Greg Lukianoff
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Greg Lukianoff is the President of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). He previously served as FIRE's Director of Legal and Public Advocacy until he was appointed President in 2006.[1] A graduate of American University and Stanford Law School[2], he has described himself as a "pro choice liberal."[3]. He appeared in the film Brainwashing 101 and on numerous television segments. He has published over two dozen articles about free speech and testified before the United States Congress on the state of free speech on college campuses.[4] He resides in the city of Philadelphia.
[edit] Quotes
"The campus free speech debates of the last two decades may give one the false impression that those debates have primarily revolved around issues like politeness, sensitivity, or hurt feelings. But if one looks at the great free speech debates of American history, one discovers that often the concerns of the censors were quite real and serious: they feared riots, bloodshed, threats to global or national security, and even civil war. Even under these fearsome circumstances, American society has time and time again chosen liberty and sunlight over repression. Free speech has not been an easy path, but it is one worth following. Living with liberty often requires courage, but when this most sacred of American principles is threatened, we always seem to find the courage to defend it."[5]
"Garneau is an example of what bullies can do when they are given too much power. He is an example of a special kind of madness that grips our universities where students can have their academic careers and college experience ruined for a single moment of misconstrued rudeness. He is an example of how our increasingly polarized society too often sees the people it disagrees with as not fully human but rather caricatures of societal evil."[6]
"As aggressive as FIRE may be in defending free speech, at the core of the philosophy of free speech is a very beautiful idea: humility. None of us is omniscient and we must at all times recognize that wisdom can arise from unexpected…Professors who remember that their students present a constant opportunity for them to learn and are not merely inductees to be reformed to a 'correct' way of thinking better represent the true spirit of both liberty and education."[7]
"I am frankly getting tired of hearing how the republication of these cartoons is somehow unethical, irresponsible, unnecessary, or foolish. These cartoons are almost certainly the most relevant and newsworthy cartoons in history."[8]
"After nearly five years of dealing with all the terrible and often absurd abuses of free speech in higher education, I am a hard person to shock, but hats off to professor Sally Jacobsen of Northern Kentucky University (NKU) for showing me the most perverted inversion of the concept of free speech I have seen in a long time." [9]
