I spoke to Lukianoff about what’s changed since the publication of his Atlantic cover story, how parenting contributes to students’ expectations for their education, and the increasingly blurred lines between engaging with ideas and endorsing them. An edited and condensed transcript of our conversation is below.

Julie Beck: When you first published “The Coddling of the American Mind” as a magazine piece, did you get different reactions from students, from professors, and from the lay public not currently enrolled or working at universities?

Greg Lukianoff: Definitely. Since we were talking about topics that are very dearly held by some students, trigger warnings in particular. Trigger warnings produced the strongest reaction in the entire article. We were kind of expecting a reaction more like what I’ve seen on campus, some amount of “very interesting,” and a very large backlash.

Instead what we got, to our surprise and delight, was mostly a really good conversation. There were definitely people who disagreed with us, there’s always name-calling, but overall it was actually a really good discussion. We only really noticed the discussion starting to change around the protests in late 2015, which began after the article came out.

The protests were usually on racial-justice issues. One of the ones that got the most attention was at the University of Missouri. The first we noticed at FIRE was at Wesleyan. That was a case in which a student wrote an article that was critical of some of the tactics and positions of Black Lives Matter. And that led to demands that the newspaper, the Wesleyan Argus, stop receiving funding. Those protests, for those of us who defend free speech for a living, were a mixed bag. On the one hand we were like, this is great, students are overcoming their reputation for apathy, they’re getting out there and protesting for ideas they believe in. But at the same time, a lot of times they were calling for administrators and professors to be fired for what they said, in some cases for very clearly protected speech. That puts the free-speech defender in a little bit of a difficult situation.

Beck: In the three years since the article, how have you seen free-speech issues on campus evolve?

Lukianoff: I’d say everything’s speeding up. I usually describe my career as a bunch of trends. The first trend is, from about 2001 to 2011, the main thing we were fighting and trying to push back against was administrative censorship. I say over and over again, the students were always the best constituency for free speech. After 2011, and reaching a peak around 2013, the Department of Education started giving guidance that was really vague and broad. They stated that harassment happens any time you experience unwelcome speech of a sexual nature. In the case of that 2013 blueprint, they took out the requirement that it be something that a reasonable person would find offensive. Phase three was when we started noticing the trends that led me to talk to Jon Haidt—a sudden, seemingly overnight rise in what I call student illiberalism. And that was a real shock to us at FIRE. We like defending students. But if what you’re trying to do is shout down a speaker or prevent someone you disagree with from even coming to your campus, that’s not compatible with what higher education is supposed to be like. We wrote the article in 2015 partially in response to that.