Straws in the Wind - Part 358

From The Dartmouth: On May 21, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression president and chief executive officer Greg Lukianoff, who will receive an honorary Doctor of Laws degree at Commencement next month, condemned the state of freedom of speech in higher education at an event in the Hanover Inn... [Dartmouth] was the only Ivy League university to receive FIRE’s “green light” rating for its free expression policies in 2025. 

...The Dartmouth Dialogues event — which was co-moderated by distinguished fellow Ezzedine Fishere and Middle Eastern studies professor Jonathan Smolin — was attended by 80 people, according to School of Arts and Sciences event coordinator Tammi Klotz. At the event, Lukianoff argued that higher education must take “seriously” points of view that many would “find deeply offensive” because “you only know what is true when you’re allowed to actually test it.”

“Unfortunately, I think way too many campuses have taken on this moral role where they actually think that, ‘because my norms find what you might want to say highly offensive, I am going to stop it,’” he said. He criticized administrators in elite academic institutions who try to “rebalance” the unequal power they see in American society with “[their] judgement on what must and must not be allowed.”

“That kind of thinking is almost always motivated reasoning and … self-serving, and frankly, overwhelmingly represents the point of view of upper-class Americans,” Lukianoff said. “It ends up being a cultural imposition of the upper-class norms on everybody else.” ...

Full story at https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2026/05/sanchez-the-worst-of-both-worlds-fire-president-and-2026-honorary-degree-recipient-greg-lukianoff-condemns-the-state-of-higher-education-at-dartmouth-dialogues-event.