Censorship and "Unlearning Liberty" at College: Q&A with FIRE's Greg Lukianoff

"The...idea that if you just let people talk, it will be this pit of racist pandemonium...is sort of childish and it oversimplifies. But it is a great justification for having a lot of power over speech," says Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

Lukianoff spoke with Reason TV's Nick Gillespie about his new book Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, where he details the slow and steady withering of free expression on America's college campuses.

In some ways, the modern on-campus free-speech movement dates back to 1993's "water buffalo incident" at the University of Pennsylvania, where a student was brought up on racial harassment charges for using the term "water buffalo" as an insult. That case led directly to the founding of FIRE, which "defends free speech, due process and basic rights on campus."

A Stanford Law-trained liberal who blogs at the Huffington Post, Lukianoff insists that by restricting controversial or potentially offensive speech, "you're putting people into echo chambers" where they only interact with people with whom they already agree. That sort of groupthink is dangerous to a free society, says Lukianoff, but it's particularly appalling to see it instituted at the nation's colleges and universities, where the free exchange of ideas is supposed to be the whole point of higher education.

Runs about 16 minutes.

Produced by Anthony L. Fisher. Camera by Jim Epstein and Fisher.

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[ZombiedustXXX]

Texas Tech's free speech zone gazebo @3:50, strikes me as an insulting politically correct representation of a pillared playpen for toddlers. All one needs to complete the playpen effect, is plastic netting wrapped anound the outside. For safety, and to reduce the possibility of suffocation, make sure the gaps in the netting are wide enough, to keep the college administrators from accidentally snagging their pointy heads in the webbing.

[sniper6081]

Every time YouTube updates it gets uglier visually and more useless. Just pick a format and stick with it for fuck's sake!

[DeltaHorizon22]

believe it

[DartmouthAlum96]

I understand what you're saying, but your comment oversimplifies the issue.

Just because an individual steps onto private property or transacts business with a private institution doesn't mean that he waves his Constitutional rights.

Furthermore, universities don't lend themselves to perfect free-market practices. For example, a restrictive school might have a particularly strong math program. Students wishing to enter the program are forced to choose between their rights and their educations.

[EternalHappElements]

colleges boards are smart at doing all those. Disencoraging or preventing speech freedom has its dilema.

[LibertarianUSA1982]

If you censor speech you are no better than Dictatorships.

[Walter Clark]

Censorship is only observed when the speech is not approved of by those in control. But what about all that is approved? Notice that there is a kind of force --an invisible force-- in all that “is” said. This should be the more important issue. Government should not be the ones who own the schools. Freedom of speech means nothing if 99.99% of that which is going into microphones is created by the government.

[TheGeneralHeinz]

5:30 I think Nick's a little blown haha

[jwestbrook86]

@Sue Max As I said, I don't agree with labeling certain places as free speech zones (especially not at a public university), but I never witnessed free speech being forcefully limited to that gazebo during my time on campus. That might be the only "official" area for free speech, but I saw demonstrations outside that zone routinely.

[Sue Max]

Should it not have been the other way around. Gazebo for non-free speech zone, and the rest of the land mass a free speech zone? It's not a gazebo, it's a cage for an owned animals.

[BecauseIAmABoy]

Same in Canada. But here nobody even dares to talk about it.