The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
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?
00:31:16 · Greg Lukianoff
[00:31:16] S1: Well, both things are still happening. It's just a question of degree. And since Trump came into office, there's been... You know, politicians have felt empowered to really go after higher education, not on the basis of the idea of real meaningful reform in the name of search for truth, but political, score settling. It... It's become this very sort of vain foolhardy sort of project to just kind of give to the left what they what they perceived they were taking for a really long time, which is no way to fix anything. So so in the past, certainly in 2025, it was the first time we'd ever seen, like, the number one constituency for censorship on campus actually be, at least in our twenty twenty six years of existence, be politicians themselves. Now that's not historically unprecedented, but it's certainly not something we've seen in the last, you know, at least most of the last fifty years. I feel like we have failed as faculty
00:32:15 · Scott Galloway
[00:32:15] S0: to convince the students that the whole point of you being here is for us to offend your sensibilities. It's so strange that in this place where you're supposed to build a safe space to push the limits, that kids quite frankly are just such snowflakes. Our job is to create warriors, not wokesters. And I see it in class where a kid immediately identifies himself as being bit right in a fan of Trump. Mhmm. And he is ostracized. He's immediately seen as morally deficient. And I'm trying to figure out where did we go wrong. Like, how did this happen? It's one thing to disagree with someone, but to take it on as this person, I don't feel safe around this person. You know, that bullshit. Where did we come off the tracks here?
00:33:08 · Greg Lukianoff
[00:33:08] S1: Yeah. I mean, that's a long story. And Coddling of the American Mind, the book that I I I wrote with, Jonathan Haidt, you know, goes into depth a lot about where where this came from. One part that I feel like is underappreciated is the refusal to create expectations of discomfort, but also to actually do do something even worse, which is to kind of implant this this sort of idea that if you feel terribly about something, if you feel panicked, if you feel passionate about it, if you feel harmed by it, that there's something inherently noble about that, that that that essentially your heart is doing the hard work that your... Maybe your hands should actually be doing. You know, that's at the core of coddling of the American mind. I do think that part of it came from an idea that if we make students miserable enough, if we make them panicked enough about the future to see the world as a as a binary of good versus evil, that we make them overgeneralize in the name of social justice, that all of these things will somehow magically equal social progress as opposed to a cohort of miserable students who feel like they're always under attack because they're being told they're always under attack, but who are not great for free speech, academic freedom, or for their own mental well-being.