The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) recently held a luncheon for fifty in Palm Beach, hosted by FIRE Advisory Council member, Fox News contributor and business analyst, Liz Peek. FIRE’s John Campione moderated a talk with the organization’s President and CEO, Greg Lukianoff, which focused on their history and recent work, as well as a more broad discussion on the landscape of free speech. “FIRE is incredibly lucky to have donors and allies all over the country, and so we like to hold local events to gather and show appreciation for our generous supporters,” says Lukianoff. Here, PALMER sits down with Lukianoff, who explains the history of FIRE and what’s ahead for the non profit, which is based in Philadelphia.
Tell us a bit about how the organization started and why.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (then the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) was founded in 1999 by two civil libertarians, Harvey Silverglate and Alan Charles Kors. Harvey, the more politically left-leaning of the two, is a civil rights attorney and journalist, while Alan, who leans more to the right, is a professor, historian, and one of the world’s foremost experts on the European Enlightenment and specifically on the philosopher Voltaire. They met while studying at Princeton. The two of them founded FIRE after co-authoring “The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s College Campuses”, which catalogued the various threats to academic freedom and the free speech rights of students and faculty in American higher education. Harvey likes to joke that he thought FIRE would be able to accomplish its mission and close up shop within a year or two. But more than a quarter century later, we’re still here holding the line because the threats to free speech in higher ed — and beyond! — have only grown.
You recently did a $75 million expansion for your outreach, please tell us about that.
FIRE’s supporters had been asking us to consider expanding beyond higher ed for years, but we resisted those calls because we wanted to make sure that we had truly comprehensive coverage on the problems on college campuses. Around 2021-22 though — with the massive success of FIRE’s annual College Free Speech Rankings — we started to feel like we’d achieved that coverage. So, in June 2022, at our gala in New York City, we announced our name change (from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) to reflect our newly expanded mission beyond college campuses to defend the free speech rights of all Americans. This included a massive, surround sound ad campaign, as well as new off-campus litigation efforts.
So much is going on right now in the arena of individual rights and expression and so much remains threatened. What are some specific ways you are fighting that?
When we expanded, we promised that we would not be giving up the fight on campuses and we haven’t. In California, we fought the implementation of a mandate by the state’s community colleges to force faculty to insert and endorse concepts related to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) in their curriculum. And in Florida, we’re suing on behalf of plaintiffs challenging the DeSantis administration’s Stop WOKE Act which sought to outlaw the promotion of concepts related to DEI in higher ed.
Off campus, in the world of journalism, you might appreciate our recent advocacy on behalf of the Clarksdale Press Register, a Mississippi newspaper that was forced to take down an editorial critical of the city government, as well as our defense of Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, who President Trump is suing for consumer fraud as well as fraudulent and negligent misrepresentation.
We’re also increasing our focus on threats facing free speech in big tech and AI around the globe. Wherever the threat to free speech comes from, FIRE will be there to fight.
What are some of your campaigns that have garnered success?
One of our most successful initiatives has been our annual College Free Speech Rankings. The rankings are based on the largest-ever survey of student opinion about free speech on their campuses (most recently, the 2025 Rankings drew on survey results from over 58,000 students at more than 250 schools). It also includes data from FIRE’s Scholars Under Fire Database which catalogs incidents in which professors were punished or investigated for their speech as well as FIRE’s Spotlight Database which evaluates schools’ speech codes.
Books — like my New York Times Bestseller, “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure,” co-authored with Jonathan Haidt — and movies — like “Can We Take a Joke?” and “Mighty Ira: A Civil Liberties Story” — have also been incredibly effective tools at educating and convincing people about the importance of free speech. I often joke that the best way to reach people is to “trick them” into caring about whatever issue for which you’re trying to raise awareness. There are relatively few people for whom free speech is the most important cause, and most of them work at FIRE, so to spread the word about free speech we have to reach people where they’re at. “Coddling” did that through social science, psychology, and parenting, and “Can We Take a Joke?” did that through stand-up comedy.
Freedom of Speech is the cornerstone of what this country was founded on. What’s the most important thing we can do to protect that?
The single most important thing we can do to protect freedom of speech is to always remember that if you don’t believe in free speech for everyone, you don’t believe in free speech at all. It’s easy to defend the free speech rights of people who you agree with, but the real challenge comes when you must defend the free speech of people whose opinions you find loathsome or repugnant. That’s what makes FIRE and FIRE’s mission so unique. In recent years, we’ve seen organizations in our space succumb to mission drift or ideological capture, or outright abandon their principles altogether. FIRE will always remain the adult in the room calling balls and strikes both when it comes to what speech is protected under the First Amendment but also on how American culture can preserve and bolster our historically unprecedented and uniquely robust free speech culture.