Free to be funny on campus.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Greg Lukianoff, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education - Soundbite - Interview

Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), an organization that opposes speech codes and other forms of censorship on college campuses. He's also an executive producer of Can We Take a Joke?, a feature-length documentary that premiered at the DOC NYC film festival last November. In March, Reason TV's Nick Gillespie talked with Lukianoff about what's driving "one of the worst years for cam pus free speech" the Stanford Law School graduate has ever witnessed--and what his group is doing about it.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Q: Let's talk first about the campus situation.

A: I have to say, this has been one of the worst years for campus free speech that I've seen in my entire career. FIRE was founded in '99, I started in 2001, and for the overwhelming majority of my career, what I've been fighting is administrative overreach. Then the other phase was when the feds started pushing the administrators to overreach, so it was this horrible cycle. But during that entire time, the single constituency on campus that seemed to have the most common sense, and understand free speech and due process the best, was always the students. And somewhere two or three years ago, that changed.

Q: Do you think it's because students have been brought up in a very protective [environment]?

A: To be completely frank, we really don't know, and I'd love to do a lot more research on it. But I think that freedom of speech is a really sophisticated concept. We're so used to it in America that we kind of forget how sophisticated it is. Meanwhile, if you have aK--12 environment or a parental environment where people are explaining that free speech is "just the argument the bully, the bigot, and the robber baron make," that's morally persuasive. And if nobody's ever explained to you otherwise then of course you're going to think that free speech is the mean...