With the war in Gaza dividing college campuses across the country, Greg Lukianoff believes this difficult moment reveals the depth of the free-speech crisis in higher education. As president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonprofit organization devoted to protecting speech, Lukianoff has observed up close the dissolution of campus discourse over the past decade. “It’s particularly ugly right now, but things have been bad for a long time,” he says.

Lukianoff’s nonpartisan group, known as FIRE, pledges to fight censorship from all directions. This means backing an economics professor at the University of Southern California who has been barred from campus for making anti-Hamas remarks to pro-Palestinian student protesters but also defending chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine against bans at various public universities.