Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression

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The FIRE logo.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is a non-profit group whose stated concerns involve civil liberties in academia in the United States. Founded in 1999, according to their website FIRE's mission is "to defend and sustain individual rights at America's increasingly repressive and partisan colleges and universities," including the rights to "freedom of speech, legal equality, due process, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience." [1] One of the Foundation's main activities has been criticism and action against what it calls campus "speech codes"; the schools themselves usually refer to these as "anti-harassment" policies or similar. It has also taken controversial stances on campus sexual conduct policies, and in support of the funding and operation of "expressive" student organizations, in particular campus religious organizations, that may discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or religious belief in membership. See below for a discussion of particular cases.

According to the group, a recent survey [2], funded by the John Templeton Foundation, has shown that college students and administrators are "woefully ignorant" of First Amendment rights guaranteed by the United States Bill of Rights.

FIRE maintains a blog, The Torch [3], and a detailed listing of universities in the United States. Their site gathers together each university's various harassment and hate speech policies, as well as any "Advertised Commitments to Freedom of Speech". On the basis of these and media reports, FIRE then assigns each institution a color code: green ("no serious threats to free speech"), yellow ("some policies that could ban or excessively regulate protected speech") or red ("at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech").

FIRE rates most institutions "yellow"; of the eight universities of the traditional Ivy League, two are rated "green" (Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania), four are rated "red" (Brown, Cornell, Harvard and Princeton) and the rest are rated "yellow".

FIRE's leadership and sources of funding

FIRE's current president is Greg Lukianoff, a self-described "pro-choice liberal" [4], who served as interim president after the retirement of David French. He was named permanent president of FIRE on March 23, 2006.

FIRE's first Executive Director and CEO was Thor Halvorssen (Mendoza), a prominent civil liberties and human rights advocate; he headed FIRE from its creation in 1999 until 2004. Nat Hentoff, a former ACLU member and now a vocal critic of that group, is on FIRE's "Board of Advisors"; a full list of FIRE's Board of Advisors [5] includes a number of lawyers and academics, including the philosopher John Searle, conservative author Christina Hoff Sommers, and former Reagan advisor T. Kenneth Cribb Jr.. While FIRE sometimes finds itself in opposition to the ACLU, the Board of Advisors also includes Woody Kaplan, a board member of the ACLU's Massachusetts chapter, as is FIRE cofounder Harvey Silverglate. FIRE's "Board of Directors" includes Marlene Mieske who is on the board of the David Horowitz Freedom Center (formerly the Center for the Study of Popular Culture) [6], Virginia Postrel, the former editor of libertarian Reason Magazine and Daphne Patai, an outspoken critic of "academic feminism".

FIRE's cofounders are Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate; Silverglate is still active with the organization as Chairman and serves on the Board of Directors. Kors is no longer on the board. [7]

Alan Kors has been identified as a right-wing civil libertarian, and Silverglate as a left-wing civil libertarian, by the National Review. [8] Kors, appointed by the first President Bush to the National Endowment for the Humanities, once signed his name to court briefs filed by Academics for the Second Amendment. Kors teaches intellectual history at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds the George H. Walker chair.

The depiction of Silverglate as "left wing," however, has drawn controversy. On the one hand, Silverglate is praised by conservative organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, has angered some liberals with his positions on hate speech legislation such as Virginia v. Black [9], and has referred to Bill Clinton as a "cad and criminal" [10]; on the other, Silverglate was the former president, and is a current board member, of the Massachusetts ACLU, has opposed much of the Bush administration's policies on torture and indefinite detention, and has publicly taken liberal positions on issues such as gay marriage, gays in the military, abortion, and the death penalty [11].

FIRE's political orientation

FIRE itself has no stated political affiliation and does not endorse candidates for office; however, in contrast to many other groups that describe themselves as concerned with civil liberties, FIRE has received much greater praise and support from commentators on the right, including in a number of articles in Front Page Magazine and Townhall.com. An article by the Center for Media and Democracy linked FIRE with a number of conservative groups such as Young America's Foundation and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni [12]. FIRE's leadership has reacted strongly against the suggestion that they are a "conservative" group, and list a number of cases in which they undertook a defense of professors or students with left-wing views [13]. FIRE's current president identifies himself as a liberal.[14]

Cases taken by FIRE

In their first major case, FIRE intervened on behalf of a Fundamentalist Christian group at Tufts University that was banned from campus for discriminating against a lesbian member. The group acknowledged that the member in question was allowed to remain in the group but prevented from serving on their "Leadership Council" because of her sexuality. FIRE's intervention was based on freedom of religion: they argued that students should be allowed to act upon religious beliefs that include a condemnation of homosexuality, and compared the group's actions to a hypothetical "Gay Students Association" preventing the nomination to their board of a conservative Christian.

FIRE has also criticized Columbia University's sexual misconduct policy [15]; according to FIRE, the policy "lack[ed] even the most minimal safeguards and fundamental principles of fairness." [16] That controversy led to the resignation of Charlene Allen, Columbia's program coordinator for the Office of Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Education, whose policies were at the center of the controversy. Allen's resignation was considered in part due to FIRE's activism [17].

FIRE has been involved in another Columbia campus controversy, this time against both the ACLU and the University administration, in supporting the actions of the David Project, a group claiming a pattern of anti-Semitic harassment by professors in the Middle Eastern studies department [18], [19].

FIRE has taken up a number of other cases. Among others, it supported Linda McCarriston, a poet, professor and self-described socialist at the University of Alaska, Anchorage in a complicated case that found McCarriston accused of bigotry [20]. It joined with a number of other civil liberties groups in the case of Hosty v. Carter, involving suppression of a student newspaper at Governors State University in Illinois, and has been involved in a case at Arizona State University where it condemned the listing of a class as open only to Native American students [21].

External links

• FIRE's main site
• FIRE's guides
• FrontPage Magazine article
• SourceWatch entry on FIRE
• MediaTransparency FIRE donor list