Unlearning Liberty - Greg Lukianoff

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other freedom, but also because it teaches students the wrong lessons about living in a free society. Free speech is a far more fragile right than most people know. When bad examples and flat-out misinformation characterize the lessons that students get about free speech, due process, and the other essential elements of liberty, it can be expected that rights will erode in our larger society just as they have been eroding on campus. The values, habits, and practices that allow you to live and function in a free society are things that you must be taught. Despite our country’s veneration of the term “free speech,” the importance of free expression is neither obvious nor intuitive. It has been the exception in human history, not the rule.

      In order for free speech to thrive, students need to experience on a regular basis how open discussion and debate and even random bits of comedy can increase tolerance and understanding more effectively than any speech code, residence hall initiative, or ideological “training” ever could. Modern universities are producing college graduates who lack that experience of uninhibited debate and casual provocation. As a result, our society is effectively unlearning liberty. This could have grave long-term consequences for all of our rights and the very cohesion of our nation. If too few citizens understand or believe in free speech, it is only a matter of time before politicians, activists, lawyers, and judges begin to curtail and restrict it, while other citizens quietly go along. Perhaps no one has summarized what is at stake more clearly than FIRE’s cofounder Alan Charles Kors: “A nation that does not educate in liberty will not long preserve it and will not even know when it is lost.”

      In the process of offering a theory on how the world of higher education today is harming American discourse and increasing polarization, this book will reveal the many ways that today’s universities violate basic rights and betray the principles that undergird fundamental liberties. I will expose violations of due process, intrusions into the realm of private conscience, and programs that require investigating and “reforming” people’s deepest moral beliefs and convictions. What all of these violations have in common is that they arise from and reinforce an unscholarly kind of certainty. After all, if you already know that a student must be guilty, why do you need due process? Or if you’re certain you know the moral and factual truths about the issues at hand, why bother with debate and discussion? Students and campus administrators are losing sight of the important role that the skeptical, questioning mind, aware of its own failings, has played in every aspect of human progress. Those who are responsible for higher education need to be reminded that we want bright, ambitious, iconoclastic thinkers, not more foot soldiers for a seemingly endless culture war.

      Throughout this book, I’ll be linking what has been happening on campus to larger controversies involving a diverse cast of characters—Herman Cain, Bill Maher, Juan Williams, Dave Barry, Glenn Beck, Margaret Cho, Rush Limbaugh, Richard Dawkins, even Robert De Niro—and issues as varied as the “Ground Zero mosque” and the Penn State rape scandal. There is even a case in which Jon Stewart’s Daily Show saved the day for one student. You will also see how the problem with free speech on American campuses has international implications from the Middle East to India, as it did in the wake of Harvard’s decision to fire a famous Indian politician because of his public response to terrorist attacks on Mumbai.

      The time frame of the cases in this book spans my career over the last eleven years. For the definitive text on campus censorship in the 1980s and ’90s, I recommend The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses, with its numerous additional examples of violations of free speech, due process, and other rights on campus.24 The book was authored by FIRE’s cofounders, Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silverglate.

      Because FIRE plays such an important role in this book, you should know a little about it. Founded by a conservative-leaning libertarian professor at the University of Pennsylvania (Kors) and a liberal-leaning civil rights attorney in Boston (Silverglate), FIRE is a unique organization in which liberals, conservatives, libertarians, atheists, Christians, Jews, Muslims have successfully worked together for the common cause of defending rights on campus. I am a Democrat and an atheist, our senior vice president is a Republican and Christian, while our legal director, a Democrat and former Green Party activist, works harmoniously alongside our other top lawyers including a Jewish libertarian and a Muslim-raised liberal. I have worked at nonprofits almost all my life and have never even heard of, let alone worked at, a cause-based organization successfully run by people with such different personal politics. But we all agree on free speech and basic rights without hesitation, and we live the benefits of having different perspectives in the office every day. True, it can get a little heated in the office around election season, but we wouldn’t have it any other way.

      At FIRE, we see every day the tribulations of college students who get in trouble for assuming that higher education involves speaking candidly about serious topics, or that telling jokes is always permitted on campus. This book invites you to experience the confusing challenges that students face today. Each chapter opens by putting you in the shoes of a fictional modern student as you progress through high school to the last day of your first semester in college. All of the opening fact patterns are based on real-life stories and will help illustrate the bad lessons that students are learning about what it means to live in a free society—even before they set foot in a classroom.

      So let’s start our journey through the modern collegiate experience. Imagine you are a sophomore in high school …

       Learning All the Wrong Lessons in High School

      YOU ARE A FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD SOPHOMORE IN HIGH SCHOOL and it’s the night before you take your PSAT exam. While you know it will be the most important test you have taken in your life, your mind is on something very different. You work for the student newspaper, and earlier this week the editor-in-chief was told by the principal that the paper could not run an investigative article about the student body president. The article was carefully researched and did its best to be fair, but found that the president had failed to deliver on any of his campaign promises. The principal told your editor that the article was “hurtful” and didn’t provide any further justification for rejecting it. The newspaper staff couldn’t help but believe this rejection had something to do with the fact that the student body president was the son of the vice principal. In an attempt to circumvent the clamp-down, your editor tried to hand out an underground edition of the article, but he had been caught doing so and was now suspended. None of this seems right to you, so now you are sitting in front of your computer, an instant away from publishing the entire article on a blog that you and a few students run.

      You’ve spent the last few hours online and on the phone with classmates trying to figure out what you should do. Your closest friend warned you that you could get kicked out of school for posting the piece. She has heard about students being punished for what they posted on Facebook, what they printed in the student magazine, or even the T-shirts they wore to school. Soon you get an angry phone call from the vice president of the student government, who learned via Facebook that you’re planning on posting the article. He gives you a serious dressing-down, saying that publishing such an article would be “cyber bullying” and that you could be suspended for it. This sounds like self-serving nonsense to you, but then he says, “Do you seriously think you’ll get into a good college if you have a suspension for bullying on your record?”

      You have been dreaming about going to college almost as long as you knew what the word meant. You are a serious student, which can sometimes make you feel like an outcast in high school, and college holds the possibility of being your “island of misfit toys,” a place where you will fit in. But you know that the competition for a good college is brutal, and could you really afford to suffer the wrath of the school administration?

      You think about your grandparents, who went to college in the 1960s during the “free speech movement,” and about how different college must

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