Greg Lukianoff

One thing that makes it easier to document are the petitions to get professors fired or punished.

And how disproportionately that those actually do come from students.

But another big uptick has been fellow professors demanding that their fellow professors get punished.

It's kind of shameful.

You shouldn't be proud of signing the petition to get your fellow professor.

And what's even more shameful –

This has almost become a cliche within FIRE.

When someone is facing one of these cancellation campaigns as a professor, I would get letters from some of my friends saying, I am so sorry this has happened to you.

And these were the same people who publicly signed the petition to get them fired.

And this was all throughout my career.

A president, a university president who puts their foot down early and says, nope, you know, we are not entertaining firing this professor.

We are not expelling this student.

It ends the issue often very fast.

Although sometimes – and this is where you can really tell the administrative involvement –

Students will do things like take over the president's office, and then that takeover will be catered by the university.

People will point this out sometimes as being kind of like, oh, it's clearly like my friend Sam Abrams when they tried to get him fired at Sarah Lawrence College.

And that was one of the times that it was used as kind of like, oh, this was hostile to the university because the students took over the president's office.

And I'm like, no, they let them take over the president's office.

And I don't know if that was one of the cases in which the takeover was catered.

But if there was ever sort of like a sign that's kind of like, yes, this is actually really quite friendly.