My guest this week is Greg Lukianoff, a lawyer and the CEO and president of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Greg has been a fierce defender of free speech for decades now. He and his organization have taken on all manner of controversial and unpopular causes, including the defense of Amy Wax from Penn’s attempts to oust her from her faculty post and criticisms of Harvard’s commitment to free speech and expression. He’s the author and co-author of many books, the latest of which is War on Words: 10 Arguments against Free Speech—and Why They Fail, written with Nadine Strossen and available later this month.
In this conversation we address some broad, abstract questions about speech, like why Greg thinks speech cannot be equated to violence and who decides what counts as “misinformation” and “disinformation.” FIRE is most concerned with speech as it relates to education and the university, and we talk about how the Israel-Palestine conflict has rearranged campus politics. Greg finds himself in an interesting position, because while he’s criticized Harvard’s commitment to free speech, he’s also found himself defending the university against the Trump administration’s attempts to, as Greg sees it, nationalize the school. He walks me through Title IX’s repurposing as a tool to limits speech, argues for the social necessity of comedy, and we end on FIRE’s next frontier: artificial intelligence.
This post is free and available to the public. To receive early access to TGS episodes, an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.
0:00 The return of the “speech is violence” argument
6:05 Who’s the arbiter of “misinformation” and “disinformation”?
8:06 The University of Virginia topped FIRE’s college free speech rankings
14:08 The Victorianism of the Woke
22:10 The comedian as gadfly
24:40 Do we need to “protect” Jewish students from pro-Palestine speech?
31:23 Harvard Derangement Syndrome
37:13 FIRE’s defense of Amy Wax
39:59 Using Title IX to restrict speech
46:24 Complicating the left-right speech distinction
49:34 FIRE enters the AI debates
Recorded June 2, 2025
Links and Readings
Greg and Nadine Strossen’s forthcoming book, War on Words: 10 Arguments against Free Speech—and Why They Fail
Lisa Feldman Barrett’s 2017 NYT op-ed, “When Is Speech Violence?”
FIRE’s 2025 College Free Speech Rankings
FIRE’s Scholars Under Fire Database
Rajiv Sethi’s post, “Under Fire”
Glenn’s forthcoming book, Self-Censorship
Musa al-Gharbi’s book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite
Greg and Rikki Schlott’s book, Canceling the American Mind: How Cancel Culture Undermines Trust, Destroys Institutions, and Threatens Us
The IHRA definition of antisemitism
Steven Pinker’s NYT guest essay, “Harvard Derangement Syndrome”
Greg’s Atlantic essay, “Trump’s Attacks Threaten Much More Than Harvard”
Share this post