The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:22:32 · Greg Lukianoff
[00:22:32] S1: Your thoughts, I'm sufficiently obsessed, even though fires extended beyond higher ed these days. Mhmm. I'm sufficiently obsessed with higher education reform that I started on my vacation this summer writing a book about it, which is just gonna probably be a very long substack thing about it. But when it comes to the actual standards of free speech, academic freedom, professionalism, the standards are different for professors and students, and and in a way that actually makes perfect sense. Students have the highest, you know, level of free speech rights of of any constituency on a college campus if it... If it's a public college. When it comes to professors, they have very strong what are called extramural free speech rights, which basically means that they can, you know, spout... Talk about, you know, other topics off campus or in their expertise or not. They have very high intramural speech rights, which basically means they can criticize the university. But, you know, in the classroom, they're expected to be professional, and they're expected to be germane. And that means that if you... And and I and I may have called with a case that I got wrong many years ago. That was at a... At Forsyth Technical Community College, there was a technical writing class, you know, something about, like, how to write for engineers. And of a fifty minute class, a professor spent ten minutes, on her opinion about the Iraq war. And at the time, I think it was my own political bias that made me want to take that case and defend Elizabeth Ito at at that school. And it took me a while to realize I was wrong. That essentially, if you're teaching a technical writing class and you go so far afield to spend a substantial chunk of it talking about your opinion on something that's completely unrelated to technical writing, they can punish you.
00:24:18 · Scott Galloway, Greg Lukianoff
[00:24:18] S0: Yeah. I don't. It's like I say in my house, my kids don't have free speech rights. And I'm not sure if I were working at Google and I went downstairs and said with a big Israeli flag and started, you know, they would have the right to say, this is disruptive. You teased you're writing a book on higher ed reform. Give me two or three kind of big picture thoughts that will be somewhat controversial or contrary to popular opinion about higher education that you feel we should consider? I just, I'm bragging now, Greg. I just joined the board of the Regents of the University of California. [00:24:53] S1: Oh, great. [00:24:53] S0: And I'm thinking a lot about higher ed reform because I can think of few products that have changed less in fifty years and survived. So give me two or three great ideas the big university system should be considering.
00:25:08 · Greg Lukianoff
[00:25:08] S1: Well, my big thing, and it's tend to... The book's tentatively called the academic filibuster, which is about how like the standard for there being something wrong in higher ed keeps on, the goalposts keep shifting. And the worst it gets, the more people pretend there's nothing wrong. But as far as something that I think really matters is committing to disconfirmation. Essentially, you don't really know what's true. You know what isn't true. Like, bay... Basically, the only way we have access to truth seems to be by subtraction. And institutions need to refocus on the... Their priorities and the things that actually give them the special protections of academic freedom and and legal protections and all all of these kind of things. And to me, I think the only thing that really justifies that special societal treatment is that they help us see the world more clearly when they're doing their job right or can help us see the world less clearly if they're not. And I think that committing to search for truth, it it it is essential, and that's... Hopefully, that won't be too controversial. But the way you do that is not just people pinky swearing to be better. It's by having structured friction. It's by having things like, Daniel Deremyer was the first person. I I don't think he called him this, but having, like, counter departments to basically be like, listen. If we have the following sacred cows in this department, we're not gonna get rid of the department, but we are gonna have people test to see if the empirical assumptions that would be true, if those political assumptions are true in these departments hold up. We have to be much braver and much more ambitious in being like, let's see if we're not just standing on a a huge pile of BS. And frankly, when I look at modern scholarship, it is a weird hodgepodge of excellent, excellent research and a lot of junk. And we have to be able to sift and winnow between those two. And the way you do that is, again, not saying I promise to be better. It's by having a counter department saying, by the way, none of these empirical assumptions that would be true if your dogma was true, hold up.
00:27:05 · Scott Galloway, Greg Lukianoff
[00:27:05] S0: So let me ask you more specifically about tenure, I think serves and has served a really important role. That if you say something really controversial and upsetting at the time, whether it's women should be able to vote or the world is not flat, that you have some economic or not, or economic, cultural and speech rights, intellectual property rights that encourage you to push the boundaries and occasionally say something crazy that might end up being crazy genius or crazy right. I get it. I worry that it is now essentially just [00:27:39] S1: bloat, that [00:27:40] S0: a tenure at the business school, your views on dark water versus blue water economics just aren't that controversial. And that we should move to a system that's more reflective of the centers of excellence we're trying to be. Because what I find generally with tenure is that it's just Latin for student debt. That it just levies a massive amount of student debt because we have to create a system of lifetime employment for people just as they become unproductive. And they'll go to this, you know, they'll go to Galileo and free speech and make these very big sweeping arguments that no tenure is the basis of academic freedom and progress in our society. Your thoughts on tenure as it relates to reform of higher ed.
00:28:25 · Greg Lukianoff
[00:28:25] S1: Oh, boy. I could talk about that one for a long time. But just to make it very simple, I came in very pro tenure. And by the way, I'm gonna be twenty five years doing this on October 2. You know, I I got to work my dream job. But when it came in, you know, trying to consider, like, what was good for academia, I I really was very pro tenure. And it's been one of the great disappointments of my career because in theory, tenure is supposed to make you braver, more, more courageous in defense of not just your own academic freedom free speech rights, but everybody else's. You use it as an opportunity to boldly challenge orthodoxies that are local, not just national, the ones that are locally unpopular, not just nationally unpopular, which is often harder. And it just hasn't really worked out that way. I I I do know, and and this is the heartbreaking part of it, there are absolutely amazing professors out there who owe their jobs to tenure and who do use it, bravely. But those professors, in my experience, are overwhelmingly, in the minority. So that's one of the reasons why FIRE has no position on tenure other than professors must not be fired because of their, political viewpoint or or for for finding something unpopular. But I think that given it hasn't really give... Given the professor that kind of, you know, steely spine that we expected, If anything, I think Meghan McCartle made this point, tenure seems to select for a certain kind of complacency and timidity of not rocking the boat kind of aspect. And I think you could end up with a much more dynamic place if you had, say, five year contracts with very strong academic freedom and free speech protections, but where you're not actually saying, I'm gonna stay here for the rest of my life, that that this is this is what I wanna be doing, you know, three decades from now, That I think it would actually spur some greater dynamism if it was something that was more fluid.
00:30:26 · Scott Galloway
[00:30:26] S0: There's been a lot of controversy on campus about certain speakers being where they face pushback, whether it was Ben Shapiro, Cal State LA, and UC Berkeley, Hassan Piker was cut from a University of Washington speaker series. And Fire Zone data reported 184 de platforming attempts of college speakers in 2025, with 172 counting this year. What really struck me though was that according to your data, it looks like more attempts now are coming from the right to squelch free speech than the left. I'm used to people in Birkenstocks going crazy when some right wing person shows up. The best way to hurt them is indifference, is to ignore them, but that's neither here nor there. Why do you think there's been a shift from, you know, the left trying to get, you know, block certain speakers and move to the right?