Greg Lukianoff: belief

Transcript context

…So how do you push back on de-platforming? Well, who would do it? Is it other students? Is it faculty? Is it the administration? What’s the dynamics of pushing back of, basically, because I imagine some of it is culture, but I imagine every university has a bunch of students who will protest basically every speaker. And it’s a question of how you respond to that protest. Well, here’s the dirty little secret about the big change in 2014 and FIRE, and me, and Height have been very clear that the big change that we saw on campus was that for most of my career, students were great on freedom of speech. They were the best constituency for free speech, absolutely unambiguously until about 2013, 2014. And it was only in 2014 where we had these very kind of sad for us experience where suddenly students were the ones advocating for de-platforming and new speech codes, in a similar way that they had been doing in say the mid-eighties, for example. But here’s the dirty little secret. It’s not just the students, it’s students and administrators, sometimes only a handful of them though, working together to create some of these problems. And this was exactly what happened at Stanford when Kyle Duncan, a Fifth Circuit Judge tried to speak at my alma mater and a fifth of the class showed up to shout him down. It was a real showing of what was going on. That 10 minutes into the shout down of a Fifth Circuit Judge, and I keep on emphasizing that because I’m a constitutional lawyer, Fifth Circuit Judges are big deals. They’re one level below the Supreme Court. About a fifth of the school shows up to shout him down. After 10 minutes of shouting him down, an administrator, a DI administrator, gets up with a prepared speech that she’s written that’s a seven-minute-long speech where she talks about free speech, maybe the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. And we are at this law school where people could learn to challenge these norms. So it’s clear that there was coordination amongst some of these administrators. And from talking to students there, they were in meetings, extensive meetings for a long time. They show up, do a shout down, then they take additional seven minutes to lecture the speaker on free speech, the juice of free speech not being worth the squeeze. And then for the rest of it, it’s just constant heckling after she leaves. This is clearly, and something very similar happened a number of times at Yale, where it was very clearly administrators were helping along with a lot of these disruptions. So I think every time there is a shout down at a university, the investigation should be first and foremost, did administrators help create this problem? Did they do anything to stop it? Because I think a lot of what’s really going on here is the hyper bureaucratization of universities with a lot more ideological people who think of their primary job as basically policing speech, more or less. They’re encouraging students, sorry, they’re encouraging students who have opinions they like, to do shout downs. ical people who think of their primary job as basically policing speech, more or less. They’re encouraging students, sorry, they’re encouraging students who have opinions they like, to do shout downs. And that’s why they really need to investigate this. And it is at Stanford, the administrator who gave the prepared remarks about the juice not being worth the squeeze. She has not been invited back to Stanford, but she’s one of the only examples I can think of, when these things happen a lot where an administrator clearly facilitated something that was a shout down or a de-platforming, or resulted in a professor getting fired, or resulted in a student getting expelled, where the administrator has got off scot-free or probably, in some cases, even gotten a promotion.…

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