FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff: Stanford’s Approach to Speech is Like Being in “An Upper Class Finishing School.”

Greg Lukianoff, reflecting on the time he attended Stanford University: Don’t confuse “upper class white liberal ways of seeing the world with truth itself.” Excerpt:

And one thing that was so clear when I got to a place like Stanford, was that people had a real tendency to confuse sort of upper class white liberal ways of seeing the world with truth itself and therefore wanted everybody to talk exactly like rich white, over educated people. And there was like this lack of curiosity about whether or not those assumptions were even correct.

And you think about people who are on the spectrum, you think about people from other countries, you think about people who come from different economic classes or different regions or who are a little bit older or a little bit younger than everybody else, and it’s just a series of landmines that you’re supposed to either know they’re there and if you know they’re there, you’re supposed to pretend you believe the following five things. It’s a really messed up way for a place that is supposed to be a marketplace of ideas, to teach people to interact with each other.

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

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