In a Polarized Climate, Free-Speech Warriors Seize the Spotlight

Greg Lukianoff is a relentless campaigner who has traveled to dozens of campuses in the past 16 years to decry threats he sees to free speech. More often than not, he’s also tuned into Twitter. But on Christmas Eve, the president and chief executive of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education was off the grid.

Meanwhile, George Ciccariello-Maher, an associate professor of politics and global studies at Drexel University, was sending a tweet. At 7:48 p.m. on December 24, Mr. Ciccariello-Maher wrote, “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide.”

Even on a holiday, it didn’t take long for the professor’s provocative words — which he intended as satire — to awaken the social-media outrage machine. Conservative news outlets pounced. As the controversy boiled, Drexel faced calls to fire Mr. Ciccariello-Maher. Meanwhile, the professor’s supporters called on Mr. Lukianoff’s organization, known as FIRE, to come to his aid.

“Where are you on this Drexel shit Greg,” one Twitter user wrote on December 26.

Mr. Lukianoff, who was in New York with his family and trying to keep up with a rambunctious 1-year-old son, sighed.

“Can you give us a couple days?” he recalled thinking.

Throughout its 18-year history, FIRE has prided itself on its ability to quickly come to the defense of students and professors ensnared in free-speech and academic-freedom disputes.

That fight looks a lot different than it used to. “We’re at a stage where so many people are interested in this topic,” Mr. Lukianoff says, “and the information moves so quickly.” First Amendment controversies play out in minutes, not days. Now FIRE’s staff members say even they can’t always gather facts and research fast enough.

Mr. Ciccariello-Maher wasn’t fired or disciplined, but he faced a public rebuke from Drexel officials for his choice of words. His case was one of several that recently propelled campus free-speech issues to the forefront of the national consciousness.

Over the years, FIRE has drawn criticism from some college administrators for, in their view, blowing the scope of free-speech threats out of proportion. The organization tends to cherry-pick a handful of extreme examples, these critics say, and use them to make sweeping statements about the state of expression at all colleges. In the grand scheme of higher education, they say, the number of campus speakers disinvited in a given year is minuscule.

At the same time, though, new flashpoints are appearing on FIRE’s radar with increasing frequency: professors who make provocative statements, students who protest speakers, colleges that, in FIRE’s opinion, overreact to such situations by shutting down constitutionally protected speech. Last year FIRE received about 900 requests from students, professors, and others to intervene when they felt their rights had been violated, and Mr. Lukianoff says he expects more in 2017.

Those controversies have come to life in a campus climate that has grown ever more polarized since President Trump’s election. His victory has also emboldened people with extreme right-wing, racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic views, and on occasion, they have spoken on college campuses.

When anarchist-driven violence marred student protests of Milo Yiannopoulos’s scheduled appearance at the University of California at Berkeley, and when protesters at Middlebury College shouted down the controversial political scientist Charles Murray, whose work has often been criticized as racist, FIRE faced a barrage of questions: Where do you stand on this? Why is this happening? How can you support the free-speech rights of bigoted speakers like Mr. Yiannopoulos?

FIRE has also faced questions about Mr. Trump. The president himself vowed during the presidential campaign to “end the political correctness and foster free and respectful debate,” and he threatened to cut Berkeley’s federal funding if the campus “does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view.”

Asked about Mr. Trump’s apparent interest in issues that are central to FIRE’s mission, Mr. Lukianoff pauses, choosing his words carefully. Mr. Trump is sending “dramatically mixed signals” to FIRE, he says finally. He found the president’s threat against Berkeley — which did not acknowledge that the administration had in fact gone to great lengths to allow Mr. Yiannopoulos to speak — to be reprehensible.

For some, speech fights like those at Berkeley and Middlebury — not to mention academe’s recurring debates over trigger warnings, microaggressions, and safe spaces — reinforce the argument that FIRE has been promoting for nearly two decades: Free expression on campuses is under attack. That environment has opened the door for the organization to play a central role in shaping public discourse and standing up for free expression.

Yet FIRE has also found itself in the cross hairs of increasingly fraught campus free-speech disputes.

On the one hand, when people like Mr. Yiannopoulos come to campus, some critics question whether they are creating the kinds of environments where speech and debate can flourish. But others say that, with campus tensions running high, it’s more important than ever for FIRE to defend free speech for all, and encourage people to listen to one another.

When FIRE was founded, in 1999, Alan Charles Kors, a historian and a conservative, and Harvey A. Silverglate, a lawyer and a liberal, conceived of an organization that could “defend and sustain individual rights at America’s increasingly repressive and partisan colleges and universities.” The slogan: “Because your liberty is a precious thing.”

The group emerged as an ally to anti-abortion and Christian students who claimed that colleges wouldn’t recognize their organizations or allow them to bring in certain speakers. It also jumped into academic-freedom debates, challenging the American Association of University Professors, which for decades had owned the task of defending controversial faculty members.

The AAUP’s investigations into individual professors’ cases could take months. The more-agile FIRE wrote letters to institutions and publicized them in the news media within days — and seemed to get results. One professor had this to say in 2004 about FIRE and the AAUP: “One is a SWAT team, and the other is like the CIA.”

When Mr. Lukianoff joined FIRE, in 2001, he became the small shop’s fifth employee. Now it boasts 50 staff members and a dozen interns who join each summer, as well as revenue of more than $6 million.

Its funding is primarily made up of grants and donations, some of which come from nonprofit groups like the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which have generously supported conservative causes. Some observers have questioned how that money influences FIRE’s work; Mr. Lukianoff says it doesn’t come with any strings attached.

FIRE has moved its Philadelphia headquarters four times since it was founded because the staff keeps growing. Its current home is a modern 12th-floor space with First Amendment decor, overlooking Independence Hall.

At one end of the office are boxes of FIRE swag and T-shirts strewn across a few tables, items the organization typically distributes free to students. Daniel Burnett, the communications manager, offers this reporter a pair of FIRE sunglasses, which she politely declines.

Much of the group’s work force is young; Mr. Lukianoff is 42. It’s also politically diverse. While 26-year-old Molly Nocheck, director of campus outreach, was a student at Ohio University, she was heavily involved in Students Defending Students, a campus organization that trains a network of students to defend their peers in campus disciplinary hearings. A “Pennsylvania for Hillary” sticker is posted prominently above her desk.

Will Creeley, FIRE’s senior vice president for legal and public advocacy, was a student activist, founding a campus chapter of the Green Party and campaigning for Ralph Nader in the 2000 election. Since then, the 36-year-old has been a Democrat. Robert Shibley, executive director of FIRE, is Lebanese and identifies as a conservative and evangelical Christian. Mr. Lukianoff, a first-generation American whose father was a refugee from Yugoslavia, is a lifelong Democrat and an atheist.

The chief executive — a sharp, thoughtful, happy warrior of sorts — met this reporter in Washington at FIRE’s satellite office, where he’s based.

Mr. Lukianoff says his group’s work is especially important now, given the shifts he sees taking place in the battle lines of campus-free-speech fights.

“For my entire career, the best constituency on campus had been students” in terms of understanding the importance of free speech, he says. FIRE’s focus had long been on targeting administrative censorship of those students. Four years ago, he says, he noticed a change.

In 2013, Ray Kelly, who spent 14 years as police commissioner of the City of New York, was scheduled to speak at Brown University. Students tried, and failed, to get him disinvited, saying his support for the city’s widely criticized stop-and-frisk policy made his presence an insult to minority students. When Mr. Kelly did show up, students shouted him down, and the speech was canceled after half an hour.

“It’s not like that’s unprecedented on campuses,” Mr. Lukianoff says. “But in this case, it was the pride with which the students continued to take the shutting down of Ray Kelly’s speech that was different to us.”

In 2015, Mr. Lukianoff and the New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt examined those dynamics in a widely discussed cover story in The Atlantic, titled “The Coddling of the American Mind.” The piece argued that as students increasingly demand protection from microaggressions and ideas they don’t like, they are threatening free academic inquiry and harming their own mental health.

As protests against racism and demands for safe spaces swelled at the University of Missouri, Yale University, and dozens of other campuses in the fall, the story proved popular. It raised FIRE’s profile as a leading voice against a climate on campuses where, as Mr. Lukianoff and Mr. Haidt wrote, “everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse.” (The timing of its publication with the protests was a coincidence, Mr. Lukianoff says; he’d been thinking about writing such a piece for years.)

FIRE staff members say that many student activists that fall were rightly using their free speech to call attention to what they saw as racial injustice at their institutions, and that conversations about race and diversity that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise took place on many campuses.

What distressed Mr. Lukianoff was the significant number of students who were demanding, for instance, that publications be punished for running columns that took contentious stances, as was the case at Wesleyan University, or that people be fired for taking a stand on something, as was the case at Yale.

In the fall of 2015, Nicholas Christakis, a professor of social and natural science at Yale and leader of a residential college, was confronted by a group of mostly black students in a campus courtyard. At the time a heated debate was taking place over an email about Halloween costumes sent by his wife, Erika Christakis, who wrote, “Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious … a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?” A group of student activists was demanding that the Christakises be removed from their residential-college positions.

During the encounter, one student in particular raised her voice for several minutes, accusing Mr. Christakis of not “creating a home” for students of color within the college and demanding to know, using an expletive, who had hired him.

Mr. Lukianoff — who happened to be at Yale because he was speaking at a conference there the next day — took videos of the confrontation, as did several other observers, and published them on FIRE’s YouTube account. He said he wanted to make sure there was evidence that Mr. Christakis had acted calmly. (Mr. Christakis kept his faculty position, but he and his wife eventually resigned from the residential college. She no longer teaches at Yale.)

Conservative publications like The Daily Caller and the Washington Examiner seized on the confrontation, dubbing the student “shrieking girl” and linking to FIRE’s video, which eventually had more than 1.6 million views.

That fueled a perception among some student activists, professors, and others that FIRE had purposely tried to make the video go viral and unfairly spun the standoff so it would fit neatly into the group’s arguments about coddled students who demand protection from offense. One Yale professor told The New York Times that FIRE’s framing the incident as a free-speech issue was “a complete misconstruction of what happened.”

Mr. Lukianoff says he was critical only of the Yale students’ demand for the Christakises to be fired, not of their activism. But it’s situations like the Yale protests that lead some people to question who FIRE is really defending.

When Michael Roth, Wesleyan’s president, was dealing with a tense scuffle in 2015 over funding for the campus newspaper, The Wesleyan Argus, he recalls FIRE’s attacks on some Wesleyan students for not respecting the newspaper’s editorial independence. The Argus had published a student column that was critical of the Black Lives Matter movement, which led students of color on the campus to demand that the newspaper lose its funding because it wasn’t creating a “safe space” for their voices.

FIRE’s reaction, Mr. Roth says, was “a knee-jerk absolutist response that ignored the free-speech rights of the protesters.” And in the end, he says, his administration strongly supported the Argus’s right to publish contentious viewpoints. “FIRE, in order to perhaps raise its own profile among the donor class that supports anything that’s anti-political-correctness, was making hay with a situation that, in the end, affirmed the value of the free press,” he says.

Gregory P. Magarian, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, doesn’t believe that FIRE limits its attention to right-leaning causes. But he has noticed a pattern: Its work tends to draw the attention of conservative news sites that try to capitalize on perceived liberal biases.

“It seems that a lot of what they’re doing is feeding or having a symbiotic relationship with the sort of conservative outrage machine,” he says.

Concerns about who FIRE really defends can give some students and professors pause about turning to the group for help. Recently, Mr. Creeley says, FIRE offered to defend a student who had been punished for his activism regarding Palestine. “The student didn’t want anything to do with us,” Mr. Creeley says. “He said, I’m not going to work with you, because you’re conservative.”

But Alice Dreger, formerly a clinical professor of medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University, says that portrayal doesn’t fit her experience. Ms. Dreger, a self-described liberal, resigned in 2015 because, she said, Northwestern officials had interfered with an article she guest-edited in a campus journal about a nurse who helped the author regain his sexual function after he was paralyzed. FIRE had written a letter to Northwestern asking it to “abandon any future plans to dictate or censor” the journal’s content.

She admits that, when FIRE asked her to speak at its annual student conference last year, “I was expecting to find nothing but pasty-faced young white men,” many of whom “wanted to bash feminism.” Instead, she says, “there were an astonishing number of people of color in that room.”

Ms. Dreger knows that some of FIRE’s donors are prominent conservative foundations. “There’s no question that they’re a well-funded organization,” she says, noting that FIRE had paid her well to talk at its conference. But she’s also a FIRE donor, and she knows other leftist academics who are, too.

Those who accuse FIRE of partisan bias haven’t done their research, Mr. Lukianoff says: “If you’re not going to bother to actually read our material, that’s not on me.”

In response to criticism, FIRE staff members deliver a practiced line that they are nonpartisan and uphold everyone’s right to free speech and due process. Mr. Lukianoff can rattle off a half-dozen recent FIRE cases that don’t involve conservative causes. It’s clear that he and his staff are well versed in defending their organization against attacks — and somewhat frustrated that they have to do it so often.

FIRE’s stances, however, have often positioned the group on one side of debates that have become politicized — for instance, its attacks on the Obama administration’s guidance to colleges on how Title IX, the gender-equity law, applies to sexual misconduct.

Bob Casey Jr., a Democratic U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, questioned then-nominee Betsy DeVos during her January confirmation hearing about how she would deal with campus sexual violence as education secretary. He cited as a concern her foundation’s $25,000 in donations to FIRE. The senator’s spokesman later wrote on Twitter that “we’ll gladly take on the far right groups determined to roll back the progress we’ve made on campus sexual assault.”

FIRE also defends the right of sexual-assault victims to publicly criticize institutional policies, Mr. Lukianoff notes. The group did just that in 2013, he says, in the case of a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

One result of having a campus culture war, Mr. Lukianoff says, is that people tend to pay attention only to developments that fit their preconceived narratives about colleges, and to sort people and organizations into ideological boxes.

He points to a case at Northern Michigan University from last year, when a student who sought counseling after experiencing sexual assault was told not to discuss thoughts of self-harm with other students, or risk facing disciplinary action. FIRE sent the university a letter condemning the policy, but the case wasn’t widely covered in the national news media, he says. “Whose culture-war narrative does that fit? Nobody’s.”

FIRE’s stature has been bolstered by the increased attention to campus culture, but the group’s staff members say they work independently of whatever is going on or being said around them. The only thing FIRE can control, Mr. Creeley says, is how its staff responds to cases.

“It’s been going on 11 years doing this work,” he says. He slowly lets out a breath. “I can’t control the reaction of third-party actors. We don’t send it to the College Fix like, Hey, check this one out. They’re going to find it regardless.”

“It’s been a long process of sort of coming to terms with being stuck in the middle of the culture war,” Mr. Lukianoff adds.

He recalls the first cases he helped handle at FIRE, many of which involved students and professors being censored for talking about 9/11. The country was on edge, and FIRE received a lot of hate mail. “I never let it change what FIRE did,” Mr. Lukianoff says, “but it weighs on you after a while. It can become kind of exhausting.”

FIRE has also taken a lot of heat for supporting the right of Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at colleges. The stance reflects the group’s emphasis on defending all constitutionally protected expression, even when that speech is racist, sexist, or bigoted.

“Prohibitions on hateful speech do nothing to stop hate,” Mr. Lukianoff wrote in his 2012 book, Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate. He also emphasizes that the First Amendment’s most crucial purpose is protecting minority viewpoints: “the weak, the unpopular, the oddballs, the misfits, and the underdogs.”

“If the only price that we have to pay for this freedom is that we sometimes hear words that we find offensive,” he says, “it is well worth it.”

But that broad approach is one that some people say doesn’t always make sense in the present climate, particularly now that white nationalists and other extremists who add questionable value to academic debates are doing a lot more talking.

Certain kinds of expression do qualify as assault and harassment, says Mr. Roth, the Wesleyan president. His sense is that Mr. Lukianoff believes “the only way to defend free speech is to defend a free market of ideas.” In some cases, Mr. Roth says, “universities shouldn’t legitimate points of view that are abusive to members of the university community and other members of society.”

Mr. Ciccariello-Maher, the Drexel professor, doesn’t think colleges should give a platform to people like Mr. Yiannopoulos. Students should engage in debate with people who don’t agree with them, the professor says, but they should be able to feel safe when doing so — and they shouldn’t be subjected to questions about their very existence on campus.

Also, when it comes to student activists, FIRE often rails against the so-called heckler’s veto, in which audience members shout down a speaker, Mr. Ciccariello-Maher says. “But the reality is, it’s very hard to protect speech and just say ‘it shouldn’t be too loud’ or ‘it shouldn’t be too deafening.’ "

Jon B. Gould, a professor of public affairs and law at American University, wants to see FIRE defend more speakers and students who are Muslim, black, and the like — people who won’t necessarily feel welcome and safe on all campuses and in the current political climate. “Up until now, they have seemed to focus most of their attention on what they claim to be progressive restrictions against conservative speakers,” he says. “I think that’s more than just a coincidence.”

Mr. Gould has cast doubt on the rigor of FIRE’s methods for rating colleges based on their “speech codes,” and he questions what its agenda might be. But he admits that the organization is taking on an unenviable job at a challenging time. “They are in a tough spot right now where a lot of who they’re having to defend are the most vile speakers,” he says. “There’s a part of me that actually feels bad for them.”

Even those who find fault with FIRE’s positions at times say the explosive tensions characterizing the recent protests at Berkeley, Middlebury, and elsewhere make the presence of a civil-liberties organization especially valuable.

“It’s incredibly important to have an institution like FIRE in the mix of the free-speech conversation,” Mr. Roth says. He says that he’s less critical of the organization now than he was last year, and that he cares about what FIRE thinks on questions of free speech and academic freedom.

Most of the time, he says, he and other college leaders “know what to do” when a speech controversy arises. In some cases, however, FIRE’s voice is welcome — as it was when Middlebury students shouted down Charles Murray. “They have a principled stand that’s worth taking seriously,” Mr. Roth says.

For nearly two decades, FIRE has been a gadfly in higher education, leveraging public attention to bring about change. Now some scholars see another potential niche for FIRE to fill: creating spaces for the kinds of difficult debates the organization holds up as essential on college campuses.

There is a need for “new creativity” to figure out how to talk across polarization, says Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of educational history at the University of Pennsylvania. In this era, “we’ve added to our list of people and ideas that need protection,” he says, noting that he’s had students “come out” in his office as supporters of Mr. Trump.

If people are actually muzzling their own speech because they’re afraid of conflict, he says, it’s essential “to create venues and mechanisms and systems where we can all use our speech to promote understanding, rather than just bitterness and misunderstanding.” That’s incumbent on everyone, not just FIRE, he says — but FIRE can certainly help make that happen.

The group has experimented with such a role, hosting a pilot program of debates on campuses last academic year about issues like college athletes’ pay and the Second Amendment. Mr. Lukianoff says FIRE will very likely do that again in the future and plans to release a debate guide this spring so that students can organize their own.

In 1999, Mr. Kors, one of FIRE’s founders, said he hoped the organization would eventually be able to “extinguish itself” — the idea being that, if FIRE had its intended influence, it would no longer be needed. But as controversies around campus free speech burn ever brighter, it seems that FIRE will do the same.

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.