On February 5, Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott discussed their new book on cancel culture, “The Canceling of the American Mind” before an audience at Cornell.
Lukianoff is the CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and Schlott was a FIRE research fellow. Lukianoff also co-authored, with Jonathan Haidt, “The Coddling of the American Mind.”
Lukianoff noted that people favor free speech when it protects their own expression, but challenge it when it is used to protect others. Lukianoff noted, “What I fear is that for younger people, what they hear about freedom of speech is that it’s the argument of what I call the three B’s: the bully, the bigot and the robber baron.” However, rich and powerful people do not need their free speech to be protected, because they are rich and powerful.
Lukianoff commented about higher education:
“If you’re in a knowledge producing environment where you can get in trouble for hypotheticals, for hypotheses, and for questioning received wisdom, nobody should trust you on the production of ideas. So I think that higher ed is in a much bigger crisis than it fully is even capable of understanding because it also crushes the dissent that will actually help them understand it.”
Lukianoff’s prior book noted three “great untruths”:
- What does not kill you makes you weaker,
- Always trust your feelings, and
- Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
These do not have any antecedents in ancient accepted wisdom and can cause psychological harm. The new book adds as a fourth great untruth, “No bad person has any good opinions.” Lukianoff explains, “But essentially the way we argue particularly on campus is I can point out that you’re a bad person and therefore all your opinions are now invalid.” So, people “cancel” others with whom they disagree so that they don’t have to make substantive arguments against their specific ideas.
The moderator, Prof. Randy Wayne, CALS, asked Lukianoff, “Does DEI require that there be a double standard when it comes to free speech at universities?” Lukianoff replied:
“DEI has a great name. I think diversity is incredibly important. I think equality is extremely important. (Equity is something that Russia was trying to do, and it didn’t work out so well.) Inclusivity, I believe in a big, big way. But that’s not what the ideology actually means and it’s by its very nature, it’s been weird watching some people trying to rectify what’s been going on on campus. Particularly with regards to anti-semitism; that maybe just include Jewish students in intersectionality somehow. The answer is it can’t. It’s always going to be a situation that actually requires some people being moral and some people being immoral, as groups not as individuals. I don’t think the DEI can actually be reformed. And the single most important thing for people to understand from an academic freedom and free speech perspective is that case after case we’ve seen on campus have been either facilitated by directly, encouraged by, or outright organized by DEI administrators at various schools, including my alma mater, Stanford Law School. So, it’s been weird watching people come to the defense of the academic freedom of universities who have DEI offices. And about how it’s important to respect that when it’s kind of like, so you’re making an argument based on academic freedom, for not shutting down your censorship department, essentially. And that it doesn’t make a lick of sense to me.”
Lukianoff later added:
“[T]he problem is not just DEI administrators though. The problem is the mass bureaucratization of higher education and people who believe that it’s their job to police what students say to each other, what their professors say, et cetera. And if you decide to go after DEI administrators, they’re just going to change what they’re called. And that’s what they did ten years ago and that’s what they’ll continue to do…. And I think the only solution is massively debureaucratizing a lot of universities. But there is very little appetite for this, particularly in the country club that is elite higher education.”
Regarding the Gaza conflict, Lukianoff said:
“I do think we’re at a little bit of a watershed though, because this is something that even the left, which completely dominates higher education, disagrees within itself. And I think that that’s creating an opportunity for people to go like what exactly has happened here, that we have this overly simplistic narrative about things in one of the most complicated parts of the world. And part of the answer there is that we’ve been teaching young people in institutions that are supposed to make them more sophisticated thinkers, overly simplistic narratives about good versus evil, when we could have been teaching them something much more profound. And I think people are pretty horrified at what they’re seeing, what passes for discourse today in higher ed.”
Lukianoff noted generational differences among faculty:
“[O]ne of the most horrifying things we found in our studies of DEI statements is that we asked professors, ‘do you think mandatory DEI statements are political litmus tests?’ And we also asked them separately if we thought they were a good idea and appropriate. What we didn’t expect was to get nearly 25% of professors saying, yes, there are political litmus tests and yes, they’re appropriate. We didn’t think those two would go together, let alone for about a quarter of professors. And that was wildly disproportionately the younger professor. So things are going to get worse, frankly.”
Audience Q&A
Students from SUNY Cortland came to discuss their efforts to get that school to recognize a Turning Point USA chapter.
One student asked about the ACLU defending in 1978 the American Nazi Party members who sought a parade permit to march in Skokie, IL. Lukianoff thought that was an important and effective defense of free speech.
One graduate student asked about the Cornell Graduate Student Union and perceived it as raising a free speech problem when it seems to favor one side over the other on the Gaza dispute.
An audience member asked about the Interim Expressive Activities Policy. FIRE has written Cornell letters criticizing the interim policy.
The lecture drew an audience of about 100 students and faculty. The talk was sponsored by the Cornell chapter of the Heterodox Academy, the SUNY Cortland chapter of the Heterodox Academy and the Program on Freedom and Free Societies. The video of the talk was posted.
