A Conversation with Nadine Strossen

Nadine Strossen is American legal scholar and the author of The War on Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech—And Why They Fail. Strossen sits down with Sara Arjomand '26 to discuss free speech and its status on today's American college campuses.

This interview transcript and recording have been edited for length and clarity.

Interview with Nadine Strossen

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Sara Arjomand: Nadine Strossen is a professor of law emerita at New York Law School, and was the national president of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1991 to 2008. She's now a senior fellow at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. She's also the author of The War on Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech—And Why They Fail, which was published this year. She has more than 40 years of experience in First Amendment law, and we’re lucky to have her here to speak with us today. Nadine Strossen, welcome to the podcast.

Nadine Strossen: Oh, Sara. I'm so honored to be your podcast guest and to be a return visitor to your very impressive and supremely beautiful campus.

Sara Arjomand: Thank you. So I suppose we can start at the very beginning. What is your elevator pitch for freedom of speech?

Nadine Strossen: Without freedom of speech, nothing that is positive in life could be achieved—starting with the ability to explore your own identity, your own values, your own concept of your purpose in life. 

And moving beyond that, your ability to communicate with other human beings—to form relationships from the most intimate to interpersonal ones that are essential for being part of any community.

And moving beyond that: instrumental values, including the pursuit of truth. Here on campus, that’s an especially important aspect—truth in every possible field, from spiritual, philosophical, and religious to scientific and social scientific.

And then, last but far from least, as we live in a representative democracy, “We, the people”—to quote the opening words of the Constitution—could not effectively or responsibly exercise our sovereign power without the most robust freedom to debate and discuss policies and officials and candidates.

Is that enough?

Sara Arjomand: I mean, it’s certainly a compelling pitch. And I just, I suppose I wonder if not all of our readers will be on board at this point. I think that for many of them, the lingering worry has to do with hate speech. I think that’s especially relevant here on a college campus.

Nadine Strossen: Well, if I could interject though, Sara. 

Sara Arjomand: Of course.

Nadine Strossen: Freedom of speech is not absolute. I’m talking about the value of speech, but precisely because of its power, the Supreme Court—which has generally been very speech-protective—has never held that speech is absolutely protected.

Let’s start with the language of the First Amendment, which is the Free Speech Clause: Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. Now that may sound rather straightforward, but when you hone in on it, you will not be surprised that every single word in that phrase has been subject to debate.

What is speech? Not everything that conveys a message is deemed to come within the protective ambit of speech. What is freedom? Freedom is not absolute. What is an abridgement? Maybe a restriction that is necessary to protect safety or health is not an abridgment that violates the First Amendment.

So now you can ask follow-up questions. I didn’t mean to interject, but to say that one protects freedom of speech does not mean that therefore one says, “All speech is protected, and no limits are ever tolerable.” I do not know a single free speech champion who has ever taken that position. 

Sara Arjomand: Maybe it would be helpful, then, to think about how “hate speech” has been traditionally understood.

Nadine Strossen: There is no legal definition of hate speech precisely because the U.S. Supreme Court has never recognized a category of speech defined by its hateful message or content, and said, “Therefore, because of that message, it is excluded from First Amendment protection.”

To the contrary, the Supreme Court has very strongly protected—as what it calls the bedrock principle of free speech—a concept called viewpoint neutrality: that government must remain neutral with respect to the viewpoint, the idea, the message, the content of the speech. No matter how unpopular or hated or hateful or otherwise controversial the view is, that alone is never enough to justify censoring it. So that fact that someone deems a message to be hateful is not ever going to justify government restrictions on that message.

But the complementary principle is often called the emergency principle. And what that means is when you get beyond the viewpoint or the message of the speech and you consider it in its overall context—its facts and circumstances—if, in a particular factual context, speech (regardless of the message—it can be a hateful message, it can be any message), if in the facts and circumstances, it directly causes certain specific harm, or imminently threatens certain specific harm, then it can and should be punished.

Let me give you an example. If speech is—well, this is a very simple example—if speech is through messages that intrude into your private life… Let’s say a phone call—the old-fashioned landlines that you couldn’t turn off, that would ring in the middle of the night—and somebody was persistently calling someone else, disturbing their sleep. It wouldn’t matter even if they were saying, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” That’s the opposite of hate speech, right? And yet it is still unprotected harassment because it’s causing the harm of intruding into privacy and rest.

There are many factual contexts in which much hateful speech can and should be punished—but not solely because of its message. So there are many instances of targeted harassment of the type that I talked about that are conveying hateful messages. There are many instances of threatening or intimidating speech, where the speaker intends to instill a reasonable fear in the targeted person that they’re going to be subject to violence. Many of those contain hateful messages.

And I think that’s exactly right: that the speech that is the most dangerous, because it poses an emergency, can be punished regardless of what its particular viewpoint is. But the most dangerous censorship is also outlawed—and the most dangerous censorship is when government selectively chooses which messages it disfavors.

Sara, I want to give you one other example, because I know that everybody has in mind particular odious messages that each of us thinks are hateful, and therefore would be very happy to have government restrict. So I want to remind everybody that what is going to be punished is not what you consider to be hateful, but what the government considers to be hateful.

So let’s take Donald Trump and his vice president, J.D. Vance, and his chairman of the FCC, Brendan Carr, not to mention the Attorney General, Pam Bondi. I guarantee you that what they consider to be hate speech is going to be very different from what many members of our country consider to be hate speech.

Donald Trump was quite expressed a few days ago. He basically said any speech that’s critical of him or of his policies is hate speech and should be punished. So it’s the danger of that subjectivity—the value judgments, and basically empowering whoever has the enforcement power to pick and choose the messages they personally disfavor.

Sara Arjomand: And so in your view, is that kind of the most compelling rationale for safeguarding even the most deeply offensive forms of speech—this kind of worry about how a government might wield their subjective power? Or is it something else?

Nadine Strossen: I would say that is—if I had to choose a single rationale, I would say the fact that it is such an inherently vague and broad, manipulable concept that it essentially empowers whoever is enforcing (whether it be a government official, a university official, or, for that matter, a social media platform).

It essentially gives them unfettered discretion to pick and choose the ideas that the rest of us will be able to hear and to convey. And that’s extremely dangerous for all of the reasons that I explained—why freedom of speech is so important. It would undermine individual liberty, equality, and democracy alike.

Another way to think of it is this: harmful as much speech—including much hateful speech—can be, I think it’s even more harmful to empower the government to suppress it. So it’s like: what is the least dangerous option?

Sara Arjomand: So, there are a couple of things we kind of often hear, I think, on a college campus like this one: words are violence, silence is violence. These are kind of common refrains on American college campuses.

Nadine Strossen: So everything is violence, right? Words are violence and silence is violence, right? And I think hopefully violence is violence too, right?

Sara Arjomand: Right. I think that’s kind of something that we hear especially on campuses with the kind of liberal or leftist bent—which, you know, admittedly, is a great many of them. What would you say to my peers who hold that view? Because I think it’s kind of a particularly difficult one to disabuse them of. 

Nadine Strossen: It’s a very important argument. My most recent book, which was just published this summer, co-authored with Greg Lukianoff, who’s the CEO of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), is called The War on Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech and Why They Fail.

Greg and I came up with the idea for this book because both of us are constantly speaking on college campuses and other venues and constantly hearing anti–free speech arguments. And we thought—we love answering the questions orally, we never get tired of that—but we thought it would be useful to concretize the answers in writing for people that we don’t have a chance to speak to in person.

Of all the different arguments that both of us heard, we each came up with our own list of what we thought the 10 most important were. And then our editor also independently made his own selection. Every single one of us concluded that the most important argument that is regularly offered as a supposed justification for restricting speech, that we really had to refute, was exactly the argument that you have flagged, Sara—that words are violence.

That has become very poignant and troubling in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Because if you fervently believe that words are violence, then it becomes justified to use violence to try to suppress words that you put in that category of violence.

And FIRE’s most recent campus survey, which came out the day before Kirk was assassinated, showed that 34% of students on college campuses believe that violence is at least sometimes justified to silence a speaker whose message is detested. On your campus, the answer was about the same—34% of your fellow students thought that.

So if we want to protect against actual violence, that is one reason to oppose this argument. But also logically, it falls apart. Sara, you’re a philosopher, so I’m sure you could answer this very compellingly. But Sigmund Freud supposedly said—if he didn’t, somebody else made the observation—that civilization began the first time an argument was responded to by hurling words rather than hurling rocks.

Far from being violence, words and expression are the antithesis of violence—the alternative to violence as a mechanism for addressing and resolving conflicts through negotiation, through mediation, through debate and discussion.

That is true on an interpersonal level. We don’t beat up somebody—or we should not physically assault somebody—we disagree with. We should engage with them through words. And likewise, for nations that are in conflict with each other, we would hope that rather than war and genocide and other violent tactics, they could have negotiated resolutions of their conflicts to advance human safety and peace and to enhance a long and good life for all of us as individuals and as nation-states. 

Sara Arjomand: Right. So you just mentioned your work—or FIRE. And Greg Lukianoff, who is the president. Can you talk to me a little bit about your work there, and kind of how you think about FIRE’s mission?

Nadine Strossen: FIRE was founded a little bit more than 25 years ago, while I was the national president of the ACLU. And the ACLU has done and continues to do very important work in defending free speech for students and faculty members on campus.

In fact, at that time, the concept of hate speech codes was just being pioneered in response to exactly the concerns that you raised, Sara—very important concerns about making sure that campuses were welcoming. I think it was before we used the phrase DEI, but the concepts were very much in play. We want to be sure that not only do campuses lower the traditional discriminatory bars to people who had been traditionally excluded, but that we truly create inclusive and welcoming environments.

And it was a very plausible argument that those environments are undermined through hateful expression. The ACLU, even though it had long defended freedom for speech that was hateful (that was antithetical to civil liberties), because of the fear of empowering government that we described, we thought: this is a serious new argument that hadn’t been raised in the past, one that was based more on concerns of equality and dignity and inclusivity.

So we very seriously reexamined what our policy should be. And after much study and debate, the national board of the ACLU did something which is unheard of—it unanimously adopted a policy. Very contentious board, very large (more than 80 people), but every single one of us, including people who had devoted their whole lives to civil rights and racial justice, was convinced that no matter how well-intended, hate speech codes were at best ineffective and at worst even counterproductive in furthering those goals.

And so the ACLU brought the first couple of lawsuits against campus hate speech codes. We won them. But despite those victories, campuses all across the country were adopting these codes, and it was too much for us to do on top of all the other work.

So when I learned, and ACLU colleagues learned, about the forming of this new organization—then called, it had the same acronym but it stood for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education—co-founded by somebody who was a leader of the ACLU, Harvey Silverglate, I was very excited. You know, we really need an organization that is going to be dedicated full time to this burgeoning area.

Often FIRE has handled cases together with the ACLU, often separate. And then, as you know, a couple of years ago—or, I think you know—FIRE expanded its mission to go beyond campus. Because what starts on campus doesn’t stay on campus, and the free speech challenges in the larger society have been growing exponentially. They kept the same acronym, but the “E” now stands for Expression.

I’ve been closely involved with FIRE personally since the beginning, because I’ve always been very concerned about campus freedom and about free speech. From the beginning, I was on the board of FIRE, even while I was the national president of the ACLU. And then a few years ago, when I had stepped down from full-time teaching so I would be able to become a full-time evangelist for free speech—seriously, that was my idea, and it certainly has come to fruition—it was about that time that FIRE was expanding, and they asked me to become—I was one of its first two senior fellows. I’m very proud of that.

And I continue to work very closely with both FIRE and the ACLU and a couple other organizations that are committed to academic freedom and free speech. I continue to be completely, enthusiastically supportive of the ACLU’s overall mission, which is broader than that of FIRE and these other organizations—defending all fundamental freedoms for all people.

I’m passionately committed to all of those rights, from A to Z—or abortion to zero tolerance, to mention a couple of examples. But for the reasons I explained at the outset of our interview, I am absolutely convinced that freedom of speech is the essential bedrock for advocating every single other human right. And so, therefore, in my limited remaining time on this planet, I want to concentrate my time on that absolutely essential fundamental right.

Sara Arjomand: Do you feel that kind of making these arguments is getting harder? I mean, has it kind of become more of an uphill battle as you’re, you know, kind of evangelizing today, versus maybe if you’d been on this kind of, you know, touring journey 10 years ago or something?

Nadine Strossen: Actually, it has really stayed the same, Sara, through all of the factual changes and through all of the changes in who’s exercising political power—all of the cultural changes. The basic problem from a free speech perspective has been consistent, and that is that the vast majority of people believe in freedom of speech for me, but not for thee.

People are constantly changing their views depending on whether they like or dislike the particular message or the particular speaker. And I can illustrate that just by very recent events.

When Donald Trump and Republicans were running for office, they were campaigning on free speech and against censoring hate speech and against cancel culture. Trump made this a big deal in his inaugural address. And I think his very first executive order—at least it was on the first day of issuing executive orders—was one that was, you know, “we’re going to get rid of censorship and restore free speech.”

And how quickly things have changed. He and his attorney general are now saying, and many other Republicans are now saying, “We should censor hate speech” and “Cancel culture is fine as long as it’s coming from the right rather than from the left.”

But conversely, in fairness, many progressives and Democrats who were in favor of censoring hate speech, who said, “Oh, there’s no such thing as cancel culture, it’s only consequence culture”—now that the power of those concepts is being wielded against messages that they support, their perspective has changed.

I think that those of us who—and I don’t say this at all in a self-righteous way—I really understand people’s fervor about wanting to restrict ideas that they believe are fraught with danger. And it takes… But I do also believe that if I have a chance to explain, giving some current examples and examples from history of how even the best-intended censorship ends up causing more danger than alleviating the danger, then I can persuade people. But you can’t do it in a sound bite. Whereas, you know, saying, “That’s a hateful message, let’s silence the message,” is easy to convey in a sound bite.

One really good example, which has been in the news lately, is burning the American flag—which Donald Trump is yet again saying that we should outlaw. That would require amending the Constitution, because the Supreme Court has held, including with the support of conservative justices, that any law banning or punishing flag burning would squarely violate that bedrock viewpoint neutrality principle.

But I remember at the time that the Supreme Court first reached those holdings, they were so politically unpopular all across the political spectrum. The then-president of the United States, George H. W. Bush, the very next day gave a speech in which he called for amending the Constitution. And we were within one vote of amending the Constitution.

Almost immediately, the House of Representatives passed the constitutional amendment by the mandatory two-thirds vote, and almost immediately, three-quarters of the states supported the constitutional amendment. In the U.S. Senate, it came within one vote of the two-thirds margin.

So when people really detest an expression, it’s just like common sense that we should get rid of it. And I remember speaking to many members of the House and Senate who opposed the constitutional amendment, but they said, “I can’t say that, because I can’t say it in a sound bite. And my opponent—all my opponent has to do is get on TV,” or nowadays they’d say on your podcast. And I guess podcasts give you more time to make the point, but in a TV ad you can’t—it’s a sound bite. My opponent just has to say: “This person supports burning the American flag.” You can’t respond to that quickly.

Sara Arjomand: Right, right. So I guess you just kind of mentioned the FIRE report, which was released a few weeks ago. And I guess for context for listeners—Claremont McKenna, we claimed first place.

Nadine Strossen: Yay! And you’re, I think, the only… It’s the second time you’ve been in first place as the most speech-protective, congenial environment for speech of all the campuses surveyed. This year it was 257, and I think you’re the only school that has ever been number one more than once.

Sara Arjomand: Oh wow! Well, congrats to us, I guess. Right—and Pomona clocked in, unfortunately, at 247 out of 257. And then the other kind of Claremont Colleges, their placements spanned that range. Can you share any insights into the findings from FIRE?

Nadine Strossen: Yes. So first of all, for anybody who’s interested, I highly recommend you to take a look at the report on FIRE’s website. It’s very transparent. All of the data are available, all of the factors that were considered for your university and all of the others are available. And FIRE staff who collaborated in the report openly invite every member of the campus community who’s interested in doing a deeper dive to contact them.

The reasons why Claremont McKenna did so well have to do primarily with excellent policies and a complete absence of any punitive actions by the administration against either faculty or students for engaging in controversial but protected speech.

So, on the policy front: FIRE, as you may know, ranks campuses by red light, yellow light, or green light. A green light means there are no policies that expressly—no express policies—that are inconsistent with First Amendment principles. Sadly, there are very few campuses in the whole country that have a green light rating. So the fact that CMC has that already puts it in a very rarefied category of campuses. Harvard, my alma mater, has a red light rating because it has quite a few policies that, on their face, violate basic free speech principles.

The other two policy vectors that weighed heavily in favor of your positive rating were that: you have adopted some version of the Chicago free speech principles. You’re a private campus, so you’re not bound by the First Amendment itself, but you’ve chosen voluntarily to adhere to principles that are completely consistent with the First Amendment.

And secondly: you have adopted institutional neutrality, which I was just discussing in detail with your wonderful president—who is an expert, and who had personally written the policy, I had not realized that. Basically—the details can vary from campus to campus—but the basic idea is that the college as an institution does not announce positions, does not issue statements on contested matters of public policy, unless they directly affect the mission of the college itself.

So that would mean there would be no CMC statement—or statement from a leader, such as the president—on the war in Gaza. But there could and should be a statement about a Trump administration policy that is directly affecting the university, such as a policy of defunding or of seeking to dictate what the curriculum should be, that violates academic freedom.

So you got top grades on all of those policies. The only area where there was a deficit—and here I have to say I’m going to give you the honest, less positive part of the assessment—is that even though CMC is number one, its grade is still a B–. And barely a B–. That was done by a rounding up, because FIRE does not have grade inflation. It uses the strict traditional curve. I remember B– is the median, right?

And as FIRE’s authors of the report said, we really applaud the schools that are on the top end. But the fact is that they’re just doing less badly, less poorly than the overwhelming majority. Two-thirds of all the campuses in the report—257—two-thirds got F grades.

Where the downside for most schools was in this student survey, where students report a very sad degree of self-censorship—that they don’t feel comfortable having a free and frank and candid conversation about the most important contested issues.

57% percent of students reported—I’m sorry, 51%, could not have such a candid conversation about Israel/Gaza. But the second-highest swath of students nationwide—and your campus was quite typical on this factor—the second most self-censored topic was abortion. Something like 47% said they couldn’t have a frank conversation about abortion. And then right under that was the 2024 elections: 42% of students said they couldn’t frankly discuss the elections.

Sara Arjomand: You sound kind of incredulous. Is this surprising to you?

Nadine Strossen: Yeah—and you’re not?

Sara Arjomand: No, I am. It’s..

Nadine Strossen: The Gaza issue doesn’t surprise me—I know how fraught that is. But I’m really astounded that abortion, among other things… Because statistics do show that campuses are overwhelmingly liberal, and so I would think that the overwhelmingly liberal, predominant portion of the student body would feel very comfortable discussing abortion and advocating a pro-choice perspective.

Here’s a real—this one maybe I’m not as shocked as I would be if I weren’t a free speech crusader: 20% of students say they cannot comfortably discuss free speech. I mean, free speech is seen as being such a controversial topic. Hate speech, which you raised earlier—27% said they can’t comfortably discuss hate speech.

So that is really significant, Sara, because it means free speech was separated from hate speech. So even just plain free speech is considered… what you and I are talking about now, 20% of your classmates, and students all across the country, would not want to have this conversation.

So thank you for being courageous.

Sara Arjomand: No, of course—and thank you. Oh, I guess I’ll just say on the kind of abortion point—I mean, I imagine that it’s probably the pro-life students who are self-censoring. Was that…?

Nadine Strossen: But that would surprise me, that they would reach such a high percentage then, right?

Sara Arjomand: You’re right, that’s strange.

Nadine Strossen: So maybe my arithmetic is wrong. But how could you get to 46% or whatever it was? I doubt that those are all pro-life students.

Sara Arjomand: No, it’s a good point—maybe people who are just kind of less convicted about the pro-choice view?

Nadine Strossen: But anyway, anyway. This is a serious issue that, as I was discussing with some of your faculty members, and FIRE recognizes, is not directly within the control of the administration. So this is a factor that is weighted less heavily, in fairness, I think. Because no matter how good the policies are, students are still—and even if students aren’t afraid that they’re going to be punished by the administration (which, realistically, students here are not going to be punished by the administration or by faculty)—they’re afraid of their peers. And so, you know, peers have to change their own culture. Us old folks can’t do it for you.

Sara Arjomand: Do you have advice for us?

Nadine Strossen: I can only say that, from experience, that to be true to yourself, you have to be comfortable expressing your own views. And to be true to yourself in the sense of also wanting to discover and pursue truth—and having humility that you might not have arrived at perfect truth on your own, especially at your relatively young age. But maybe the older you get, the more aware you become of your own limitations—that it benefits you to listen to people who have different perspectives. You may change your own views; you may discover that you were wrong, or refine your thinking, which is a great benefit. Or you will learn to have empathy and understanding for different views, and have a sharper, more nuanced appreciation of your own views.

So just in terms of being a happy human being, that kind of robust discourse is important. But beyond that, to be an effective and engaged member of our political community, you really have to hone the skills, the desire, and the benefits of engaging in negotiation.

Going back to an earlier point: if you are to be part of a democratic process that resolves conflicts in a peaceful, nonviolent way.

Sara Arjomand: We’re running up against the time here. But if I can ask kind of a final question: was there a case during your tenure at the ACLU that kind of profoundly tested the limits of your free speech commitments? And can you tell me about what you kind of learned from that experience—how you stand up for your principles, even when it’s uncomfortable?

Nadine Strossen: I have to say that, in terms of the principle, I never found it hard. And I don’t say that in a self-righteous way—it’s the opposite. I mean, I never was somebody who felt a conflict between hating an idea and wondering whether it should be censored.

Although I’m always open to evidence. I engage with every anti–free speech argument I can, and I’m always looking for data. But all of the information I’ve seen has convinced me that the most effective way to counter an idea that is dangerous is through more speech, rather than censorship. So from that perspective, it’s never been hard.

But in terms of the personal blowback I’ve gotten—it was quite painful when I wrote a book that was published in 1995 called Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights.

At the time—and to some extent this has continued, though not nearly as dramatically—there was a big division among feminists (of which I have always considered myself to be one), between the so-called radical feminists, who believed that a certain category of sexual expression, that was from their perspective demeaning or degrading or dehumanizing to women perpetuated discriminatory attitudes toward women, which fostered not only discrimination but also violence against women, including rape and other forms of sexual assault. And so therefore, they used the term pornography to apply to that category of sexual expression. 

And others of us—classical liberal feminists, civil libertarian feminists, if you will—who were very concerned about fighting against discrimination and violence against women, but believed that censorship, again, no matter how well-intended, would do more harm than good. This was based on a lot of history of laws against sexual expression targeting feminist expression, expression and information about contraception and abortion, about LGBTQ sexuality, about women’s health.

So there was a lot of free speech from the so-called radical camp. And I say “so-called radical” because, to me, it was a profoundly reactionary viewpoint—but, you know, we’ll use the term that was commonly used.

They engaged in what other people would call hate speech against myself and colleagues of mine. It didn’t particularly hurt me—I had developed very thick skin by that point—but it hurt me to see the pain that was caused to my husband in particular.

I think each of us—we’re very well partnered, very fortunate—each of us gets more distressed and hurt about somebody who is hurting the other one. So very nasty things were said about me that were hard on him. He didn’t like the publicity. He’s a big free speech supporter, but those were troubling times.

Sara Arjomand: How has kind of the reception of that book—and obviously it was difficult then—how do you think it would be received if you published it today?

Nadine Strossen: It’s funny that you should ask, because two years ago NYU Press got in touch with me and said, “You know, this book is as relevant and timely as ever, because we’ve seen an increased volume of attacks on sexual expression using the rubric of pornography and obscenity.” And it’s mostly been wielded by the right against curriculum materials and library materials in schools and in public libraries that have to do with feminism and abortion and LGBTQ writers and perspectives.

I should say, at the time that I wrote the book, I documented that under either the radical feminist definition or the traditional obscenity definition—no matter what you labeled it and how you defined it—any attack on sexual expression disproportionately silenced not only feminist expression, but also LGBTQ expression. That was a major theme in my book, and that really has come home to roost.

So NYU Press said, “We want to republish the book as part of our NYU Classics series. Will you write a new preface for it?” And I said yes. So that happened. It came out in 2023.

Sadly, I think the feminists have become—there’s less support, although it hasn’t gone away. I have debated feminists who share my goals of protecting women’s dignity and privacy and autonomy, and they’ve been primarily concerned about so-called revenge porn, or non-consensual intimate imagery.

And there, I would say we have a basic agreement—if the law is sufficiently narrowly defined. Beyond that, the #MeToo movement and the movement against sexual harassment is very important, but too often it has been too expansive, to include any sexual expression no matter how well-intended or justified—including serious academic discussion, serious artistic expression.

I think the best-known example there is Laura Kipnis, a film studies professor at Northwestern, who wrote an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education in which she was opposing over-expansive concepts of sexual harassment as extending to expression, including serious academic discussions of sexuality and gender. Ironically, some students complained that her essay constituted sexual harassment, and she was subjected to what she called the “Title IX Inquisition,” sort of kangaroo court proceedings. She wrote a whole book about it. So the problems, unfortunately, persist.

Sara Arjomand: Well, thank you so much for speaking to me. I really appreciate it.

Nadine Strossen: Well, right back at you, Sara. Thank you for defending and exercising free speech so effectively. Thank you.