Apparently, I’m not the only one who feels misrepresented by The New York Times. Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, was also quoted in the Times piece on Indoctrinate U. Here’s his reaction:

I am, to say the least, disappointed by Joseph Berger’s column in The New York Times today concerning Evan Maloney’s film “Indoctrinate U” and free speech on campus in general. I have been corresponding with Joe for several weeks, and even had lunch with him this past Friday. I had hoped that after such extensive interaction, I had demonstrated to him that a serious and ongoing free speech problem exists on campus. I also hoped that I had convinced him that taking student fee funding away from a student newspaper for printing a controversial article is censorship. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

As for the article, I don’t know which is worse: that Berger uses the single example of Vassar College’s handling of a controversial article as a tool to refute the idea that there is a serious censorship problem on campus, or that he chose to praise the outcome of a case in which the school did, in fact, punish a student publication for what would be clearly protected speech outside Vassar’s gates.

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As for using Vassar as the sole counterpoint to “Indoctrinate U’s” presentation of the illiberal academy, Berger cannot claim that he did not have enough examples. At his request, I sent him links to our entire case archive, our 2006 report on speech codes, summaries of our cases at Glendale Community College, Marquette University, SUNY Fredonia, Washington State University, the University of New Hampshire, and Hampton University, as well as our letter to Mayor Bloomberg and details about the Tufts case.

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Despite all of this information, my major contribution to the piece seems to be that I “acknowledged that campus freedom of expression has improved since the low points of the 1990s.” This is my opinion, but I also said: (1) that the situation on campus with regards to speech is actually worse than it appears in “Indoctrinate U”; (2) that speech codes are paradoxically more common than ever; and (3) that I think that the improvement I refer to has been in no small part the result of the attention FIRE and our co-founders Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silverglate have been able to bring to the problem on campus.

So, yes, I am disappointed. I enjoyed meeting Joe Berger, I liked him, I appreciated his interest in FIRE’s issues, but it seems that after spending hours getting him information about the very serious problems on campus, he left our meeting on Friday believing exactly what he believed when he came into the meeting—the problem on campus just ain’t that bad. It’s a shame, too. FIRE could use the help of the Gray Lady in fighting campus censorship, but apparently we’ll have to keep waiting.