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NAS Posts FIRE President Greg Lukianoff’s Speech from January Conference

For those of you who missed Greg's speech at the National Association of Scholars (NAS) conference in January, a footnoted, hyperlinked transcript was posted today on the NAS website. In his speech, Greg was asked to address, among other things, whether he thought that the situation on college campuses had been improving. To this, he responded that since 2007, things have appeared to be getting worse, and identified a potential cause:

Why then do things seem to be getting worse? I have no way of proving this is why, but purportedly the number of administrators on campus finally exceeded the number of people involved in instruction in 2006. And that is where the problems are coming from: the administrators. That's one of the reasons why I try to go every year to be a very unpopular speaker at the Association for Student Judicial Affairs. People may disagree with me on this, but I do not believe that professors are as infatuated with "hate speech theory" as they were in the 1990s. Indeed, Nadine Strossen wrote me last week to ask why she's suddenly getting all of these questions about speech codes; she was wondering if there had been new scholarship or legal justifications written and my answer was "absolutely not." In fact, there is much scholarship that is critical of speech regulation on campus, and the courts are absolutely uniform against the presence of speech codes. It's the administrators that have taken up this issue as a moral imperative.

You can read Greg's entire speech here.

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