'Unlearning Liberty' Released in Paperback Today

PHILADELPHIA, March 11, 2014—The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is proud to announce the paperback release of President Greg Lukianoff’s Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, which includes a new afterword and photo section. As with the hardcover edition, all royalties from sales of the book will support FIRE’s work defending individual rights on campus.

In Unlearning Liberty, Lukianoff walks readers through the life of a college student, describing the startling violations of free speech rights that today’s students experience: a student in Indiana punished for publicly reading a book, a student in Georgia expelled for an environmentalist collage he posted on Facebook, students at Yale banned from putting an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote on a T-shirt, and students across the country confined to absurdly tiny “free speech zones.”

The paperback edition has been updated with an afterword that brings readers up to speed on several developments since the book’s release in 2012, such as the federal government’s attempt to mandate a national speech code in the name of preventing “harassment.” The new photo section also drives home the absurdity of campus administrators’  treatment of fundamental rights by showing the book cover and collage that got the aforementioned students in trouble, along with a “free speech wall” damaged by a professor’s vigilante censorship, a vandalized pro-life display, illustrations of the tiny size of “free speech zones,” and more.

Praise for Greg Lukianoff and Unlearning Liberty:

“…[W]ritten in the spirit of such figures as Alexander Hamilton and Judge Learned Hand, who famously taught us that liberty cannot prevail if it is not alive in the hearts and minds of citizens.” — Professor Donald Downs, University of Wisconsin

“You might say Greg Lukianoff was born to fight college censorship.” — Sohrab Ahmari, The Wall Street Journal

“[Unlearning Liberty] documents how ‘orientation’ programs for freshmen become propaganda to (in the words of one orthodoxy enforcer) ‘leave a mental footprint on their consciousness.’” — George Will, The Washington Post

“Unlearning Liberty is a must-read book for anyone concerned about the constitutional future of our nation.” — Nat Hentoff, journalist, author of Free Speech for Me—But Not for Thee

“Here’s a book full of sunlight—the best disinfectant for campus censorship.” — Jonathan Rauch, author of Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought

“Beautifully written and powerfully argued, Unlearning Liberty is a dismaying chronicle of the sorry state of free speech on today’s campus—and beyond.” — Nadine Strossen, former president, American Civil Liberties Union

“In Unlearning Liberty, author Greg Lukianoff describes a perfect storm of highly-tuned cultural sensitivity, bureaucratic bloat, and fear of litigation that has created a stultifying atmosphere on campuses nationwide where unpopular ideas and offensive language are policed to an absurd extent.” — Erika Christakis and Nicholas A. Christakis, Time

FIRE is a nonprofit educational foundation that unites civil rights and civil liberties leaders, scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals from across the political and ideological spectrum on behalf of individual rights, freedom of expression, academic freedom, due process, and rights of conscience at our nation’s colleges and universities. FIRE’s efforts to preserve liberty on campuses across America can be viewed at thefire.org.

CONTACT:

Pierce Babirak, Executive Assistant to the President, FIRE: 215-717-3473; pierce@thefire.org