL SEX IS REAL AND MATTERS SCIENTIFICALLY. THAT LED TO A WHOLE CAMPAIGN AGAINST HER AT HARVARD.

SHE GOT EXTREMELY DEPRESSED AND IS NOW LEAVING HARVARD. ALL BY ITSELF, THAT IS CANCEL CULTURE, ILLEBERAL, BUT WHAT DOES IT DO TO PEOPLE'S FAITH AND EXPERTISE ON THIS TOPIC? THE PUBLIC IS NOT STUPID. EVEN AT HARVARD SOMEONE IS MAKING A MODEST POINT THAT CAN GET THEM FORCED OUT OF THEIR JOB? WHY SHOULD I BELIEVE ANYBODY ON THIS TOPIC ANYMORE? I KNOW THAT SAYING ANYTHING OTHER THAN THE IMPROVED LINE WILL GET YOU CANCELED EVEN AT HARVARD. CANCEL CULTURE IS MUCH MORE DEVASTATING TO OUR SHARED WORLD OF FACTS THAN PEOPLE UNDERSTAND.}:}:

simon & sheister

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Psychotherapy Is Not Harmless: These Are the Side Effects of CBT

Aeon

CBT has revolutionised mental-health care. READ MORE»

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https://townhall.com/tipsheet/christophernmalagisi/2018/10/06/how-colleges-turn-students-into-snowflakes-n2525480

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https://www.amazon.com/Greg-Lukianoff/e/B008VFY3M2/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1

unleaRNING

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Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Lukianoff is a graduate of American University and Stanford Law School. He specializes in free speech and First Amendment issues in higher education. He is the author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate and Freedom From Speech.

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In a Polarized Climate, Free-Speech Warriors Seize the Spotlight 

FREE SPEECH

PHILADELPHIA

GREG LUKIANOFF is a relentless campaigner who has traveled to dozens of campuses in the past 16 years to decry threats he sees to free speech. More often than not, he's also tuned into Twitter. But on Christmas Eve, the president and chief executive of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education was off the grid.

Meanwhile, George Ciccariello-Maher, an associate professor of politics and global studies at Drexel University, was sending a tweet. At 7:48 p.m. on December 24, Mr. Ciccariello-Maher wrote, "All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide."

Even on a holiday, it didn't take long for the professor's provocative words -- which he intended as satire -- to awaken the social-media outrage machine. Conservative news outlets pounced. As the controversy boiled, Drexel faced calls to fire Mr. Ciccariello-Maher. Meanwhile, the professor's supporters called on Mr. Lukianoff's organization, known as FIRE, to come to his aid.

"Where are you on this Drexel shit Greg," one Twitter user wrote on December 26.

Mr. Lukianoff, who was in New York with his family and trying to keep up with a rambunctious 1-year-old son, sighed.

"Can you give us a couple days?" he recalled thinking.

THROUGHOUT its 18-year history, FIRE has prided itself on its ability to quickly come to the defense of students and professors ensnared in free-speech and academic-freedom disputes.

That fight looks a lot different than it used to. "We're at a stage where so many people are interested in this topic," Mr. Lukianoff eays, "and the information moves so quickly." First Amendment controversies play out in minutes, not days. Now FIRE's staff members say even they can't always gather facts and research fast enough.

Mr. Ciccariello-Maher wasn't fired or disciplined, but he faced a public rebuke from Drexel officials for his choice of words. His case was one of several that recently propelled campus free-speech issues to the forefront of the national consciousness.

Over the years, FIRE has drawn criticism from some college administrators for, in their view, blowing the scope of free-speech threats out of proportion. The organization tends to cherry-pick a handful of extreme examples, these critics say, and use them to make sweeping statements about the state of expression at all colleges. In the grand scheme of highereducation, they say, the number of campus speakers disinvited in a given year is minuscule.

At the same time, though, new flashpoints are appearing on FIRE's radar with increasing frequency: professors who make provocative statements, students who protest speakers, colleges that, in FIRE's opinion, overreact to such situations by shutting down constitutionally protected speech. Last year FIRE received about 900 requests from students, professors, and others to intervene when they felt their rights had been violated, and Mr. Lukianoff says he expects more in 2017.

Those controversies have come to life in a campus climate that has grown ever more polarized since President Trump's election. His victory has also emboldened people with extreme right-wing, racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic views, and on occasion, they have spoken on college campuses.

When anarchist-driven violence marred student protests of Milo Yiannopoulos's scheduled appearance at the University of California at Berkeley, and when protesters at Middlebury College shouted down the controversial political scientist Charles Murray, whose work has often been criticized as racist, FIRE faced a barrage of questions: Where do you stand on this? Why is this happening? How can you support the free-speech rights of bigoted speakers like Mr. Yiannopoulos?

FIRE has also faced questions about Mr. Trump. The president himself vowed during the presidential campaign to "end the political correctness and foster free and respectful debate," and he threatened to cut Berkeley's federal funding if the campus "does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view."

Asked about Mr. Trump's apparent interest in issues that are central to FIRE's mission, Mr. Lukianoff pauses, choosing his words carefully. Mr. Trump is sending "dramatically mixed signals" to FIRE, he says finally. He found the president's threat against Berkeley -- which did not acknowledge that the administration had in fact gone to great lengths to allow Mr. Yiannopoulos to speak -- to be reprehensible.

For some, speech fights like those at Berkeley and Middlebury -- not to mention academe's recurring debates over trigger warnings, microaggressions, and safe spaces -- reinforce the argument that FIRE has been promoting for nearly two decades: Free expression on campuses is under attack. That environment has opened the door for the organization to play a central role in shaping public discourse and standing up for free expression.

Yet FIRE has also found itself in the cress hairs of increasingly fraught campus free-speech disputes.

On the one hand, when people like Mr. Yiannopoulos come to campus, some critics question whether they are creating the kinds of environments where speech and debate can flourish. But others say that, with campus tensions running high, it's more important than ever for FIRE to defend free speech for all, and encourage people to listen to one another.

WHEN FIRE was founded, in 1999, Alan Charles Kors, a historian and a conservative, and Harvey A. Silverglate, a lawyer and a liberal, conceived of an organization that could "defend and sustain individual rights at America's increasingly repressive and partisan colleges and universities." The slogan: "Because your liberty is a precious thing."

The group emerged as an ally to anti-abortion and Christian students who claimed that colleges wouldn't recognize their organizations or allow them to bring in certain speakers. It also jumped into academic-freedom debates, challenging the American Association of University Professors, which for decades had owned the task of defending controversial faculty members.

The AAUP's investigations into individual professors' cases could take months. The more-agile FIRE wrote letters to institutions and publicized them in the news media within days -- and seemed to get results. One professor had this to say in 2004 about FIRE and the AAUP: "One is a SWAT team, and the other is like the CIA."

When Mr. Lukianoff joined FIRE, in 2001, he became the small shop's fifth employee. Now it boasts 50 staff members and a dozen interns who join each summer, as well as revenue of more than $6 million.

Its funding is primarily made up of grants and donations, some of which come from nonprofit groups like the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which have generously supported conservative causes. Some observers have questioned how that money influences FIRE's work; Mr. Lukianoff says it doesn't come with any strings attached.

FIRE has moved its Philadelphia headquarters four times in the past dozen years because the staff keeps growing. Its current home is a modern 12th-floor space with First Amendment decor, overlooking Independence Hall.

At one end of the office are boxes of FIRE swag and T-shirts strewn across a few tables, items the organization typically distributes free to students. Daniel Burnett, the communications manager, offers this reporter a pair of FIRE sunglasses, which she politely declines.

Much of the group's work force is young; Mr. Lukianoff is in his early 40s. It's also politically diverse. While 26-year-old Molly Nocheck, director of campus outreach, was a student at Ohio University, she was heavily involved in Students Defending Students, a campus organization that trains a network of students to defend their peers in campus disciplinary hearings. A "Pennsylvania for Hillary" sticker is posted prominently above her desk.

Will Creeley, FIRE's senior vice president for legal and public advocacy was a student activist, founding a campus chapter of the Green Party and campaigning for Ralph Nader in the 2000 election. Since then, the 36-year-old has been a Democrat. Robert Shibley, executive director of FIRE, is Lebanese and identifies as a conservative and evangelical Christian. Mr. Lukianoff, a first-generation American whose father was a refugee from Yugoslavia, is a lifelong Democrat and an atheist.

The chief executive -- a sharp, thoughtful, happy warrior of sorts -- met this reporter in Washington at FIRE's satellite office, where he's based.

Mr. Lukianoff says his group's work is especially important now, given the shifts he sees taking place in the battle lines of campus -free-speech fights.

"For my entire career, the best constituency on campus had been students" in terms of understanding the importance of free speech, he says. FIRE's focus had long been on targeting administrative censorship of those students. Four years ago, he says, he noticed a change.

IN 2013, Ray Kelly, who spent 14 years as police commissioner of the City of New York, was scheduled to speak at Brown University. Students tried, and failed, to get him disinvited, saying his support for the city's widely criticized stop-and-frisk policy made his presence an insult to minority students. When Mr. Kelly did show up, students shouted him down, and the speech was canceled after half an hour.

"It's not like that's unprecedented on campuses," Mr. Lukianoff says. "But in this case, it was the pride with which the students continued to take the shutting down of Ray Kelly's speech that was different to us."

In 2015, Mr. Lukianoff and the New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt examined those dynamics in a widely discussed cover story in The Atlantic, titled "The Coddling of the American Mind." The piece argued that as students increasingly demand protection from microaggressions and ideas they don't like, they are threatening free academic inquiry and harming their own mental health.

As protests against racism and demands for safe spaces swelled at the University of Missouri, Yale University, and dozens of other campuses in the fall, the story proved popular. It raised FIRE's profile as a leading voice against a climate on campuses where, as Mr. Lukianoff and Mr. Haidt wrote, "everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse." (The timing of its publication with the protests was a coincidence, Mr. Lukianoff says; he'd been thinking about writing such a piece for years.)

FIRE staff members say that many student activists that fall were rightly using their free speech to call attention to what they saw as racial injustice at their institutions, and that conversations about race and diversity that wouldn't have occurred otherwise took place on many campuses.

What distressed Mr. Lukianoff was the significant number of students who were demanding, for instance, that publications be punished for running columns that took contentious stances, as was the case at Wesleyan University, or that people be fired for taking a stand on something, as was the case at Yale.

In the fall of 2015, Nicholas Christakis, a professor of social and natural science at Yale and leader of a residential college, was confronted by a group of mostly black students in a campus courtyard. At the time a heated debate was taking place over an email about Halloween costumes sent by his wife, Erika Christakis, who wrote, "Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious … a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?" A group of student activists was demanding that the Christakises be removed from their residential-college positions.

During the encounter, one student in particular raised her voice for several minutes, accusing Mr. Christakis of not "creating a home" for students of color within the college and demanding to know, using an expletive, who had hired him.

Mr. Lukianoff -- who happened to be at Yale because he was speaking at a conference there the next day -- took videos of the confrontation, as did several other observers, and published them on FIRE's YouTube account. He said he wanted to make sure there was evidence that Mr. Christakis had acted calmly. (Mr. Christakis kept his faculty position, but he and his wife eventually resigned from the residential college. She no longer teaches at Yale.)

Conservative publications like The Daily Caller and the Washington Examiner seized won the confrontation, dubbing the student "shrieking girl" and linking to FIRE's video, which eventually had more than 1.6 million views.

That fueled a perception among some student activists, professors, and others that FIRE had purposely tried to make the video go viral and unfairly spun the standoff so it would fit neatly into the group's arguments about coddled students who demand protection from offense. One Yale professor told The New York Times that FIRE's framing the incident as a free-speech issue was "a complete misconstruction of what happened."

MR. LUKIANOFF says he was critical only of the Yale students' demand for the Christakises to be fired, not of their activism. But it's situations like the Yale protests that lead some people to question who FIRE is really defending.

When Michael Roth, Wesleyan's president, was dealing with a tense scuffle in 2015 over funding for the campus newspaper, The Wesleyan Argus, he recalls FIRE's attacks on some Wesleyan students for not respecting the newspaper's editorial independence. The Argus had published a student column that was critical of the Black Lives Matter movement, which led students of color on the campus to demand that the newspaper lose its funding because it wasn't creating a "safe spaces" for their voices.

FIRE's reaction, Mr. Roth says, was "a knee-jerk absolutist response that ignored the free-speech rights of the protesters." And in the end. he says, his administration strongly supported the Argus's right to publish contentious viewpoints. "FIRE, in order to perhaps raise its own profile among the donor class that supports anything that's anti-political-correctness, was making hay with a situation that, in the end, affirmed the value of the free press," he says.

Gregory P. Magarian, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, doesn't believe that FIRE limits its attention to right-leaning causes. But he has noticed a pattern: Its work tends to draw the attention of conservative news sites that try to capitalize on perceived liberal biases.

"It seems that a lot of what they're doing is feeding or having a symbiotic relationship with the sort of conservative outrage machine," he says.

Concerns about who FIRE really defends can give some students and professors pause about turning to the group for help. Recently, Mr. Creeley says, FIRE offered to defend a student who had been punished for his activism regarding Palestine. "The student didn't want anything to do with us," Mr. Creeley says. "He said, I'm not going to work with you, because you're conservative."

But Alice Dreger, formerly a clinical professor of medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University, says that portrayal doesn't fit her experience. Ms. Dreger, a self-described liberal, resigned in 2015 because, she said, Northwestern officials had interfered with an article she guest-edited in a campus journal about a nurse who helped the author regain his sexual function after he was paralyzed. FIRE had written a letter to Northwestern asking it to "abandon any future plans to dictate or censor" the journal's content.

She admits that, when FIRE asked her to speak at its annual student conference last year, "I was expecting to find nothing but pasty-faced young white men," many of whom "wanted to bash feminism." Instead, she says, "there were an astonishing number of people of color in that room."

Ms. Dreger knows that some of FIRE's donors are prominent conservative foundations. "There's no question that they're a well-funded organization," she says, noting that FIRE had paid her well to talk at its conference. But she's also a FIRE donor, and she knows other leftist academics who are, too.

Those who accuse FIRE of partisan bias haven't done their research, Mr. Lukianoff says: "If you're not going to bother to actually read our material, that's not on me."

In response to criticism, FIRE staff members deliver a practiced line that they are nonpartisan and uphold everyone's right to free speech and due process. Mr. Lukianoff can rattle off a half-dozen recent FIRE cases that don't involve conservative causes. It's clear that he and his staff are well versed in defending their organization against attacks -- and somewhat frustrated that they have to do it so often.

FIRE's stances, however, have often positioned the group on one side of debates that have become politicized -- for instance, its attacks on the Obama administration's guidance to colleges on how Title IX, the gender-equity law, applies to sexual misconduct.

Bob Casey Jr., a Democratic U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, questioned then-nominee Betsy DeVos during her January confirmation hearing about how she would deal with campus sexual violence as education secretary. He cited as a concern her foundation's $25,000 in donations to FIRE. The senator's spokesman later wrote on Twitter that "we'll gladly take on the far right groups determined to roll back the progress we've made on campus sexual assault."

FIRE also defends the right of sexual-assault victims to publicly criticize institutional policies, Mr. Lukianoff notes. The group did just that in 2013, he says, in the case of a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

One result of having a campus culture war, Mr. Lukianoff says, is that people tend to pay attention only to developments that fit their preconceived narratives about colleges, and to sort people and organizations into ideological boxes.

He points to a case at Northern Michigan University from last year, when a student who sought counseling after experiencing sexual assault was told not to discuss thoughts of self-harm with other students, or risk facing disciplinary action. FIRE sent the university a letter condemning the policy, but the case wasn't widely covered in the national news media, he says. "Whose culture-war narrative does that fit? Nobody's."

FIRE's stature has been bolstered by the increased attention to campus culture, but the group's staff members say they work independently of whatever is going on or being said around them. The only thing FIRE can control, Mr. Creeley says, is how its staff responds to cases.

"It's been going on 11 years doing this work," he says. He slowly lets out a breath. "I can't control the reaction of third-party actors. We don't send it to the College Fix like, Hey, check this one out. They're going to find it regardless."

"It's been a long process of sort of coming to terms with being stuck in the middle of the culture war," Mr. Lukianoff adds.

He recalls the first cases he helped handle at FIRE, many of which involved students and professors being censored for talking about 9/11. The country was on edge, and FIRE received a lot of hate mail. "I never let it change what FIRE did," Mr. Lukianoff says, "but it weighs on you after a while. It can become kind of exhausting."

FIRE has also taken a lot of heat for supporting the right of Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at colleges. The stance reflects the group's emphasis on defending all constitutionally protected expression, even when that speech is racist, sexist, or bigoted.

'Prohibitions on hateful speech do nothing to stop hate," Mr. Lukianoff wrote in his 2012 book, Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate. He also emphasizes that the First Amendment's most crucial purpose is protecting minority viewpoints: "the weak, the unpopular, the oddballs, the misfits, and the underdogs."

"If the only price that we have to pay for this freedom is that we sometimes hear words that we find offensive," he says, "it is well worth it."

But that broad approach is one that some people say doesn't always make sense in the present climate, particularly now that white nationalists and other extremists who add questionable value to academic debates are doing a lot more talking.

Certain kinds of expression do qualify as assault and harassment, says Mr. Roth, the Wesleyan president. His sense is that Mr. Lukianoff believes "the only way to defend free speech is to defend a free market of ideas." In some cases, Mr. Roth says, "universities shouldn't legitimate points of view that are abusive to members of the university community and other members of society."

Mr. Ciccariello-Maher, the Drexel professor, doesn't think colleges should give a platform to people like Mr. Yiannopoulos. Students should engage in debate with people who don't agree with them, the professor says, but they should be able to feel safe when doing so -- and they shouldn't be subjected to questions about their very existence on campus.

Also, when it comes to student activists, FIRE often rails against the so-called heckler's veto, in which audience members shout down a speaker, Mr. Ciccariello-Maher says. "But the reality is, it's very hard to protect speech and just say 'it shouldn't be too loud' or 'it shouldn't be too deafening.'"

Jon B. Gould, a professor of public affairs and law at American University, wants to see FIRE defend more speakers and students who are Muslim, black, and the like -- people who won't necessarily feel welcome and safe on all campuses and in the current political climate. "Up until now, they have seemed to focus most of their attention on what they claim to be progressive restrictions against conservative speakers," he says. "I think that's more than just a coincidence."

Mr. Gould has cast doubt on the rigor of FIRE's methods for rating colleges based on their "speech codes," and he questions what its agenda might be. But he admits that the organization is taking on an unenviable job at a challenging time. "They are in a tough spot right now where a lot of who they're having to defend are the most vile speakers," he says. "There's a part of me that actually feels bad for them."

Even those who find fault with FIRE's positions at times say the explosive tensions characterizing the recent protests at Berkeley, Middlebury, and elsewhere make the presence of a civil-liberties organization especially valuable.

"It's incredibly important to have an institution like FIRE in the mix of the free speech conversation," Mr. Roth says. He says that he's less critical of the organization now than he was last year, and that he cares about what FIRE thinks on questions of free speech and academic freedom.

Most of the time, he says, he and other college leaders "know what to do" when a speech controversy arises. In some cases, however, FIRE's voice is welcome -- as it was when Middlebury students shouted down Charles Murray. "They have a principled stand that's worth taking seriously," Mr. Roth says.

FOR NEARLY two decades, FIRE has been a gadfly in higher education, leveraging public attention to bring about change. Now some scholars see another potential niche for FIRE to fill: creating spaces for the kinds of difficult debates the organization holds up as essential on college campuses.

There is a need for "new creativity" to figure out how to talk across polarization, says Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of educational history at the University of Pennsylvania. In this era, "we've added to our list of people and ideas that need protection," he says, noting that he's had students "come out" in his office as supporters of Mr. Trump.

If people are actually muzzling their own speech because they're afraid of conflict, he says, it's essential "to create venues and mechanisms and systems where we can all use our speech to promote understanding, rather than just bitterness and misunderstanding." That's incumbent on everyone, not just FIRE, he says -- but FIRE can certainly help make that happen.

The group has experimented with such a role, hosting a pilot program of debates on campuses last academic year about issues like college athletes' pay and the Second Amendment. Mr. Lukianoff says FIRE will very likely do that again in the future and plans to release a debate guide this spring so that students can organize their own.

In 1999, Mr. Kors, one of FIRE's founders, said he hoped the organization would eventually be able to "extinguish itself" -- the idea being that, if FIRE had its intended influence, it would no longer be needed. But as controversies around campus free speech burn ever brighter, it seems that FIRE will do the same.

Protesters took to the streets at the U. of California at Berkeley in February after an appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos was canceled.

Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE: "We're at a stage where so many people are interested in this topic, and the information moves so quickly."

Protesters at Middlebury College face away from the stage and chant during an appearance this month by the political scientist Charles Murray.

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huffpo blog many links

THE BLOG 02/17/2016 09:46 am ET Updated Feb 17, 2017

The 10 Worst Colleges for Free Speech: 2016

By Greg Lukianoff

ASSOCIATED PRESS

This past year will be remembered as the year that freedom of speech (or the lack thereof) on U.S. campuses became international news. Even President Barack Obama felt compelled to comment on the issue (three separate times). Although those of us who have worked for years on the frontlines defending freedom of speech on campus think the media was a little late to the story, we can all agree that last year was an especially contentious one.

While some students filed lawsuits to fight campus “free speech zones,” others demanded new, restrictive campus speech codes. Some campuses renewed their commitments to freedom of speech, while others backpedaled. Perhaps the most striking trend of the last year was the number of professors, even tenured professors, who found their livelihoods under threat for what they said either on or off campus.

With an epic year behind us, we are proud to present the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s (FIRE’s) list of the worst schools for free speech in 2016. This is our fifth annual list, and it covers the time that has passed since we published our fourth list during this time last year.

One school that people may have expected to see on the list that did not make it is Yale University. As you may know, FIRE strongly opposed last year’s effort by Yale students to get two professors, Erika and Nicholas Christakis, fired from their posts at the university. The controversy arose after Erika Christakis sent an email defending students’ autonomy and questioning if it is the proper role of colleges to tell students what Halloween costumes they should wear.

While no charges were brought against either of the Christakises, both professors announced that they will not teach in the spring. Nicholas cancelled his spring 2016 class to go on sabbatical, and Erika resigned from teaching. Of course, this is a very bad outcome for Yale. But because the university did publicly defend the professors’ free speech and academic freedom rights, we decided that Yale did not edge out the 10 schools who made the list this year. FIRE will, however, keep a close eye on Yale to see if it lives up to its glowing promises of freedom of speech.

Another university, or, in this case, university system, that did not quite make this year’s list, but easily could have, is the University of California (UC) system. For several years now, the board of regents of the UC system has proposed, with some support from students, an expansion of the definition of anti-Semitism that would present serious First Amendment concerns and chill constitutionally protected speech, including criticism of Israel’s government. We at FIRE have strongly opposed this move from the start, but given that the proposed language has not yet been adopted, the UC system did not make the list this year. However, if the UC system adopts the proposed definition, I can all but guarantee you that it will make this list next year — and likely end up on the losing end of a First Amendment lawsuit.

This year’s list contains cases from all over the spectrum — from large public colleges, to three private Catholic schools, and more. If you believe we missed a college, or want to nominate a college for next year’s list, please let us know in the comments. Most of all, if you want to challenge your own school’s speech codes, please get in touch with us.

Mount St. Mary’s University

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Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland did everything it could this month to ensure it would find itself on this “worst of the worst” list in 2016. On February 8, the liberal arts university took the extraordinary step of firing Thane M. Naberhaus, a tenured professor, and Ed Egan, the student newspaper’s faculty advisor, in the midst of a mushrooming scandal surrounding first-year university President Simon P. Newman’s plan to oust low-performing freshmen.

The plan became national news in January after the student newspaper reported that Newman sought to use a student survey as a basis to identify students to dismiss, which would boost retention rates, and that he told a concerned faculty member, “This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies ... put a Glock to their heads.” The professors were notified of their firings in letters that stated they were “persona non grata“ at the university and were no longer welcome on campus or at any university activity, and that failure to comply with the letter would result in “legal proceedings.”

Newman also demanded and received the resignation of Provost David B. Rehm, who was previously critical of Newman’s retention plan.

While Mount St. Mary’s is a private, Catholic institution, it makes promises of free speech and academic freedom to its community that it is morally and legally obligated to uphold — promises it broke in firing the faculty members.

The firings unleashed a storm of criticism, and on February 12, Newman announced at a faculty meeting that Egan and Naberhaus had been reinstated. Although Newman’s reversal is a welcome development, Mount St. Mary’s actions have caused lasting damage to the community’s confidence in the administration. Naberhaus, in fact, has already stated that he refuses to return. If disagreeing with the administration on an important issue within the university community is a fireable offense, no form of dissent is safe at the Mount.

Northwestern University

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Northwestern University earns its place on this year’s list for its heavy-handed and chilling treatment of not one but two prominent faculty members. Northwestern was thrust into the national spotlight last spring, after professor Laura Kipnis found herself the subject of a Title IX investigation for an essay she wrote that was, ironically, critical of the over-enforcement of Title IX. In the essay, she criticized the “sexual panic” that has resulted from Title IX’s unchecked expansion, using a widely reported-upon case at her own university as an example. During her Title IX investigation — which dragged on for more than 70 days — Kipnis was denied even the most basic information necessary to defend herself. She was not allowed, for example, to review any evidence submitted against her, a due process deficiency that is unfortunately common during campus investigations. Northwestern cleared Kipnis only after she published an explosive and damning account of her treatment in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

At the same time that Kipnis was undergoing her Title IX ordeal, administrators at Northwestern’s medical school were censoring a faculty-produced bioethics journal, fearing that one article’s discussion of oral sex would be detrimental to the medical school’s “brand.” Northwestern then announced the creation of an oversight committee to review the journal’s content prior to publication. This new prior review requirement so incensed professor and author Alice Dreger, who edited the journal issue featuring the controversial article, that she resigned her faculty position at Northwestern as a result.

Louisiana State University

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Teresa Buchanan served Louisiana State University (LSU) for nearly 20 years as a tenured professor who inspired her students, won millions of dollars in grant money for the university, and developed a top-notch early childhood education teacher training curriculum. However, in June 2015, only a few months before she was eligible to retire, LSU fired her for her alleged occasional use of profanity. LSU ignored that she used this as a pedagogical technique to prepare her adult students to be effective teachers. The university claimed Buchanan’s teaching methods violated its policy prohibiting “sexual harassment” of students, although not a single student had ever accused her of sexual harassment.

LSU’s policy defines sexual harassment as “unwelcome verbal, visual, or physical behavior of a sexual nature,” mirroring the language of the sexual harassment definition propagated by the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice in 2013 as “a blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country.” A faculty panel unanimously opposed firing Buchanan, but without explanation, LSU’s top administrators overruled the panel and fired her, prompting censure by the American Association of University Professors and the LSU faculty senate.

Left with no other choice, Buchanan sued LSU in federal court on January 20, 2016, for violating her First Amendment and due process rights. FIRE has been predicting since the day the “blueprint” definition of sexual harassment was released that it would be used to stifle speech and limit academic freedom. Although we regret being proven right, we are proud to sponsor Buchanan’s lawsuit as part of our Stand Up For Speech Litigation Project and look forward to the restoration of unfettered dialogue between professors and students at LSU.

University of California, San Diego

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In November 2015, the student government at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) cut all student media funding in an effort to censor The Koala, an unapologetically satirical student newspaper that has long been known for its provocative content. After The Koala published an article in 2015 mocking the concept of “safe spaces” on campus, the UCSD administration released a statement denouncing the newspaper and the “offensive and hurtful language it chooses to publish.” Following the administration’s lead, the UCSD Associated Students Council, which funded The Koala and many other student organizations through mandatory student activity fees, decided to strip funding from all student print media organizations in an attempt to punish the newspaper, seeming to acknowledge that it could not defund just The Koala because of its offensive content and still purport to comply with the First Amendment. NOTE KIRK TURNING PT TO CAPTURE ST ASSOC

If this sounds familiar, it should. In 2010, in response to another controversial move by The Koala, the council president froze all student media funding until the council could develop policies to prevent student funds from going to groups supporting hateful speech.FIRE and others spoke out, noting that the First Amendment prohibits the council from distributing student activity fees in a manner that discriminates against groups based on the viewpoints they express. And the council certainly cannot punish an entire category of student organizations in order to target the speech of one unpopular paper. After weeks of controversy, the council finally voted to restore student-media funding.

FIRE, theAmerican Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties, and the Student Press Law Center have all written to the council and the university to point out that defunding all student media in order to censor a single controversial publication is just as unconstitutional today as it was in 2010. But with New Year’s Day come and gone and the funding yet to be restored, UCSD joins our list of the worst free speech offenders of the past year.

Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota

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Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota fired popular classics adjunct professor Dave Hillman after he translated Seneca’s Medea and then worked with the drama department to put on an authentic production of the play. The administration apparently did not approve of Hillman’s decision to have cast members point fascina — phallus shaped objects — at audience members to replicate the ancient practice of “confronting viewers with their lavish and corrupt lifestyles,” as Hillman explained.

The official justification for firing Hillman is not clear. The university says he was terminated for sexual harassment, but it never explained to him the details of his alleged misdeeds, such as the name of the target of the harassment and when it happened. Saint Mary’s also fired Hillman from his job as a janitor at the university, leaving him unable to afford asthma medication for his daughter.

On February 3, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) wrote to Saint Mary’s urging the university to explain Hillman’s charges and provide him with a fair hearing. The AAUP also asked Saint Mary’s to revise its sexual harassment policies to “comport with Association-supported standards.”

Like Mount St. Mary’s in Maryland, Saint Mary’s of Minnesota is a Catholic university, but it promises freedom of expression to its faculty and students. Saint Mary’s therefore violated its contractual and moral duty to uphold its pledges when it fired Hillman without due process, thus removing a dedicated professor whose only sin appears to be doing his job too well.

University of Oklahoma

[The college students were freely singing, “There will never be a n**** in SAE… You can hang them from a tree, but they’ll never sign with me.”]

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Last March, University of Oklahoma (OU) President David Boren unilaterally expelled two members of the university’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity for their “leadership role in leading a racist and exclusionary chant,” as shown in a video posted online. However, as First Amendment expertsEugene Volokh and Erwin Chemerinsky pointed out at the time, OU is a public university and cannot punish speech that does not fall into one of the few and narrowly defined categories of speech not protected by the First Amendment, like true threats or incitement to imminent lawless action. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that offensive speech, even racist speech, is protected by the First Amendment. Therefore, the expulsion of the two OU students without notice of the charges against them or an opportunity to contest those charges was one of the most brazen violations of free speech and due process rights to occur on campus in 2015.

What’s worse, after the expulsions, numerous colleges across the country seized on OU’s unconstitutional actions as a signal that they have an “all clear” to toss freedom of speech and basic fairness out of the window. But public colleges do so at their own peril. If a student decides to stand up to their college, the courts are quite clear on whose side they will rule.

Marquette University

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Marquette University makes this year’s list for the same reason it made last year’s list: its ongoing campaign to strip the tenure of longtime professor John McAdams based on the writings on his personal blog. McAdams criticized a graduate student instructor for suppressing a student’s opinions against same-sex marriage during a class discussion. After the instructor received criticism from readers of McAdams’ blog, Marquette suspended McAdams without due process and without a hint of regard for his free speech or academic freedom rights.

But that was only the beginning. In public statements the university repeatedly insinuated, without any evidence, that McAdams had violated Marquette’s harassment policy, labeled him a threat to safety, and effectively held him directly responsible for the comments and actions of his readers — a position wildly opposed to basic free speech principles.

Marquette announced it was seeking his termination last January, and McAdams is now in his third semester of being banned from teaching and being on campus as he appeals his case. Unless it wants to take up permanent residence in this feature, Marquette must resolve McAdams’ case and return him to the classroom without further delay.

Colorado College

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As protests over racial issues publicly roiled campuses across the country in late 2015, college administrators were eager to avoid the perception that they were indifferent to racial tensions. Sometimes, this impulse resulted in colleges disciplining students perceived to be engaging in racially charged speech. At Colorado College, a student responded anonymously to a post on the social media application Yik Yak that read “#blackwomenmatter” with the joke “They matter, they’re just not hot.” After administrators learned that student Thaddeus Pryor may have been responsible for the joke, they summoned him to a meeting at which he admitted to writing it. Colorado College responded by imposing a 21-month suspension, during which Pryor was forbidden from taking courses for academic credit at any other institution. Following Pryor’s appeal and a letter from FIRE reminding Colorado College that its actions violated the freedom of expression that the college promises to its students, Pryor’s suspension was reduced to six months. But any suspension for clearly protected speech is unacceptable at an institution that claims to value free speech, and Colorado College’s repeated failure to live up to these ideals warrants its inclusion on this year’s list of worst offenders.

University of Tulsa

While many colleges on this list earned their spot for punishing students for what they said, the University of Tulsa earned its place because it punished a student for what someone else said.

In September 2014, Tulsa student George “Trey” Barnett was notified by Senior Vice Provost Winona Tanaka that eight harsh interim measures, including his removal from classes and a theater production, had been imposed on him because his then-fiancé authored Facebook posts that criticized a Tulsa professor and other members of the Tulsa community. A month later, Tanaka found Barnett guilty of harassment and of retaliation for sharing information about the complaint with his fiancé, who provided Tanaka with a sworn affidavit acknowledging that he, not Barnett, was the author of the Facebook posts. Barnett’s punishment was severe — he was suspended until at least January 2016 and barred from receiving a degree in his major when he returned to classes. Barnett appealed the decision, and his appeal was summarily denied in January 2015.

However, Tulsa didn’t earn a spot on this year’s list just for its attack on one student’s fundamental rights; it also targeted Tulsa’s student newspaper, The Collegian, for covering Barnett’s suspension.

Last month, Barnett announced that he was fighting back. On January 13, he filed a lawsuit, alleging that Tulsa failed to provide him with “any meaningful due process” in finding him guilty of harassment and retaliation. Barnett’s lawsuit also claims that Tulsa subjected him to “substantial mental anguish” and violated its free speech promises. We’re hoping this lawsuit will ensure that Tulsa doesn’t end up on our “worst” list next year.

Wesleyan University

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It’s been a rough year for the student press, and at few institutions has that been more evident than at Wesleyan University. Wesleyan was plunged into controversy last fall after its main student newspaper, The Wesleyan Argus, published a student column critical of the Black Lives Matter movement. Students mobilized in opposition to the column’s publication, circulating a petition calling for Wesleyan’s student government to defund the Argus unless specific demands were met. Among the petitioners’ plans to get its demands met was a movement to support “recycling” the Argus — another way of saying they would round up and destroy copies of the newspaper if their demands went unmet. Indeed, the Argus reported that several hundred copies of the paper were stolen in the midst of the controversy.

Wesleyan’s student government then took up the issue, voting last fall to approve a dangerous resolution that could turn free speech at Wesleyan on its head. Under the new resolution, which may take effect this fall, the Argus could see $17,000 in funding — more than half its budget — revoked and reallocated to other student publications. Worse, the proposal would allocate funding in significant part based on a popular vote of the whole student body, an open invitation to viewpoint discrimination if ever there was one. If Wesleyan doesn’t wise up to the dangerous flaws in the new funding scheme, an already chilled atmosphere for free speech will turn truly frosty.

Follow Greg Lukianoff on Twitter: www.twitter.com/glukianoff

Greg Lukianoff

President and CEO, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

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