FIREside chat with free speech advocate Nadine Strossen

“I just had this innate sense that I should be able to say this, I should be able to ask this, I should be able to read this.”

Few free speech advocates are as fearless as Nadine Strossen. The New York University Law School professor emerita, FIRE Senior Fellow, and former national ACLU president has devoted her storied career to defending First Amendment rights — and she doesn’t shy away from the difficult or unpopular cases. 

In her landmark first book, “Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex and the Fight for Women’s Rights,” Nadine defends pornography on free speech grounds, putting her at odds with prominent anti-pornography feminists. In a later book, she argues against restricting “hate speech,” examining how hate speech laws can backfire on those they’re designed to protect. On FIRE’s website, you can find her tackling other thorny questions such as “Does free speech inevitably lead toward truth?” and “Would censorship have stopped the rise of the Nazis?” 

Most recently, Nadine has been on a speaking tour, delivering talks across the country, engaging directly with students, teachers, administrators, and everyday Americans about the timeless value of their First Amendment rights. During this tour, she stopped by FIRE’s Philadelphia office and answered some questions from our staff.

Here are some excerpts from the conversation, which has been edited for brevity and clarity. 

When you talk about the erosion of free speech culture on college campuses, how much of that do you see as an outgrowth of the change of a lot of universities’ mission from a broad liberal arts education to a more corporate model?

You know, the first person who really made me think about that was one of FIRE’s co-founders, Harvey Silverglate. He came to a talk I was giving at Harvard in 2015, and the way he described it was to focus on the proliferation of administrators and bureaucrats on campuses. I think he was one of the first people, if not the first, to really notice it. Now it’s become quite common. Yale has more administrators than it has students. 

For example, when I was a young lawyer working at Sullivan & Cromwell, one of our clients was Columbia University. This is when I first met Floyd Abrams, because his law firm was representing Cornell, and they were co-defendants in a major lawsuit. We went to meet with the university counsel for both Cornell and Columbia. Each one had literally one lawyer, and at that time Harvard also had one lawyer. Now, there are hundreds. And there are hundreds of people that are responsible for student services, who are responsible for student affairs, who are responsible for DEI. 

They’re putting money into all of these auxiliary services that not only are not promoting the educational mission, but are actually undermining it. 

One of the biggest issues that I’m seeing is private companies doing the censorship work of countries like China, because it makes sense from a marketing perspective to produce censored tech or censored movies. How would you recommend approaching that? 

It’s such a good question, and it raises a much larger question, which I think is always going to bedevil those of us who are committed to neutral free speech principles. 

We’re always going to have a harder time revving up our constituency — when we’re talking about private companies, legislative advocacy, and government policy — than pro-censorship forces, which are always concentrated on issues of urgent concern.

So you have people who are rabidly anti-pornography or anti-violence or concerned about the danger of social media to children. That’s a very concentrated and focused constituency, as opposed to this more abstract, countervailing concept. 

But that’s what we have to do. We have to mobilize consumers to put pressure on these companies, or to have alternative companies or alternative social media platforms with different policies that are conducive to our values. We have to convince people that they really have a lot at stake here. 

Greg Lukianoff calls free speech the “Eternally Radical Idea” because it’s so counter to human intuition. Everyone wants it for themselves, but not for those they disagree with. You’ve spoken about the difficulties of maintaining this principled position. What do you think gives you the ability to do this?

My awareness of free speech traces back to awareness of it being suppressed, and maybe in some ways you can never appreciate it until it’s restricted. A lot of my friends from other countries who are progressives and human rights advocates just don’t get how cavalier Americans are. They say it’s probably because we take for granted these rights, and if they really were in danger, we would feel supportive. And we have seen that to a large extent. 

That’s a silver lining to a horrible cloud that I wish had not existed after October 7. We’ve seen many progressives on campus who were denying the problem of censorship and cancel culture when it is aimed at certain progressive perspectives in support of Palestine becoming very concerned about free speech. The presidents of Harvard and Penn being classic examples of that. 

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And in my childhood, I do remember experiencing some censorship of various sorts from parents and teachers and librarians. Even before I had a concept of what free speech is, I just had this innate sense that I should be able to say this, I should be able to ask this, I should be able to read this. So the logical consequence is if we want to produce free speech advocates we have to be sure to keep censoring them when they’re kids, right? So they’ll rebel against it!

When I speak in any state, I always try to look at some examples of campuses in those states, and there’s usually a very diverse array of censorship. In fact, I mentioned Texas was one of the places where I recently spoke. So you have the drag ban that FIRE has brought to the Supreme Court, but then you also have campuses that are enforcing so-called discriminatory harassment bans that are so wildly overbroad that they suppress any speech that’s counter to the predominant liberal orthodoxy. And that’s just one of the most recent examples. 

Let me give you one of my favorite ones because it goes back to what is still the paradigmatic case that illustrates what we’re talking about: the viewpoint neutrality principle. That’s the ACLU’s famous — or infamous — defense of free speech for the Nazis in Skokie in the late 1970s. 

The very same arguments that were being made by the Holocaust survivors and Jews in Skokie were made less than 10 years earlier in Cicero, Illinois, not that far geographically from Skokie, but with a totally different population. Time Magazine at that period had an article that referred to Cicero as Selma, Alabama, without the Southern accent. 

And what was the group of peaceful demonstrators that the people in Cicero were saying are dangerous and subversive and hateful? Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights demonstrators. 

So I think when people have concrete examples, they understand the golden rule of free speech: If you want to have freedom for the speech you love, you have to defend it for speech you loathe.