Transcript: Greg Lukianoff

My interview with the co-author of The Canceling of the American Mind

There are still people who believe that cancel culture does not exist. But it’s about to get a whole lot harder to make that argument publicly. My guest on this week’s program has a new book out that provides irrefutable evidence that cancel culture is a serious phenomenon — that it is now a common tactic on the right and the left, that it is a threat to individuals and institutions, and that it is ultimately undermining trust.

But, my guest says, there is a solution.  

Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. He’s also the co-author of The Canceling of the American Mind.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the episode for free here.

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TH: Greg, welcome back to Lean Out.

GL: Thank you so much for having me on.

TH: Great to speak with you again. I enjoyed this book and I think it's going to make for a wonderful conversation today. Let's start by briefly outlining the problem for our listeners. How do you and your co-author, Rikki Schlott, define cancel culture — and what are the numbers here? How prevalent is this problem?

GL: Sure. We're really trying to make an argument that cancel culture is a historical period. I'm a First Amendment lawyer. I'm big on the history of freedom of speech. And the various moments of mass censorship tend to have names: the Red Scare 1, 2, McCarthyism, which is generally 2, et cetera, the Victorian era. We're making the argument that essentially we should think of this as the era of cancel culture.

For those of us who worked on campus, it was really clear around 2014 that something major had changed. Previously students had been incredible on freedom of speech, and then suddenly, they were demanding deplatforming and new speech codes, and by 2017, they were demanding professors be fired. With regards to the data — and to be clear, that wasn't normal before. I've been doing this for 22 years. That was unusual. Because, yes, students disagreed with professors all the time, and would ask hard questions, and write editorials about why they thought their professor was wrong, and protest. But it was an extra step to demand that that professor be fired for speech. That was very rare, in my experience.

With regards to the numbers, let's take when I started at FIRE. I landed at 9:10 AM on 9/11 to find an apartment in Philadelphia for my job at FIRE. Pretty crazy beginning. It was definitely a moment where there was mass hysteria and backlash to people saying both insensitive things about the attacks, but also professors sometimes getting in trouble for saying, "We should really get those terrorists." We saw about 17 attempts to get professors punished back then.

Three professors were fired, but all three of those you could really justify. One was academic misconduct, the other one was actual ties to terrorism. The other one was something that you could legitimately punish them before.

That was bad. That was an unusually bad couple of years for academic freedom. Cancel culture — we're now talking about a thousand attempts to get professors fired. Two-thirds of those were punished in some way. About one-fifth, about 200, were fired. I think something like 40 of them, maybe even more, 44, were tenured professors, which was unheard of before I started.

We know that this is just a tiny drop in the bucket that we're able to see, because a lot of what happens on campus happens without any public attention whatsoever. To get a sense of that, we did a poll of professors. 1 in 6 — 1 in 6, this one blew me away, too, after doing this 22 years — said they had been either investigated or threatened with investigation for things related to free speech or academic freedom. That means speaking what’s called extramurally. Your research, your pedagogy.

We just completed a survey where about 10% of students said the same thing. One-third of professors said that they've been encouraged by their colleagues and by administrators not to touch on controversial topics. It's been the worst period I've seen in 22 years. I can't find a period since McCarthyism where you're looking at these numbers. I find it somewhat frustrating to have to continue to argue that this is happening at all, when I think all of us saw it with our own eyes. It just turns out the numbers are even worse than most people thought.

TH: I want to try to unpack some of the attitudes behind this and where they come from. For much of the U.S.'s almost 250-year history, it has been distinguished as a free-speech nation. Your own polls show that Americans today value freedom of speech above all other freedoms, placing it above the right to vote, the right to bear arms, and even freedom of religion. How exactly did we get to a moment where freedom of speech is viewed with skepticism and even suspicion by many in academia, the media, and education?

GL: Well, the first thing about those numbers is — and it's something I remember someone bringing this to my attention, a very smart professor, maybe 15 years ago. Saying, "Actually, there's encouraging news when you ask students how they feel about freedom of speech, they all say they love it, and they all think it's great. Same thing with professors." It's like, “Yes, that's what Comstock thought, the great Victorian censor. He would literally open up before he arrested people for indecency, "I love freedom of speech." Everybody thinks they do. When you poll extremely regressive parts of the world, they say they like freedom of speech. It really gets much more troubling if you dig into it. When you actually ask, "Well, what about this situation?" which is clearly free speech. They are like, "Oh, definitely not there."

Where did this come from? I call my Substack The Eternally Radical Idea, which is a reference to freedom of speech. Because free speech is always a radical idea, in every generation. And in every generation, people rise up to demand that people they don't like get censored and they're usually on the winning side. The side saying free speech is usually on the losing side.

We've just come from an unusually, and I can say this, at least in the free world, a globally, high watermark of appreciation for the value of freedom of speech. To some degree, we're regressing more to the historical mean where it's much more skeptical. There's some of that. Essentially, having that strong of a belief in freedom of speech was hard to — was historically unusual in the first place. And I feel very lucky to have grown up in an environment where, certainly being a Democrat, that was taken for granted. That one of your key beliefs was an unwavering commitment to freedom of opinion, for example, to make it very clear.

Why specifically on campus, though, is another question. I, with my co-author, Jonathan Haidt, for my previous book, The Coddling of the American Mind — you always want to give a social science argument that lets people off the hook to a degree. That this was just natural forces. It was kind of unintentional. And that's true as well — that essentially universities got much more politically homogenous. They moved from a majority on the left to a super, super-majority on the left, both among professors and administrators. And when you don't have enough viewpoint diversity, a very typical social science situation is people tend to get more radicalized, more group thinky, all this kind of stuff.

We shouldn't eliminate the fact that there was a very conscious movement since about 1965 — one year after the free speech movement — that started to actually try to turn free speech into no longer a sacred cow on the left. This started with people like Herbert Marcuse, but it continued to be promoted by the founders of Critical Race Theory, which has been treated like a boogeyman. But one thing that people should know, is that the founders of Critical Race Theory, one of the first things they did was advocate campus speech codes.

This was an article originally, I think, 1980 called Words That Wound that later became a book called Words That Wound in the '90s, which included everybody. It was Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, Kimberlé Crenshaw, et cetera.

There has been an effort to change the attitude about freedom of speech on campus for some time. I went to a non-elite college but then I went to Stanford for law school and I was shocked at how much free speech had already been — it got an eye roll almost. I worked at the ACLU of Northern California, took every class that my school offered on First Amendment, and already you could see that free speech was already taking a backseat, at least in elite left circles.

Unfortunately, I've watched this progress, and it's actually really easy to teach people to be free speech skeptical. It comes very naturally to us — that essentially there is bad ideas and people shouldn't say bad things. That makes instinctual sense to the very core of every human being.

But a lot of what's actually good for society and certainly good for the production of knowledge does not make immediate intuitive sense. I have to reframe it to people sometimes. To be kind of like, “No, protecting free speech does not mean all opinions are good. That would be a nonsensical argument. It wouldn't make a lick of sense. However, is it important to know what people really think in a democracy? Of course, it is. As a social scientist? Of course, it is important to know the world as it is. You cannot know what the world really looks like without having an environment in which people can actually say what they think.”

I think that the justification for censorship oftentimes comes from not really thinking the whole thing through. Essentially, do you really believe you are safer for not knowing that, say, your uncle thinks that lizard lizard people control the world? Is he right? I can say pretty definitely he's not right. Is it valuable information to know? Yes. Is it really, really valuable information to know that if, say, 10% of the country actually thinks that? Of course, it is.

It's really easy to battle free speech based on emotional responses to offensive speech. But reminding people that actually that knowledge is really important to understand the world as it is is something that I'm constantly trying to do.

TH: I want to spend a moment on the elite institutions and the role they play in this. Last week on Bill Maher's show, he railed against elite universities and said that if ignorance is a disease, Harvard yard is the Wuhan wet market. You quote a 2022 poll that showed the percentage of people who believe colleges and universities had a positive impact on society has dropped 14 points in two years. 73% of Democrats, 37% of Republicans now think that universities are a force for good. Do you think we will reach a point in the near future where a significant portion of the public neither values nor fully trusts our universities?

GL: Yes. I think that. And that's the subtle harm of cancel culture that we talk about in the book that really can't be appreciated enough. I always give the example of Carole Hooven at Harvard. Carole Hooven is brilliant, thoughtful, and she wrote a book called Testosterone. She's an evolutionary biologist. She studied primate biology in Africa, and made the argument while promoting her book that we should be kind to trans people. We should use their pronouns. We should be understanding and compassionate, but biological sex is real and we can't pretend that it's not. This is an argument that if you told me would be controversial 15 years ago, I would've been like, "That's crazy thinking."

A DEI administrator at Harvard started sounding the alarm about how offensive this was, and the typical thing happens: students start a petition, friends abandon her, won't defend her in public, all of the cancel culture nastiness. So bad that she actually admitted that it was the first time she started getting suicidal ideation in her whole life. Which is hard to imagine if you know Carole, because she's a very confident person. She voluntarily withdrew from Harvard, came back to work for Steven Pinker for a little bit, and now has since left because it was just too hostile of an environment.

Now, what does that do to trust and expertise on this topic? It basically means that if someone comes out and says that in that new opinion is that biological sex is not in fact real, and it's much more complicated than that, et cetera — why is anybody going to trust that? Because they're going to look at that and go, "Wait a second, I remember even a Harvard professor getting forced out for having the wrong opinion on this. Even if this is what you genuinely believe, how can I know that?" That's just if it happens once. When you're talking about a thousand different examples of this happening to professors, it's utterly devastating to trust in expertise, trust in authority, and trust in institutions.

When I saw the decline in trust in higher ed, there were a couple people saying, "Oh, this is just due to a right-wing conspiracy against higher ed." I'm like, "I've been doing this for 22 years. Your head is in the sand if you think they've done nothing to actually undermine their own credibility." I mean, even just being places that overwhelmingly catered to the rich was enough to make people angry. Even just putting people in ever greater debt so that they can hire ever more administrators was enough to blow credibility. But now you're actually getting to the stuff that makes reasonable people go, “But why should I trust you to be objective on any of these hot button issues?” — and have a point.

TH: We should also touch on the media, something I cover quite extensively on this podcast. You write in the book that the media went from being an intermediary to a kind of parent of the public. Walk me through your thinking on that.