--- title: "FIRE It Up..." slug: "greg-lukianoff-fire-fire-it-up-asu-gsv-2026" author: "Greg Lukianoff, Olivia Gross" date: "2026-04-14 12:00:00" category: "Premium" topics: "ASU+GSV 2026, conference transcript" summary: "FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) president Greg Lukianoff speaks with Studium founder Olivia Gross about the crisis of free speech in education and its intersection with AI." banner: "" thumbnail: "" --- > **ASU+GSV 2026 Summit** | | Unknown ## Speakers - **Greg Lukianoff**, FIRE - **Olivia Gross** ## Key Takeaways - FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) president Greg Lukianoff speaks with Studium founder Olivia Gross about the crisis of free speech in education and its intersection with AI. - Lukianoff describes alarming survey data: 70% of college students believe shouting down speakers is acceptable, 50% support physically blocking speakers, and a third condone violence in response to speech in at least some circumstances. - He argues that the erosion of free speech culture originated in higher education as political supermajorities formed, and warns that American liberalism's defining feature -- pluralism and protection of minority opinion -- is receding as both political sides gravitate toward centralized power. - On AI, Lukianoff sees significant potential: he advocates using AI as a tool for "structured friction" and critical thinking (e.g., asking AI what assumptions underlie an answer), and describes FIRE's partnership with the Cosmos Institute to fund technologists building truth-seeking AI tools, while warning against age-gating social media through government control of internet anonymity. ## Notable Quotes > "You need to know what people really think to have any guess at all. You're not safer for knowing less about what people really think." > > — **Greg Lukianoff** > "If you have not asked AI what you're wrong about, in my opinion, you're using it wrong." > > — **Greg Lukianoff** > "We need to introduce what I'm going to be talking about in my next book: structured friction at every level of the educational process." > > — **Greg Lukianoff** > "Always think of the power that you want your best friend to have in the hands of your worst enemy or the least trustworthy person you know." > > — **Greg Lukianoff** > "A small minority of students was deciding for everybody else who they were allowed to hear. That is a great formula for dogma. It is not a great formula for education." > > — **Greg Lukianoff** ## Full Transcript So let's welcome Olivia. Hello everyone. It is such a pleasure to be with you all. My name is Olivia Gross. I'm the founder of Studium. Our mission is to teach students what it looks like and what it means to agreeably disagree, something that we've been doing for a long time. It's a privilege and a pleasure to be in conversation with you, Greg. When it comes to the work that you are doing at FIRE, I would love to just start out and start the conversation in thinking about, for those who aren't familiar, FIRE formerly was the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and is now the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. So I'd like to start by just talking a little bit about what changed and to give some sort of context for the audience around what the work you do is and why it is so important. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. How many people here know what FIRE is? Some of you, but most of you don't. OK, so FIRE was founded in 1999 by a right-leaning and a left-leaning civil libertarian named Harvey Silverglate, who's my mentor. And we've been defending freedom of speech, academic freedom on campus since 1999. I joined way back in 2001. And even in 2001, I was shocked at how easy it was to get in trouble for what you said on a college campus. But around 2020, things got much more intense in the country for debate and discussion. Actually, it really kind of accelerated with Trump. And we decided that we had to expand beyond just campus. So now we fight for free speech both on and off campus. Right now, I'm in court with Trump in his personal capacity, with Marco Rubio, over whether or not you can just kick people out for their opinion. You can, like in the case of Ramesa Ozturk, for example, at Tufts. And so we've grown to about a $35 million organization. I have about 140 employees. But the unfortunate thing, and you never want to hear a First Amendment lawyer say this, is that business is booming for First Amendment lawyers at the moment. And that is not a good sign. Wonderful. So I had the pleasure of reading your and Nadine Straussen's brilliant book, The War on Words, which really did an amazing job breaking down the 10 arguments against free speech and why they fail. We're obviously a biased duo when it comes to the importance for defending free expression. I'm really curious to hear from you why you think free speech has the branding issue that it tends to have, and why, for young people, there's this perception that it is warped. This is probably a rough thing to say in a group full of educators, but I do think that a lot of the, quote, unquote, branding issue with freedom of speech came out of K through PhD. When I was working at the ACLU back in 1999, I could see something happening that I called the slow motion train wreck on college campuses, in particular. I grew up, you know, we qualified for public assistance when I was a kid, and then I ended up at a place like Stanford Law School. And this was definitely a very weird experience for me. And it was the first time I really ran into kids who were pretty, you know, mediocre, a little ambivalent about freedom of speech. Working class liberals were very pro-freedom of speech. I thought that's what made a liberal a liberal. But it was only when I started meeting kind of like more upper class people who came from, you know, the 1% and tended to go to the fanciest schools that I started really running into this very anti-liberal kind of idea. And that's a very typical dynamic, that essentially once your politics become a super majority of an institution, you go from maybe, you want free speech when you're the minority, because free speech protects minority opinions. You don't need it to protect the majority. The popular vote projects the majority of power. And in higher ed, there was this intentional, clear shift that free speech started being problematized, partially because the people in charge of higher ed kind of thought, well, if I'm the one deciding, you know, what will get you punished and what won't, I can be trusted with that. And that's the temptation of power always. And it's been very frustrating to me watch this slow motion train wreck happen and not being able to stop it. And what I fear, the situation that we're in right now, is that my dad's Russian. My mother's British. I spent a lot of time over there as a kid. And I would always talk about how America was just kind of different from other countries in that, for the most part, other countries have a sort of ethno-nationalist centralized power right and a more socialist Marxist left that also wants centralized power. Both sides basically want government to have tremendous power over everybody. They just want it for different reasons. What made America so special was we all tended to be small l liberals. We believed in pluralism. We believed in freedom of speech. We believed in candor. We believed in this. We believed it so much that Nadine Strassen, our friend and hero, the former head of the ACLU, when I was a kid finding out that there were Jewish lawyers who were so principled, they were willing to defend the Nazis at Skokie, that was the most impressive thing I had ever heard in my life in a neighborhood full of kids who, like my father, fled totalitarianism. But now we're becoming just like everybody else, where both sides believe centralization of power is the future. And liberalism, the one thing that made this country so very different and very special, is receding. And I really think we need K through PhD to start to understand, again, how important and how rare liberalism is. Yeah. So if there weren't enough tensions just when talking about the free speech conversation, I want to throw another tension in the mix, which is we're here this year to talk about the power of fusion, the theme of this year's ASUGSV, what that means, what that looks like. One of the things when it comes to FIRE, the deep commitment to free expression that you're talking about. At the same time, there's a growing push from a lot of leaders, some of which are your former co-authors. Dear friends. And dear friends. And I think it's important to introduce concepts like age gating to protect young people. And so I'm really curious to hear from you about how you think about balancing civil liberties and these crucial values with the need to protect young people and students. It's a great question. I'm the co-author of a book called Coddling of the American Mind with Jonathan Haidt, who is best known for a book called The Anxious Generation that talks about how you should get the screen-based childhood is harmful. And he started on this path from working with me on Coddling of the American Mind. I do believe that for a subset, particularly of young women, phones have been a disaster, particularly in grade school. Everything nasty about grade school is hyper-increased if you have a phone to allow you to bully each other. At the same time, my biggest fear is expansion of governmental power. And right now, globally, governmental power is expanding in a way that genuinely scares me. So I believe, for example, get phones out of schools. Could not agree more if there's not a First Amendment or free speech issue with saying that we wouldn't let you have a VCR, a TV, a telegraph, we wouldn't let you have all of these machines that are represented in this tiny little box, just because it's distracting, like when we were going to school. So the idea that you put your phone away at the beginning of school, then get it back at the end, I'm all for it. I heartily endorse it. But people need to understand that there is no way to age-gate social media without making an internet that doesn't have anonymity. We have ways of doing it that make it more secure, but no perfect way to do it. And there are a lot of countries who don't even want to make it secure. They want to know who is saying what on social media, no holds barred, all the time. That should scare everyone. If you think, you have to remember this power. Always think of this power. To think like a civil libertarian, always think of the power that you want your best friend to have in the hands of your worst enemy or the least trustworthy person you know. So John Haidt, my dear friend, we're at odds about this. We still love each other very, very much. But at the same time, I'm very publicly fighting the idea that we should be passing laws to restrict, like it currently exists in Australia, where kids 16 and under can't use social media at all. But it's an unprecedented level of control over the internet in Australia that's now required for that. And in thinking through sort of the tension between civil liberties and the need to protect young people, I'm curious, being at ASUGSV, how you think about the responsibility that K to 12 and high school students have to play a role in that. higher ed have in particular in navigating that tension? Yeah, I mean, I have seen a lot. My kids go to public school. I love a lot of public school teachers. I do think that a lot of the problems I'm seeing have come out of education schools. And I think that a lot of that needs to be the way we do. Education schools and higher ed need to be rethought. I think what we need to be focusing on in K through 12 is cultivating curiosity, intellectual humility, resilience, and maturity. All pretty old-fashioned ideas, really. But my 8- and 10-year-old, when they come back and report kind of what they're learning, it looks a lot more like what I warned about in Coddling of the American Mind, that we're teaching them something a lot more like, hey, why don't you think like anxious and depressed people, where you're in constant danger, you're not strong enough to live in the world on your own, you're less resilient than you actually are. All these terrible messages that John Haidt and I predicted back in 2014 will make kids more anxious and depressed, while at the same time being a disaster for freedom of speech and academic freedom in higher ed. All those predictions came true. And what I think we need to really think about is we need to introduce what I'm going to be talking about in my next book, structured friction at every level of the educational process. We need to teach people how little they know, how they should be intellectually open, how they need to take seriously the possibility they might be wrong, and it's OK if people disagree with you. That is the heart of pluralism. It's very well summed up in some old sayings. We don't say as much anymore, but to each their own. Everyone's entitled to their opinion. Walk a mile in a man's shoes before judging him. Don't judge a book by its cover. It's a free country. These are all things we used to say all the time that reflected a free speech culture that I fear we've gotten away from. But K through 12 can do so much to change that if it wanted to. I think this notion of creating spaces of friction for young people and that not just being something to tolerate, but maybe even celebrate and reward. Well, to demand. I would go further. And this is one of the ways that AI can help, is if you have not asked AI what you're wrong about, in my opinion, you're using it wrong. And when I think about a model that can undermine what I would call intellectual certainty culture, this kind of simplistic, moralistic kind of thing that has led to people to the unprecedented levels of shout downs on college campuses, just to back up on something that you guys can actually make a difference tomorrow in. We do a massive survey. We do the largest survey of student opinion ever conducted. And we ask students questions like, is it acceptable to shout down a speaker so that the speech can no longer go on? Is it acceptable to physically block people from getting to a talk? And is it OK to use violence in response to a speaker? About 70% of students nationally thought that shout downs were pretty much OK, at least in some circumstances. About 50% of one said that they could block speakers. And about a third said that, at least in rare cases, you can respond to speech through violence. And I talk to people in higher ed in K through PhD, and they talk to me like there's nothing they can do about this. You all have the power to send all the way down the line the message that those are not the kind of students we want. That is not a scholarly mindset to think that because I don't want to hear a speaker, none of you may hear them. So I think if the message goes down through K through 12, you can actually have a fighting chance of having a fundamentally different and better environment for actual dissent in higher ed. And if it keeps on going the way it's been, I mean, we saw the two worst years for shout downs in academic history in 2023 and 2024. This basically meant that a small minority of students was deciding for everybody else who they were allowed to hear. That is a great formula for dogma. It is not a great formula for education. So on the note of formulas for dogma, I think one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about as it relates to AI is if we have a generation of young person that's used to talking to AI, we're actually seeing a different sense of dogma around the fact that AI is reconciling with all of these different viewpoints for the young people that are using it. And so on that same note, do you have any fear around whether the next generation will encounter less disagreement in how we think through the use of AI? It doesn't have to. And I think that we can better teach people how to use AI. And I'm very proud of FIRE. And one of the things that makes us different than other civil liberties organizations is we think about it from a philosophical standpoint, not just the political or legal standpoint. So our research department has sociologists, psychologists, all the philosophers, people really thinking through epistemology, how we know things and why. So one of the things we've been working on with the Cosmos Institute, we've been giving spot grants to technologists all across the country to try to figure out ways to help improve AI for truth seeking and for critical thinking. So like for an example of one of the things one of our people came up with, this very simple interface called a priori, where you do a search on any of the major AIs, you get an answer back, and then you get a little thing next to it that says, this answer made the following assumptions. And you can uncheck any of these to see what the answer would look like if it didn't make those assumptions. You can turn AI into an incredible tool for critical thinking. You can turn it into the structured friction you need in the classroom to point out why the professor might not know everything or why the student might be wrong, or just to teach them to take seriously again the possibility that they're wrong, because let's face it, all of us are wrong about things all the time. So I see AI as potentially a boon if we use it right, and we have kind of no excuse for using it right, because all you need to use it right to some degree is just ask it, did I get this wrong? What were the assumptions that went into it? What would someone who disagreed with me say? In a way that sometimes you ask that of some teachers and they're not necessarily gonna have the best answer. So in thinking through sort of the free speech framework, often assuming a well-informed, discerning individual, that's a central component of it. How do you reconcile sort of protecting free expression with making sure students in the way that you're describing in the use of AI are developing independent judgment? Well, I do wanna question this though. I actually don't believe that free speech was based on people being highly informed and super responsible about what they said. That's not the way we think about human rights. And the founders believed in a concept called natural rights, which is where our idea of human rights comes from. It's this idea that simply we assume that people have basic rights. And that means, and there's a great old quote about, it's not a right if you can't abuse it, which I always liked. But here's my overall thinking on speech that makes my philosophy also a little bit different. We're supposed to have a scholarly mindset as people who are interested in higher ed. And what does that mean? That means we should be curious about what people really think always, because you do not understand the world in which you live unless you have a clear picture of what the person sitting next to you thinks. And I will tell you this much, particularly at a conference like this and particularly in higher education, people aren't saying what they really think. Every time you do a poll, like when you have 70% of students, this is from a North Dakota State University study, saying that they would report their professors for offensive speech. And then when you ask them what the offensive speech is, it's actual political opinions on things. Some of which, by the way, have good factual backing. That is a chilled environment. The fact that a lot of people in this room have probably gotten used to it is no excuse to put up with it anymore. You need candor. So one of the highest values of freedom of speech is just to know the world as it really is. You need to know what people really think to have any guess at all. And when students talk about, well, what if people have horrible beliefs? Do I really wanna know that? And I just have to repeat to them, you're not safer for knowing less about what people really think. And for the surveys that you were describing that are being done in higher ed, a lot of the work that we do at Studium has to do with this idea of students needing, able to learn how to agreeably disagree earlier, right? Like college is too late is a lot of the premise of the work that we do. I'm curious if you agree with that idea and where you see it. I mean, that I love. Like if I could wave a magic wand, and I think it would be good for the country, there are a couple different programs like I would do tomorrow if I had magical powers. One of them is every sophomore in the country has to do a formal debate in which they take the opposite side from what they actually believe. And here's the amazing thing about when we had to do this in law school is you see how plastic your own mind is. Is you go in dead set to go into moot court and I'm like, I'm totally right. It's the moral position. I hope I get this side of the debate. And then you get assigned to the other side of the debate. And at first you feel awful. I can't argue. you that side, but then you start studying it, and then by the time you're arguing in front of class, you're completely convinced you're right. That is something that makes it much harder to do what I think a lot of Americans are doing today, which is believing that our opponents are either stupid or evil, but probably both. It is that kind of intellectual humility that you should be cultivating early, and I think that having debates early is a great idea. I'm all for it. I'd love to watch people become better arguers, and also I think one thing that I wish that is well beyond, and really would require magical powers, I just kind of wish we could have more face-to-face meeting of people across class differences in the United States from different regions. There's lots of programs like this, and this is one of the reasons why, by the way. I have found, and in our research we have found, a lot of times bigger state schools have fewer free speech problems. Not exclusively. Indiana University ended up right at the bottom of our list last year, and boy did they earn it. But for the most part, when you do have this interaction with people from different classes and different regions, it does really tend to help prevent the kind of weird environment that I experienced at Stanford, for example. Lovely people, brilliant people to be clear, but a very upper-class group-thinky place. So I think higher ed can do a better job of getting people not to debate each other, but just to listen to each other. And that magic wand would, of course, include high school law review. Well, thanks so much, Greg, wonderful conversation, and thank you all. Thanks for having me. --- *This transcript was put together by our friend [Philippos Savvides](https://scaleu.org) from Arizona State University. The original transcript and additional summit resources are available on [GitHub](https://github.com/savvides/asu-gsv-2026-summit-intelligence). Licensed under [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).*