Free Speech Under Fire: Greg Lukianoff Discusses the Battle for Free Expression on College Campuses

Greg Lukianoff: Hi Professor Karlan.

Pam Karlan: Oh, please call me Pam. Even the students call me Pam (laughter).

Greg Lukianoff: It’s hard for me.

Pam Karlan: I know but I’m … I have faith in you. I have tremendous faith in you. Thanks for coming back.  It’s been a couple of years since we’ve had you on.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah, it’s been a couple of eventful years to say the least.

Pam Karlan: This is Stanford Legal, where we look at the cases, questions, conflicts, and legal stories that affect us all every day. I’m Pam Karlan. Please subscribe or follow this feed on your favorite podcast app. That way you’ll have access to all our new episodes as soon as they’re available.

Right now, it’s amazing what is happening across the entire spectrum of law. If you’re at a university, one of the things you think about a lot is: how is the Trump administration affecting what universities do? And our guest today, Greg Lukianoff, is a journalist, an author, and the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known colloquially as FIRE.

He’s the author of a whole bunch of books on free speech, most recently, The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All―But There Is a Solution. And before that, The Coddling of the American Mind. Today we’re going to focus on a recent essay he wrote called “Trump’s Attacks Threaten Much More than Harvard” because Harvard is the place that I think has probably gotten the most attention—maybe Harvard and Columbia—of the schools that the president has been going after.

And I wanted to start, I think, with something that sort of surprised me that was in the essay. Then I went to your website to look a bit more, but that Harvard had finished dead last for years in a kind of ranking that FIRE does of how ideologically open and how much free speech and stuff is going on campus. Can you tell us a little bit about that backdrop?

Greg Lukianoff: Sure. Yeah. Ever since … I’ve been at FIRE for now for 24 years. I graduated from Stanford Law School, I was recommended by Kathleen Sullivan, the greatest compliment of my entire life, and I started as legal director here way back then, and then eventually I became president. But from the very beginning, people were asking me to do a ranking of what schools are best and works for free speech. I was always like, I need tremendous … I need much more data than we currently have. Like we can evaluate schools on their policies depending on like how much they’re in line with First Amendment norms. That we could do. That was a herculean effort, but we could do that. But it was only around 2019 that we started getting … we started a partnership with a group called College Pulse, which actually creates representative panels for various universities that reflect the makeup of that school and that are statistically significant.

So, we could actually start polling students about what the environment is like on campus. That was the original part of our ranking, but then we added the largest database of attempts to get professors fired for their speech, to get students punished for their speech, deplatforming, which is when you get a speaker canceled or shout down a speaker—two different ways to do it. And of course, already the biggest collection of speech codes ever put together. We put this all together in a big old algorithm, actually working with a Harvard-trained statistician. And for two years in a row, Harvard finished dead last for a combination of … the polling questions weren’t great for them, but also a number of incidents that they handled poorly involving academic freedom and free speech. Also, a number of deplatforming cases.

I think Stanford finished like in the 120s, so not like … and we have we’re only able to survey about 250 schools because it’s very expensive. So Stanford does not do great, but it doesn’t do really badly. And Harvard’s finished dead last two years in a row.

And we do hear occasionally … it’s “oh, that’s just your judgment.” I’m like … we created the algorithm, we don’t …  but we then we step away … and we’ll see where Harvard ends up this past year. But it never did well and the more accurate … I feel like the more data we were able to add to it, frankly, the worst Harvard looked over the years

Pam Karlan: And was it both that it was not good on the general idea and that it skewed one way or the other? You have a little bit of this in the Atlantic piece, that part of it was a skew towards the left.

Greg Lukianoff: Oh, that doesn’t count against you in the rankings, but it definitely is the case at Harvard. A lot of academia, I think … almost … elite academia does skew the left, which I think  … As a constitutional lawyer, I’ve become way more interested in social science over the years and there is even research on this. That if basically they think a expert opinion is arising from an environment that doesn’t have that is politically homogenous, either one direction or the other, they don’t trust it as much. So I do think that’s not helpful and I don’t think … I sometimes think that academia underestimates how that can actually undermine public trust.

Pam Karlan: Yeah, and that seems to be I think one of the things … if you look at what the Trump administration has been doing, that really is exploiting that sense, right?

Greg Lukianoff: Yes. And this is interesting. So being a group that has never shied away from being critical of Harvard, we’re now in front of the line defending Harvard because, just because Harvard, we think, has done a lot of things wrong, it doesn’t mean that the Trump administration gets to make up magical new powers it doesn’t have to effectively nationalize Harvard. The letter that they sent to Harvard, basically, like their kind of like settlement agreement was more or less: “give us control over who you admit, who you hire, what you teach.” It’s like that’s…

Pam Karlan: Yeah, I have to say, when I first read the letter, I thought it was a … I thought it was a good move on Harvard’s part to release the letter.

Greg Lukianoff: Yes, absolutely.

Pam Karlan: So the letter … maybe we should go back a step and just talk about the triumvirate that sent the letter.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. As in the Trump…

Pam Karlan: The three Trump administration appointees who sent this letter to Harvard.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah.

Pam Karlan: And that was … later there was a claim that maybe the letter shouldn’t have been sent all.

Greg Lukianoff: Oh, yeah. No, that was, that was so bizarre. Like we spent the whole week fighting this, and then at the end of the week they said “Actually we sent the letter by mistake.” And then the weird thing that only the Trump administration could say: “We sent it by mistake, but we’re standing by it.”

Pam Karlan: Yeah.

Greg Lukianoff: It’s I don’t … I remember just like before the weekend, it just gave me a headache.

Pam Karlan: Yeah. It’s like the, it’s like the line about genius being the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your head and not go insane. And, if that’s true, then the Trump administration is a bunch of very stable geniuses. But yeah, so they sent this letter and the letter, as you said, the ostensible power …  maybe we should back up one more step and say … The ostensible power that the government has to lean in on Harvard comes from Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Greg Lukianoff: Yep. And so basically the argument that the Trump administration is making is that this is primarily about antisemitism on campus. I actually think, I’ve said this for a while, I think there is an antisemitism problem on some campuses. I definitely have seen language that isn’t just anti-Israel; it relies on Jewish stereotypes, for example.

I would say that probably … just my professional opinion from studying this for a long time, I’d say probably the school that’s going to be the most vulnerable to that is going to be Columbia overall, given a lot of the stuff that they tolerated, that they honestly, in my opinion, they shouldn’t have, including like actual harassment. But Harvard had an incident where a Jewish student was assaulted, … they had some bad cases there. So, the sort of kernel of truth that the Trump administration is basing its campaign against Harvard on, is this idea that they’ve tolerated antisemitism such to the extent that it would violate Title VI, and if it violates Title VI, they can, at least in theory, remove federal funding from Harvard. But even they were like … okay, listen, the money you gave to Harvard in a variety of different ways was attached to Title VI, Title VII, Title IX, but they came with specific lists of things you had to do before doing the nuclear option.

Pam Karlan: Yeah. You’re supposed to give them notice, you’re supposed to give them an opportunity to respond. You’re only supposed to take away the money that’s connected to the violation. And if you look at … if you look at Title VI back to 1964, the number of times that the federal government has actually taken money away from a university because of Title VI is infinitesimal.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. We found more examples of it than I thought we were going to, but they were pretty obscure schools over a long period of time.

Pam Karlan: I think back to the threats to the southern state universities in the 1960s and ’70s and the Adams litigation and … “unless you integrate your school, we’re going to take your money away.”

It was big scale stuff there. And as you say, there are some of these small ones, but this one to Harvard was: “Because we think there’s some antisemitism at Harvard, we want to change how you admit all your students. We want you to change and allow us to look into the hiring in each of your departments.” Any of those departments couldn’t possibly have anything to do with antisemitism. I could understand how you might make arguments if you were inclined to about, a Middle Eastern studies department or a comp lit department or a political science department, but the idea that we should be able to look at how your biology department is hiring people, because who knows, they may be hiring…It was just, it was mind boggling and it almost forced Harvard to bring this lawsuit.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. And we do appreciate the fact that Harvard’s standing up for itself here. Columbia was put in a similar situation. Not to speak ill of other universities, Pam, but the … I don’t, I feel like Columbia hasn’t made a good decision, like in years on any of this stuff because they decided to very like quickly accept a lot of the initial demands by the Trump administration. Then they told people in private that they weren’t actually going to follow the things that they told the Trump administration they were going do. That got leaked. The president stepped down. The Trump administration wrote, re-upped, increase the pressure….

Pam Karlan: That was the second president to step down in, in a year.

Greg Lukianoff: It’s been crazy. But I did hear something interesting and, sorry, this is a little bit of a tangent. But someone said that the period of Lee Bollinger stability was actually historically unusual for Columbia. That, that it has had this kind of erratic nature. But anyway, sorry.

Yeah, so I think Columbia’s …  of the colleges. I think Columbia’s probably in one of the most vulnerable stakes for any of the schools. But, I think the fact that Columbia had just capitulated pretty quickly is one of the reasons why the Trump administration decided to really up the demands when they went to Harvard.

And Harvard put its foot down. It says we can afford to fight this. And since then, it has been a nonstop toggling through different ways, different approaches to try to get Harvard, to bring Harvard to heel. Every…

Pam Karlan: then there’s the thing with the students, right? The international students.

Greg Lukianoff: Yes, and this was interesting. The argument was that the government was now going to take away Harvard’s ability to approve international students, but they justified it, in part, on national security concerns, saying that some of the students that they were admitting would have access to like high-security stuff. Now that’s probably … I feel … it’s funny because you do the thing too, I’m sure, is when you look at other people’s arguments you almost find yourself Monday morning quarterbacking ’em and being like “If you wanted to get away with a terrible thing I would make this argument….” Not that you want them to, but in this case … I thought jumping to the national security argument was actually cleverer than they’d been. However, it doesn’t make a lot of sense that they would do that just with regards to Harvard, when there’s a lot of schools in the country that actually have lots of sensitive research that’s going on.

Pam Karlan: And that’s taking an elephant gun to go after a mouse because a huge number of the students that they were threatening to not let into the country were going to be undergraduates.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah.

Pam Karlan: Many of whom were not even going to … it would be years before they would have any access to any kind of information.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. But also, at this point, it just all seemed like pretext. They were trying to cope with some argument that would stick. Now, of course, as lawyers, like …  there’s “maybe you should have considered your strongest argument and gone forward with that.” There’s this weird kind of stumbling-through-rationales kind of approach, and then occasionally getting slapped down by courts. Then there was the removal of a lot of huge amounts of federal funding and the threat of doing that. With the idea that the government can just do that willy-nilly, as if there weren’t contracts that were already in place that actually made certain promises and guarantees. So it’s been a fascinating, weird unstructured ongoing odyssey of strange attacks against Harvard that just seem utterly undisciplined. And…

Pam Karlan: So, what is the administration, do you think, at the end of the day, actually trying to accomplish? That is: What is their end goal?

Greg Lukianoff:  I think the overall end goal of what the Trump administration’s trying to do—and this is always filtered through Donald Trump’s peculiar, erratic personality—I think the overall … and I wrote about this in the Atlantic article, it is trying to weaken or undermine federally funded sources of power on the left. So that’s the grander strategy. Chris Rufo is someone who actually is working with the administration, and he’s written about this, basically saying: “We don’t have to fund our enemies,” is his argument. So when you look at it that way, it starts to make some amount of coherent sense.

You start at least getting what the larger strategy is here. But there’s also the weird thing with Trump sometimes where you should take him seriously and literally, as opposed to the opposite that we were assured. I think that he probably wanted everything he said in that letter, which is essentially federalized control of Harvard.

Pam Karlan: Yeah, there does seem to be this kind of turn each of these institutions into a … if you think about this plus the media stuff he’s doing, the  defamation and libel lawsuits are really designed to try and, as you say, bring to heel all of the kind of institutions in civil society that might otherwise go against him. The law firms…

Greg Lukianoff: The law firm stuff, honestly … I wrote a long article about this for my Substack. I think that’s the least appreciated and most horrifying part. Not just because I’m a lawyer, but because the idea … that they actually make the argument … because it’s so clearly vengeance, for one thing. And it’s saying that we’re gonna take away your security clearance. Now I’m talking to you from Washington, DC—if you get rid of lawyers in DC’s security clearance you’ve decapitated them effectively. But also making the argument that we’re now banning lawyers from these firms from federal buildings, which include of course, courts, which I’ve … like I’ve never seen anything like that in my career.

But the fact that they’re actually willing to say in a lot of these executive memoranda that “this is because this was the law firm that had Robert Mueller there. Or this is because this was the law firm that was involved in some of the January 6th prosecutions, or the attempt to overthrow the 2020 election.” But then it even goes deeper, where it’s like, “lawyers there argued against the government’s position on affirmative action” … and it’s like you’re punishing outright law firms for disagreeing with the government?

Pam Karlan: But a lot of this seems to me to be about threats that they can’t actually carry through on, but people are so nervous about them that they heel to them anyway. That’s … Columbia might be an example of this as well. That at the end of the day, the federal government can’t do some of the things it’s threatening to do but…

Greg Lukianoff: It definitely can’t do some of the things it’s threatening to do.

Pam Karlan: It can do some of them, but it can’t do all of them, and the threat is sufficient to make people think, “Even if we win at the end of this, it, it’s not going to make a difference.”

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. There’s the…

Pam Karlan: The process is the punishment.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. There a Trump suit about … you don’t just file a lawsuit to win. Like basically you do it to intimidate. I did have my old friend at FIRE, my favorite curmudgeon, write an article called “Is Harvard Doomed?,” where he just lists all the potential legal liabilities, which means that if they keep going at it and keep on toggling through different possibilities that they’re vulnerable. Just to a lesser extent that I think Columbia is, but there’s vulnerability there.

Pam Karlan: Oh, yeah because … you were talking earlier about the things they have to go through to cancel contracts, which actually they’d have to go through a lot to cancel. But a lot of these things are annual grants in the like. And when the new grant making comes up, it’s much harder to challenge the failure to give you a grant than it is to challenge them taking away a grant you already had.

Greg Lukianoff: Actually, I want ask you a question because I’ve been puzzled on this. Like what … I have thoughts on it. One thing that I have found really like also from a sort of “why aren’t you following this strategy” kind of approach: to not have a track that’s tries to achieve some of the things that Trump administration is trying to do that also includes Congress, like the complete lack of involvement from Congress and trying to do this strictly through executive orders and memoranda is … I don’t entirely understand why you wouldn’t try to do this for multiple tracks? Can you think of a reason why they’re just doing it this way?

Pam Karlan: They seem to have decided they’re not doing anything through Congress except for the big beautiful budget bill.

Greg Lukianoff: It does, it does seem that way.

Pam Karlan: And I don’t know whether that’s because they are worried about whether they can actually get stuff through Congress or it would shine too much of a light on stuff because at least in the Senate, they would have to have hearings. And so better to try and just do this all you know, quickly and unilaterally.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah.

Pam Karlan: But you’re right, they could change … if they wanted to, they could change a lot of the law that is now being used to hold them up.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah, it’s very puzzling to watch it. I don’t know if you know this, but we’re actually … when it comes to the attacks on the media, so a lot of the media companies have folded to different degrees and some others are shaking a bit, but we’re proud to be involved in one of the ones that hasn’t, which is the Ann Selzer case. So, Ann  Selzer—and Nate Silver would refer to her as being the gold standard for pollsters—she had a really impeccable record for many years there. To be clear, the methodology she uses is one that was the gold standard, say 10 years ago, like when a lot more people had landlines, or anybody had landlines for that matter.

So there, there was some reason to be concerned about the methodology, but she was towards the end of her career, and she ran a poll in Iowa that indicated that Harris was ahead by two points. Now this became a national sensation with the media like being like, maybe this actually indicates that Trump is not as strong as he currently looks. All this kind of stuff. And then, of course, Trump won Iowa by I think like 11 points. So, [the polling] was way, way off; it was a big blunder. And you know what Selzer did? She apologized, she explained how she got the methodology wrong and how this methodology clearly doesn’t work that well anymore, even though it worked very well not so long ago, and she retired. She was really palms up about this. But the Trump administration, a lot of people in the Trump orbit, were basically convinced that this was a conspiracy essentially to turn the election, to deflate the Trump balloon, and to change the election outcome.

And Trump, even before he became president, sued her in his personal capacity, which is fascinating too. So, FIRE got involved. We immediately jumped in and offered Selzer and the Des Moines Register our help. But here’s the craziest thing about this at all, is that what they’re suing under is a consumer protection law in Iowa, the kind of thing that you know, if you saw something advertised that was claiming you’ll lose 40 pounds a day … that’s what it’s for. As if there’s no distinction between a poll that is straight news and an advertisement. And we are still fighting this case. I think that we are going to win. But at the same time, it’s been slower going than I was expecting.

Pam Karlan: When I saw this suit had been filed, I thought to myself, this is an example of what a bad first year law student thinks you can get away with, right? Which is, “Oh, I feel that this was very unfair, therefore, I feel defrauded, and I bought the newspaper, so I must be a consumer who was defrauded.” It’s just insane.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah.

Pam Karlan: It’s just insane. And the thing … it’s great that she and the Des Moines Register and you at FIRE are fighting this because a lot of the major media in the United States now are so tied in either to mergers of various kinds or to other businesses. If you think about, Jeff Bezos, Amazon, Washington Post. They don’t fight this stuff.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah, that’s the situation going on with CBS. CBS is trying to do this major merger and they have the whole awful situation where—and I get why people were annoyed about this, but who cares—is essentially there was a long 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, and the ad that they initially ran showed Kamala really stumbling over what she was saying, but then when they actually [aired] the show, it showed her being really, if not eloquent, very coherent. And the conservatives got really like “Oh my God, you’re changing you’re changing the news, you’re just trying to make her look good.” And this became like a real, cause celebre on the right. So they actually got, in the process of suing CBS, they actually got the transcript, they actually got the raw footage I think of the entire interview with Harris and the government immediately put it up, which I’m like, okay, this is just bizarre.

Pam Karlan: I still don’t even understand what the theory is on which CBS doesn’t have an absolute right to run whatever it wants.

Greg Lukianoff: There isn’t. There is no theory.

Pam Karlan: This is … what’s amazing and frustrating is, even when the law is absolutely clear, it takes a long time.

Greg Lukianoff: Yep.

Pam Karlan: And it has this huge deterrent effect.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. And meanwhile it was one of these things where you could tell there was nothing really that bad in it because like within a day of it being put up, nobody was crowing about how terrible the interview actually was. Most people watched it and thought, “It wasn’t that bad. It was like it was an interview…” The CBS stuff is nuts and it is relying on  …  it is basically [the government] saying, “nice merger there, would be a shame if anything happened to it….”

Pam Karlan: It’s like the ABC one with the millions and millions of dollars for the Trump library.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah, the ABC one was a little…the ABC/George Stephanopoulos one was actually one where I have a little bit of bitterness about it because I went on a TV program and said, “I don’t understand why ABC news settled.” This was the one where George Stephanopoulos kept on referring to Trump as a “rapist.” And I was like, listen, he’s going to win this case. He’d have to show actual malice, like in this case … calling him a rapist. But then what came out within six hours of this interview with me going live was evidence including by a lawyer that I know, or a lawyer that we at FIRE know who worked for CBS, basically showing that [Stephanopoulos] was repeatedly warned—that what he can say that [Trump] was found guilty of sexual abuse. He was specifically …  not actually found in its civil court—I keep on saying guilty—but anyway of rape. So, he was apparently warned several times he wasn’t supposed to actually refer to it that way. And I’m like, “Okay, that gets you closer to the line of defamation.” So at least I understood why ABC settled the CBS thing. I think is the most “are you kidding?”

Pam Karlan: Yeah. I mean it is just crazy. So, we’ve been talking so far about the war on the First Amendment, but you have a book coming out this summer called The War on Words. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Greg Lukianoff: It’s really exciting for me because way back in 1999 when I was in law school, I was introduced to Nadine Strossen, the former president of the ACLU, by Kathleen Sullivan and I was like, I was flabbergasted. I was an ACLU intern, I was like, Oh my God, my hero. But now Nadine actually is a senior fellow at FIRE, my organization, and we started doing this series like five years ago where we would just answer what we considered to be routine criticisms of freedom of speech. And I’d answer them from my point of view and style, and she’d answer it from her point of view and style.

And then we found that this old series just kept on getting re-upped and upped. So we decided to ..  update it entirely and put it into book form for 10 arguments, 10 arguments against freedom of speech and our answers to it. So I’m really happy to have that out there, but I’m also just thrilled to get to write something with one of my heroes.

Pam Karlan: So what did you think was the hardest argument for you to answer against free speech?

Greg Lukianoff: That is a good question. A lot of people bring up the  … do you mean hardest, as in the one that I found the most emotionally difficult or the one the question that’s hardest to overcome?

Pam Karlan: Yeah. The whichever one … whichever, whichever “hardest” you want to…

Greg Lukianoff: I didn’t honestly find any of them all that hard. I do find the argument that essentially free speech was what caused Rwanda to be the one that required the most independent research to really look into it. But it’s one of those things where it’s “No,” even under the American First Amendment, like what happened in Rwanda, is not just incitement to imminent lawless action, it’s actually conspiracy to engage in genocide or conspiracy to murder. So like that was an argument that’s made with a lot of heart and a lot of fervor. That’s like no—this is not speech that would be protected anywhere in the world.

And by the way, if you had some kind of hate speech law, which is kind of Richard Delgado’s argument, that existed in Rwanda at the time, when you’ve got this massive conspiracy to murder all these people, it’s not going do a great deal of good. That ship has sailed. So, I do sometimes feel like I run into this thing where it’s almost like people forget that human beings have to enforce laws, where they think that if there was just the right law in place, it would somehow magically stop some evil from happening.

And it’s what if all the people who normally enforce the laws are actually in on the horrible thing that you’re actually talking about. It’s not going to somehow assert itself against them. So, I’d say that was probably the most emotional one. And also doing, looking into the research for that. So much of that whole situation is just so heartbreaking.

Pam Karlan: Yeah. The other thing, of course, I always worry about, and this takes us back to what we were talking about earlier as well, is that it’s never the words of the powerful that get censored, at the end of the day. I’m thinking about … reading the stories about the books taken out of the Naval Academy library. It’s not … Mein Kampf is still in the library, but they’ve taken out Maya Angelou.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. This is ….  I have a this sounds so pretentious to say it, this, I have a TED Talk coming out next week.

Pam Karlan: Oh, wow. Wow.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. I and I ha I, have you ever done one?

Pam Karlan: No. No.

Greg Lukianoff: I give speeches all the time. I’ve never actually had to fully memorize one and perform it. And it was definitely the hardest talk I ever had to give in my entire life. I worked my butt off on it, but I think it’s, I think it came up pretty good. And I address a lot of this. I talk about how I think young people are trained to believe that, or taught basically, implicitly and I think some of, even explicitly, that free speech is now the argument of the three Bs, the bully, the bigot, and the robber baron. And I go through one by one basically saying, this is bad history.

The robber baron, the rich and powerful—and I get this argument a lot, free speech is the argument of the powerful. I’m like, listen, historically, the rich and powerful do pretty well without any special protection for freedom of speech. In fact, they tend not to like freedom of speech that much because that belongs to those other guys who they’d really prefer to shut up.

And then in democracy, if you have a bully and a bigot, but they have enough of the vote, they still get to call the shots. It’s …  and having to do some basic civics here, that it’s like the only people who need special protections for freedom of speech are people who are unpopular with a majority in a democracy or with the powerful, or of course, worst of all, with both.

Pam Karlan: No, I think that’s absolutely right, and the ability to speak out against what’s been happening in this country is absolutely critical.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah.

Pam Karlan: The First Amendment is one of the few things we’ve got on our side.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah, no, it’s been … I think you’ll appreciate this, but like during this whole administration, I’ve been joking, and it does seem like this every day, it is like you get like a little tiny First Amendment exam of some novel aspect where you’re kinda like … because you get spoiled almost as a First Amendment lawyer, because you’re used to the arguments being so standard and you’re like, “Wrong!” This case, and this case and this case. And then this time we’re like, “Huh, there’s a lot more like how… “

Pam Karlan: Yeah. I wouldn’t have thought you could use consumer protection laws…

Greg Lukianoff: Exactly.

Pam Karlan: Or inaccurate poll.

Greg Lukianoff: Yeah. That kind of stuff. Or like we just saw in a case that came out from Columbia just in the past couple hours, a AAUP versus Columbia case, one of the things that a very pro-Trump judge is actually seeming to argue is that Title VI isn’t the only way the president can decide not to have contracts with universities, hinting at, pretty directly, a sort of inherent presidential power to just cancel contracts with … even if it has First Amendment or academic freedom implications. And I’m like, “Oh boy, is that the direction they’re going?”

Pam Karlan: Yeah. We will have to wait and see, but we are seeing all sorts of clauses that people never thought they were going to have to look at.

So, I want to thank you, Greg, for coming back on the show again. Thanks to our guest, Greg Lukianoff. This is Stanford Legal. If you’re enjoying the show, please tell a friend and leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast app. Your feedback improves the show and helps new listeners to discover us. I’m Pam Karlan. See you next time.