Greg Lukianoff is identified in the excerpts of The Bob Zadek Show as the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and elsewhere in the same material as president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. He is named as the co-author, with the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, of the book The Coddling of the American Mind, and as a recurring guest on Bob Zadek’s program. No excerpt in the source set contains Lukianoff speaking; he is discussed by Zadek, by Haidt, and in a closing announcement read by Charlie Deist.
Campus speech codes and FIRE
Bob Zadek, introducing a discussion of campus speech regulation with Jonathan Rauch, refers listeners to Lukianoff as a past guest from FIRE, and describes college campuses as going out of their way to prevent students from being exposed to points of view they may find offensive Jonathan Rauch on the New Attacks on Free Thought (2015). Rauch, responding, does not accept Zadek’s framing that this is entirely a private problem: he notes that speech codes also exist at public universities, which are government-funded and subject to the First Amendment, and says that Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has surely said on Zadek’s show that courts will in some cases strike down such codes as unconstitutional, though that does not stop universities from maintaining them Jonathan Rauch on the New Attacks on Free Thought (2015).
The same exchange places Lukianoff’s work alongside a second mechanism of speech regulation. Rauch describes the “hostile environment” doctrine, under which a college or employer seen as creating a pervasively hostile environment may not do so, and says the rules attached to federal money and sometimes federal civil penalties pressure institutions to adopt codes aimed at a friendly environment — with the result that colleges engage in a balancing act in which the First Amendment sometimes gets lost Jonathan Rauch on the New Attacks on Free Thought (2015). Zadek’s own contribution to that segment is a broader argument about government using private institutions as deputies: he says government has been able to deputize large segments of the commercial and academic communities to do what it cannot do directly, and that employers have become agents of the federal government to some degree Jonathan Rauch on the New Attacks on Free Thought (2015). Those are Zadek’s claims, not Lukianoff’s, and the excerpt does not record Lukianoff endorsing them.
The Coddling of the American Mind
Lukianoff’s book with Haidt is the subject of Zadek’s introduction to his 2018 interview with Haidt. Zadek describes Haidt as one of a small group of what he calls his private tutors, and says Haidt wrote with Greg Lukianoff, a former guest on the show several times, a book titled The Coddling of the American Mind [[episodes/jonathan_haidt_on__the_coddling_of_the_american_mi|Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)]]. Zadek says the book followed an article in The Atlantic — which he says has been called the most widely read article in the publication’s history — titled “How Trigger Warnings are Hurting Mental Health on Campus.” He characterizes the book’s subject as how students arrive on college campuses ill-prepared to learn, to absorb, and to learn how to process adverse points of view, and says this has had and will have profound implications for the mental health of that generation, for future generations, and for the political health of the country [[episodes/jonathan_haidt_on__the_coddling_of_the_american_mi|Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)]]. Haidt’s reply in the excerpt is a greeting; he does not correct or expand on Zadek’s description there.
Haidt gives his own account of the book’s origin later in the same episode. He says that in about the 2013 to 2014 academic year, Greg Lukianoff, his co-author — whom he identifies as the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education — had been working since around the year 2000 pushing back against speech codes and the restrictions universities often put on students [[episodes/jonathan_haidt_on__the_coddling_of_the_american_mi|Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)]]. According to Haidt, Lukianoff was used to the problem being overprotective administrators who treated students as fragile, and then noticed for the first time students themselves saying, “Protect us from this,” describing an idea, a book or a speaker as dangerous and predicting that people would be traumatized if the person spoke on campus. Haidt calls this the medicalization of the issue — the idea that students are fragile and that adults have to protect them from these threats — and says that was what was new [[episodes/jonathan_haidt_on__the_coddling_of_the_american_mi|Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)]].
Haidt also dates the pair’s published treatment of the phenomenon. He says they wrote about it in their Atlantic article in 2015, whose official title he gives as “The Coddling of the American Mind,” and that at the time it was, he thinks, the fourth or fifth most widely circulated article in The Atlantic’s history, at least online [[episodes/jonathan_haidt_on__the_coddling_of_the_american_mi|Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)]]. He says that in the article they analyzed what was going on but lacked the space or time to go into where it came from, and that the book — also called The Coddling of the American Mind, now with a subtitle he gives as “How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure” — shows six different trends or causal threads stretching back to the 1980s in how children were raised, which meant that the generation born after 1995, often called iGen or Gen Z, arrived on campus beginning around 2013 with new ideas and different needs [[episodes/jonathan_haidt_on__the_coddling_of_the_american_mi|Jonathan Haidt on The Coddling of the American Mind (2018)]].
Later references
A 2019 episode hosted by Charlie Deist, filling in for Bob Zadek, closes with an announcement that the show is giving away a free PDF of Bob’s book The Bubble: How Higher Education Became America’s Most Overrated Product, which Deist says features interviews with David Henderson’s co-blogger Brian Caplan and with Jonathan Haidt, author of The Coddling of the American Mind David Henderson on Trumponomics, Deficits, and Immigration (2019). In that announcement Deist says Haidt co-authored the book with Greg Lukianoff, whom he identifies as president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and says the book links the idea of financial bubbles in student loan debt with the brewing atmosphere of silencing of free speech on college campuses David Henderson on Trumponomics, Deficits, and Immigration (2019). The excerpt gives no further detail about Lukianoff’s role in that volume.
Across episodes
Three episodes in the source set touch on Lukianoff, and the excerpts show no development in how he is treated: the 2015 Rauch episode cites him as a past FIRE guest on campus speech codes, the 2018 Haidt episode presents him as Haidt’s co-author and as the person who first noticed the shift in student demands in 2013–2014, and the 2019 Henderson episode mentions him only in a closing book announcement. The name of his organization is given as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education in the 2018 episode and as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in the 2015 and 2019 episodes; the excerpts do not explain the difference.
What the sources do not cover
No excerpt contains Greg Lukianoff speaking, so the article cannot report his own arguments, his account of FIRE’s litigation, or his responses to anything said about him. The excerpts do not state his title at the time of any episode beyond the two organizational names given, do not describe the founding or history of FIRE, and do not name any case FIRE brought or any court ruling it obtained. They also do not say when The Coddling of the American Mind was published, what its chapters argue beyond the six causal threads Haidt mentions, or what became of the speech codes Rauch describes.