Do We Really Care About Free Speech?

Americans Say They're Worried About Freedom of Expression. Greg Lukianoff Doesn't Expect Us to be Consistent About it

Lukianoff sports the team polo shirt (photo: FIRE).

For the record: Voltaire never said I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. The line widely attributed to the French philosopher was written by a biographer, Evelyn Beatrice Hall. But good for her, because the sentiment is ingrained in the American consciousness, even if we don’t practice what we preach.

A belief that freedom of expression is precious unites most of us. But that commitment shifts depending on who’s mouthing off. According to Pew, 62 percent of U.S. adults say “people being too easily offended by things others say” is a major issue. The same survey reveals that 47 percent of Americans think “people saying things that are very offensive to others” is a worry. Such are the inconsistencies of our national psyche. We hate cancel culture unless we’re canceling somebody we hate.

Whatever happens in a few short days, speech wars exacerbated by digital transformation are likely to intensify. Democrats built a presidential campaign around freedom from those who would police what we do and say. Among other things, Trumpism is motivated by the idea that elites are trying to shut up dissenters. This is a country where rage about illiberalism on campus can lead activists to ban books. The turnabout is head-spinning.

Civil libertarians jump into these spats on the side of principle, which doesn’t make them beloved. There was a time when being “a card-carrying member of the ACLU” was a political attack line. Now, some of that ire gets directed at the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, founded in 1999 to defend First Amendment cases on campus. In 2022, the nonpartisan organization expanded its practice to include incidents of speech suppression outside of academia.

Those cases include advocating for a Tennessee pharmacy student threatened with expulsion for tweeting about Cardi B, animal rights activists arrested for protesting in a Houston park, and a North Carolinian who jail time for taking a ballot selfie. FIRE’s work at colleges and universities includes advocating for disputants on both sides of the Israel-Gaza conflict.

Along the way, Greg Lukianoff, the group’s president, has become one of the country’s leading speech advocates. The co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind with Jonathan Haidt and The Canceling of the American Mind with Rikki Schlott, he’s produced documentaries about free speech and comedy and ACLU hero Ira Glasser. A celebrity in so-called heterodox spaces, he’s stubbornly consistent about defending speech infringement, wherever it crops up.

Lukianoff has felt the sting of online attacks and is open about the toll that took on his mental health. But no matter how heated the argument, he’s genial and open-hearted— a role model for civility. As a momentous election looms, we caught up with him to discuss how speech controversies have changed, why he’s never surprised when allies turn into adversaries, and how laughter sustains him through it all.

Yours Ever,

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CultureWag: The past four years have been tumultuous ones for free expression. They've also lifted FIRE’s public profile. As a veteran of the speech wars, how has the issue changed since you began this work?

Greg Lukianoff: The biggest change I’ve seen since I started at FIRE in 2001 has been the declining support for free speech among college students. When I started at FIRE, and really until about 2014, students were by far the strongest constituency for free speech on campus. Before 2014, in most cases, administrators wanted to suppress the speech of students and faculty. But around 2014 students began joining administrators at their schools in calling for the censorship of their professors and even their peers. We noticed the change earlier than that, but I think 2014 is the correct year to mark when the shift became noticeable. It picked up steam in 2017 and 2020. 

In The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and I suggest that the sudden and dramatic shift was due to a generation of students who had been taught and absorbed counterproductive and unhealthy mental habits arriving on college campuses across the nation. But I think it's often underappreciated that the real change was the alliance between a certain set of activist administrators and activist students because activist students alone wouldn't be able to cause this much havoc. It required coordination with bureaucrats who were already policing speech and enforcing orthodoxy. 

CW: You've said that "cancel culture" reached an apex around 2020, moving from the academy into media and other professions. A confession: Around that time, a Georgetown student interviewed me about the topic and I pretty much denied it existed; it hadn't touched me. Within days of the conversation, it played out in my workplace in an ugly way. It was traumatic moment for many in journalism, media, and the arts. Do you think there’s a consensus about cancel culture now? 

GL: I think it’s becoming harder and harder for people to deny the existence of cancel culture as it regularly wreaks havoc and dysfunction in workplaces across various industries, communities, and philanthropic organizations. However, among the more left-dominated, “elite” professions such as journalism, publishing, and academia, there is still a frustrating amount of denialism, doubling down, or, worse, the insistence that “even if cancel culture exists it’s a good thing.” Sometimes you even get to see the same person progress through each stage within the same conversation!

For instance, in her recent book, Fearless Speech First Amendment critic Mary Anne Franks calls cancel culture a con and claims that those of us concerned about it serve, in her words, a neo-Confederate agenda. She doesn't grapple with the actual data that shows we've experienced an unparalleled disaster when it comes to professors being fired or punished for speech. In her view, it just simply can't be true, so there’s no need to look further. She's not alone. Too many in academia just want to wave it away.

CW: Obviously, the tendency to punish others for going against consensus isn't unique to one side of the ideological spectrum; it’s a universal bullying impulse. Back in 2003, the Chicks were famously canceled for criticizing George W. Bush. We can all cite other examples, that have nothing to do with so-called Wokeism. You're a self-described liberal and sued Florida over its Stop WOKE Act. But while FIRE is nonpartisan, it’s often shorthanded as a libertarian or conservative group. Is the term “cancel culture” just too toxic to be useful? Do we need to reframe how we discuss free speech issues so that people of all beliefs understand how they relate to higher American values, as opposed to polarizing issues?

GL: Polling shows that an overwhelming majority of Americans on both the right and left know what “cancel culture” refers to and are concerned with how it imperils free speech. When Rikki and I wrote The Canceling of the American Mind, we discussed changing the term to something new that would be more palatable to holdouts who don’t like the term because of supposed associations with the political right. But that would be leaving a giant swath of everyday Americans out of the conversation.

CW: You've been highly critical of administrators who have cracked down on conservatives, but free speech debates on campus shifted with the Israel-Gaza war. Now the crackdown is focused on those on the left, and on college presidents who defended protestors on free speech grounds. It’s chilling how quickly many critics of speech restrictions lurched into "fire them" mode when it comes to ideological opponents. How is FIRE navigating the change?

GL: You’re right that the recent uptick in pro-Palestinian protests on campus has exposed many people on the right for being hypocrites or opportunists when it comes to free speech, but is this surprising to anybody? If anyone ever thought for a minute that we at FIRE expect most people to be principled defenders of free speech, they’ve pegged us as much more naïve than we are. I often expect to be disappointed, and therefore I'm disappointed less than someone who might foolishly think one side or the other of the political spectrum will always be reliable allies when it comes to free speech. History says otherwise. Certainly, our quarter-century of experience paints this as almost boringly predictable. When it comes down to it, most people have a “for me but not for thee” attitude about free speech. As for FIRE’s position, we’re always going to remain consistent and be the adults in the room calling balls and strikes on what’s protected and unprotected.