Campus Censorship Author to Speak at UMD’s Smith School

BB&T Event to Offer Business Perspective on Free Speech Zones

COLLEGE PARK, Md. (Sept. 22, 2016) — Is freedom of speech under threat on college campuses? Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), will discuss safe spaces, trigger warnings and outrage culture in higher education during the BB&T Colloquium on Capitalism, Ethics and Leadership. The free event, “Assault in the Ivory Tower on the Market for Ideas,” will start at 5 p.m. Sept. 27 in Frank Auditorium at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business.

“I’ve been working to defend free speech on campuses since 2001 and have been consistently horrified at how easy it is to get in trouble for what you say,” Lukianoff writes in a recent Huffington Post blog about the making of his new documentary, “Can We Take a Joke?”

Lukianoff is an attorney and the author of “Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate” and “Freedom From Speech,” as well as the coauthor of The Atlantic’s September 2015 cover story, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Following his remarks, he will field questions from the audience.

Smith School professor Rajshree Agarwal, director of the Ed Snider Center for Enterprise and Markets, will moderate the discussion. “Business schools normally focus on the exchange of goods and services,” Agarwal says. “But the same principles apply in the marketplace for ideas. Too much regulation of business or speech can stifle innovation and hurt the people you’re trying to protect.”

The event is sponsored by BB&T and open to the public. Due to limited space, registration is required at http://goo.gl/wT0QDd.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is a nonpartisan, 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 core mission is to protect the unprotected and to educate the public and communities of concerned Americans about the threats to these rights on our campuses and about the means to preserve them. FIRE’s efforts to preserve liberty on campuses across America can be viewed at thefire.org.