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. Image File history File links FIRElogo. ... Image File history File links FIRElogo. ... A non-profit organization (often called non-profit org or simply non-profit or not-for-profit) can be seen as an organization that doesnt have a goal to make a profit. ... The examples and perspective in this article do not represent a worldwide view. ... Due process of law is a legal concept that ensures the government will respect all of a persons legal rights instead of just some or most of those legal rights, when the government deprives a person of life, liberty, or property. ... Conscience is generally thought of as a moral faculty, sense, or feeling that impels individuals to believe that particular activities are morally right or wrong. ... A speech code is any rule or regulation that limits, restricts, or bans speech beyond the strict legal limitations upon freedom of speech or press found in the legal definitions of harassment, slander, libel, and fighting words. ...

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. The mission of the John Templeton Foundation (usually referred to as the Templeton Foundation) is, according to its website, to pursue new insights at the boundary between theology and science through a rigorous, open-minded and empirically focused methodology, drawing together talented representatives from a wide spectrum of fields of... The first ten Amendments to the U.S. Constitution make up the Bill of Rights. ... The Bill of Rights is the name given to the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution. ...

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"). A blog is a website for which an individual or a group frequently generates text, photographs, video or audio files, and/or links, typically (but not always) on a daily basis. ...

FIRE rates most institutions "yellow"; of the eight universities of the traditional Ivy League, two are rated "green" (Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania), three are rated "red" (Cornell, Harvard and Princeton) and the rest are rated "yellow". The Ivy League is an athletic conference, founded in 1954, of eight institutions of higher education located in the eastern United States. ... Dartmouth College is a small private university in Hanover, New Hampshire, and a member of the Ivy League. ... The University of Pennsylvania (Penn is the nickname used by the university itself; UPenn is also common) is a private, nonsectarian, research university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ... Cornell University is a research university based in Ithaca, New York. ... Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and a member of the Ivy League. ... Princeton University, located in Princeton, New Jersey, is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States. ...

FIRE's leadership and sources of funding

FIRE's current president is David French who previously served as counsel for the evangelical Christian group InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. French will step down in December 31 [4]; FIRE's Director of Legal and Public Advocacy attorney Greg Lukianoff, a self-described "pro-choice liberal" [5], will serve as interim president until a new president can be found. [6] Evangelicalism, in a strictly lexical, but rarely used sense, refers to all things that are implied in belief that Jesus is the savior. ... InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, commonly referred to as InterVarsity or simply IV, is a nondenominational, evangelical Christian ministry for college students. ...

FIRE's first Executive Director and CEO was Thor Halvorssen, 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 [7] 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 volunteer of the ACLU's Massachusetts chapter. FIRE's "Board of Directors" includes Michael Meyers, a national vice president of the ACLU, Marlene Mieske, also on the board of the David Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture [8], Virginia Postrel, the former editor of libertarian Reason Magazine and Daphne Patai, an outspoken critic of "academic feminism". Thor Halvorssen is a prominent conservative activist [1]. Halvorssen was the first executive director and chief executive officer of the conservative organization the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). ... Nat Hentoff (born June 10, 1925) is a civil libertarian, free speech absolutist, pro-life advocate, anti-death penalty advocate, jazz critic, historian, biographer and anecdotist, and columnist for the Village Voice, Legal Times, Washington Times, The Progressive, Editor & Publisher, Free Inquiry and Jewish World Review. ... The American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, is a non_governmental organization devoted to defending civil rights and civil liberties in the United States. ... Image:Searlepic. ... Christina Hoff Sommers is an American author who researches culture, adolescents, and morality in American society. ... T. Kenneth Cribb Jr. ... The American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, is a non_governmental organization devoted to defending civil rights and civil liberties in the United States. ... Michael Meyers is President and Executive Director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition (NYCRC), which he co-founded in 1986. ... The Center for the Study of Popular Culture is an American Libertarian Conservative campaigning group. ... Virginia Postrel is a political and cultural writer of broadly libertarian, or classical liberal, views. ... This article deals with the libertarianism as defined in America and several other nations. ... The libertarian Reason Magazine dedicated an issue to Ayn Rands influence one hundred years after her birth. ...

FIRE's cofounders are Alan Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate; they both now serve on the Board of Directors. President George W. Bush and Laura Bush stand with 2005 National Humanities Medal recipient Alan Kors. ...

Kors has been identified as a right-wing civil libertarian, and Silverglate as a left-wing civil libertarian, by the National Review [9]. 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 [10], and has referred to Bill Clinton as a "cad and criminal" [11]; 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 [12]. National Review (NR) is a conservative political magazine founded by author William F. Buckley, Jr. ... The Heritage Foundation, a think tank located in Washington, D.C., is an influential public policy research institute. ... , a First Amendment case decided in the Supreme Court in 2003, created a new category of restrictable speech: the true threat, where inquiry hinges not on the speaker’s intent but on the perception of the listener in question. ... William Jefferson Bill Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe, III on August 19, 1946) was the 42nd President of the United States, serving from 1993 to 2001. ...

According to MediaTransparency [13], FIRE has been the receipient of numerous grants, totalling millions of dollars, from US-based right-wing conservative organizations, including the Randolph Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Earhart Foundation, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation. MediaTransparency is a project which monitors the financial ties of Conservative groups. ... The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is a large and influential right-wing foundation with about half a billion US dollars in assets. ... The Earhart Foundation is a foundation that funds research and scholarship. ... This article lacks information on the subject matters importance. ...

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 [14]. 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 [15]. FrontPageMag. ... The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) is an American-based media research group founded in 1993 by environmentalist writer and political activist John Stauber. ... Young Americas Foundation is a conservative youth organization, with a focus on sharing conservative ideas with students through conferences, campus lectures, seminars, posters, and activism initiatives. ... The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) was founded in 1995 by Lynne Cheney; Senator Joseph Lieberman is a member of its national council. ...

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. Fundamentalist Christianity is a fundamentalist movement, especially within American Protestantism. ... Tufts University is a private university located in Medford, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. ... Lesbian describes a homosexual woman. ... Since its inception, the word homosexuality has acquired multiple meanings. ...

FIRE has also criticized Columbia University's sexual misconduct policy [16]; according to FIRE, the policy "lack[ed] even the most minimal safeguards and fundamental principles of fairness." [17] 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 [18]. Some activists who opposed FIRE reported receiving unpleasant emails and threatening telephone calls that they believed were instigated by the foundation [19]; FIRE claimed opponents tore down posters announcing a campus discussion on the controversy [20]. Columbia University is a private university in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. ...

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 [21], [22]. The Eternal Jew: 1937 German poster. ...

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 [23]. 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 [24]. Poets are authors of poems, or of other forms of poetry such as dramatic verse. ... A professor (Latin: one who claims publicly to be an expert) (prof for short) is a senior teacher, lecturer and researcher, usually in a college or university. ... The color red and particularly the red flag are traditional symbols of Socialism. ... The University of Alaska Anchorage is the largest member of the University of Alaska System. ... Arizona State University (ASU) is the largest university in terms of enrollment in the United States with a main campus student body of 51,612. ... Assiniboin Boy, an Atsina Native Americans in the United States (also Indians, American Indians, First Americans, Indigenous Peoples, Aboriginal Peoples, Aboriginal Americans, Amerindians, Amerinds, or Original Americans) are those indigenous peoples within the territory that is now encompassed by the continental United States, and their descendants in modern times. ...

External links

• FIRE's main site
• FIRE's guides

• FrontPage Magazine article
• TownHall article
• SourceWatch entry on FIRE
• MediaTransparency FIRE donor list