What is the role of higher education in fostering the free exchange of ideas in a deeply polarized society? Are America’s elite colleges living up to that responsibility?
Those were among the thorny questions tackled May 21 by Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE. His freewheeling conversation with Jonathan Smolin, professor of Middle Eastern Studies and director of the Dartmouth Initiative for Middle East Exchange, and Ezzedine Fishere, a distinguished fellow who teaches courses in Middle Eastern Studies, was sponsored by Dartmouth Dialogues.
“In my opinion, the only thing that justifies higher ed’s special status in the law is its unique ability to protect the production of knowledge and truth,” Lukianoff told 60 people during the public talk at the Hanover Inn. “That does mean taking seriously and allowing for arguments that many of us would find deeply offensive. Why? Because you only know what is true when you’re allowed to actually test it. That requires thought, experimentation, devil’s advocacy, and people taking seriously the possibility they might be wrong.”
The author and free speech advocate, who holds a degree from Stanford Law School, said “elite campuses often convince themselves that they are not power itself and they’re not part of power, when in fact they’re part of a very small aspect of American power that is extremely influential.”
Smolin asked Lukianoff to define, in legal terms, what institutions mean when they cite “time, place, and manner” to determine whether protests may or may not be allowed to occur on a campus.
“You can have rules as long as they’re enforced across the board and they play to some important function of the institution,” Lukianoff answered.
In 2024, he said, some colleges were better than others at managing political demonstrations “because they talked to students like adults and said ‘we don’t allow encampments, and that’s going to be enforced across the board.’”
FIRE has examined schools’ responses to student unrest with respect to safeguarding open expression.
“Barnard, Columbia, NYU, and Penn tried to have it both ways,” said Lukianoff. “They would allow encampments until they didn’t. They changed their minds on it and enforced them in a way that didn’t really make a lot of sense. And that actually, of course, angered the students more.”
Fishere asked if campuses should permit events that clearly offend certain groups.
“Not all groups have the same power,” he said to Lukianoff. “If you’re going to organize an event where you promote antisemitism or promote a discourse that targets immigrants or that targets transgender people, or that targets this or that group, that constitutes a potential threat to the institution and to the members of the institution. What would you say to that?”
“There’s value in knowing what people really think,” Lukianoff replied.
Colleges, he proposed, should “lower their moral circuits and turn up their curiosity circuits and actually try to figure out what the world actually looks like. Just knowing the world as it really is is a never-ending, arduous, painful process that does not come naturally to us.”
Beyond academia, Lukianoff criticized recent moves by the Trump administration to silence or intimidate the media and said FIRE is pursuing legal action to combat censorship. About the Supreme Court, he said that while most of the justices are staunchly conservative, they have issued rulings contrary to President Donald Trump’s wishes.
During the question-and-answer session, Bill Hamlen ’84 cited an analysis he did of Federal Election Commission reports of political contributions made by Dartmouth employees which showed that the vast majority supported left-leaning candidates.
“How do we create the type of viewpoint diversity that creates the environment that you’re suggesting we should have, of open inquiry?” asked Hamlen, who in 2024 ran in the Republican primary for New Hampshire’s Second Congressional District.
Lukianoff proposed more team teaching by professors who hold divergent political views, empowering college presidents to hire conservative faculty, and creating “counter departments” to balance ideological scales.
“If you’re going to have a very politically homogenous sociology department, you could have a highly skeptical department for quantitative sociology,” said Lukianoff, who is among seven leaders in the arts, science and health, and philanthropy who will receive honorary degrees at Commencement next month.
Soshie Bernstein ’26, a Middle Eastern Studies major, said she’s heard stories from friends about being in classrooms with professors who are clear and open about their beliefs.
“Because of that, some students feel like they have to fit the professor’s narrative in their assignments or in class discussions,” she said. “So I’m curious about how to navigate enabling free speech for faculty while also maximizing the feeling among students that they can be open about their opinions and beliefs in classrooms without repercussions.”
It’s “immoral,” Lukianoff said, to pretend to believe things in order to win a teacher’s praise. “That’s just wrong for any number of reasons and it’s bad for intellectual development.”
Roger Friedlander ’27, president of the Dartmouth Political Union, a nonpartisan student group that organizes debates on campus, wondered how best to set the stage for difficult conversations. Should the DPU invite popular satirists and commentators as well as more intellectually rigorous speakers to campus?
“Where’s the line where the mainstream is sufficient to overcome the unserious?” he asked.
“I think there’s something to be said for both versions,” said Lukianoff. “It would be a lot healthier if people came in being able to put on their anthropologist’s hat or their scientist’s hat and say, ‘I’m not here to convince this person, I’m not here to change this person’s mind. I just want to understand why this person thinks that.’ You can invite some genuine crackpots and learn a hell of a lot.”
Before the Dartmouth Dialogues event, Lukianoff lunched with students and then visited the class Smolin and Fishere co-teach: Difficult Conversations on the Middle East.
Following Lukianoff’s talk, Friedlander said he believes free speech is alive and well at Dartmouth.
“The work that we’re doing at the DPU and the work that President Beilock has been encouraging across campus is really important,” he said. “We’re going about it the right way, in a principled way, in a content-neutral way. And if there’s any hope for higher education solving some of the issues that we have in the country with polarization, then it needs to be done in this sort of consistent, principled manner. We need the guardrails with time, place, and manner restrictions and codes for dealing with disruptions and things like that. Those restrictions need to be in place and they need to be applied consistently, but the work needs to continue.”
