User:Dachannien/Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

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. FIRE's stated mission is "to defend and sustain individual rights at America's colleges and universities," including the rights to "freedom of speech, legal equality, due process, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience&mdash;the essential qualities of individual liberty and dignity". One of FIRE's main activities has been criticism of and action against administrators who it believes have violated the First Amendment or the due process rights of college and university students and professors. FIRE lists over 170 such instances on its website.

FIRE was founded in 1999 by Alan Charles Kors, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvey A. Silverglate, a civil-liberties lawyer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Silverglate is currently the chairman of the organization's board of directors, while Kors is Chairman Emeritus.

Issues
One of the primary focuses of FIRE is its opposition to regulations on expression within the setting of higher education that are sometimes called speech codes. The group has targeted college and university sexual harassment policies, racial harassment policies, and policies concerning student-run campus organizations including religious groups and fraternities. In particular, they cite Constitutional considerations when regulations on free speech are in place at state-funded schools. FIRE also targets cases where students and faculty are adjudicated outside the bounds of due process afforded to them by Constitutional law or stated university policy.

FIRE maintains a blog, The Torch, and a detailed listing of universities in the United States called Spotlight, which gathers together each university's various speech policies, as well as any non-policy statements regarding the school's commitment to freedom of expression. On the basis of these and media reports, FIRE then assigns each institution a color code: green, when they judge that there are no serious threats to free speech; yellow, if they find policies that they believe could ban or excessively regulate protected speech; or red, if they find at least one policy that they feel both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech.

FIRE rates most institutions "red". Of the eight universities of the Ivy League, two schools, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania, are rated "green"; two, Yale and Columbia, are rated "yellow"; and the rest, Brown, Cornell, Harvard and Princeton, are rated "red".

In April of 2007, Jon B. Gould criticized FIRE's rating methods, claiming that FIRE had grossly exaggerated the prevalence of unconstitutional speech codes.

'''In a press release, FIRE characterized the results of a survey it had commissioned (and which was funded by the John Templeton Foundation) as indicating that college students and administrators are "woefully ignorant" of First Amendment rights guaranteed by the United States Bill of Rights. While the FIRE's statement repeatedly mentions the respondents' apparent lack of awareness of the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of freedom of religion, the press release does not mention that the same survey finds that "when asked to name any of the specific rights that are guaranteed by the First Amendment" (emphasis added), 85% of college administrators and 73% of college students mentioned "freedom of speech." '''

FIRE's leadership
FIRE's current president is Greg Lukianoff, a self-described "pro-choice liberal", who served as interim president after the retirement of David French, who left FIRE to head the Alliance Defense Fund's Center for Academic Freedom. Lukianoff was named permanent president of FIRE on March 23 2006.

FIRE was co-founded by Alan Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate, who were FIRE's co-directors until 2004. Kors served as FIRE's first president and chairperson. Its first executive director and, later, CEO, was Thor Halvorssen (Mendoza) (described by The New York Times as a "conservative" and by himself as a "classical liberal" ), who left in 2004 to create the Human Rights Foundation. 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 includes a number of lawyers and academics, including the philosopher John Searle, 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 Wendy Kaminar and Woody Kaplan, who have served as board members of the ACLU's Massachusetts chapter, as has FIRE co-founder Harvey A. Silverglate. FIRE's "Board of Directors" includes mental-health advocate Marlene Mieske, who is on the board of the David Horowitz Freedom Center (formerly the Center for the Study of Popular Culture), Virginia Postrel, the former editor of libertarian Reason Magazine and Daphne Patai, an outspoken critic of academic gender feminism. Silverglate is still active with the organization as chairman and serves on the Board of Directors, while Kors stepped down from the Board in 2006. 

Silverglate's stands on civil liberties have garnered supporters and critics across the political spectrum. On the one hand, Silverglate is praised by conservative organizations such as the Heritage Foundation ; he has angered some liberals with his positions on hate speech case law (such as Virginia v. Black) and referred to Bill Clinton as a "cad and criminal". On the other hand, 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 the treatment and terms of detention of prisoners, and he has publicly taken liberal positions on issues such as gay marriage, gays in the military, abortion, and the death penalty.

FIRE's political orientation
FIRE itself has no stated political affiliation; however, in contrast to many other groups that describe themselves as concerned with civil liberties, FIRE has received both praise and support from conservative commentators, including in David Horowitz's Front Page Magazine and the Heritage Foundation's Townhall.com. (For example, Front Page Magazine featured a story on FIRE's cooperation with the Alliance Defense Fund and conservative columnist Mike S. Adams has approvingly referred to "the hard work of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education" . FIRE cites over 20 columns by Adams on its own website and is itself listed as a contributor of eight columns to Front Page Magazine ) It has received funding from conservative sources such as the John Templeton Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and others.

An article by the Center for Media and Democracy described FIRE as a "conservative" organization that shares many of the goals of David Horowitz's Students for Academic Freedom, along with Young America's Foundation, the self-proclaimed "principal outreach organization of the Conservative Movement", and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), a group whose founders include Lynne Cheney and Senator Joseph Lieberman. Charles Mitchell, then a FIRE program officer and currently an ACTA program director and blogger, reacted strongly to the suggestion that FIRE is a "conservative" group, and listed a number of cases in which FIRE undertook a defense of professors or students with left-wing views.

FIRE has frequently aligned itself with or cited the work of the Alliance Defense Fund, whose stated purpose is "to aggressively defend religious liberty" and whose issues also include "guarding the sanctity of human life" and "protecting traditional family values". As noted above, FIRE's former president David French stepped down to join the ADF.

Since April of 2006, French has also been a regular contributor to Phi Beta Cons, a blog hosted on the website of the prominent conservative magazine National Review. FIRE's former CEO, Thor Halvorssen, is a member of ACTA's Society of Fellows.

FIRE's current president identifies himself as a Democrat and asserts that "accusations of conservatism used to hurt [his] feelings."

Cases taken by FIRE
At Tufts University in 2000, FIRE defended a Christian group that had been derecognized by the university for refusing to allow a homosexual student to take a leadership position in the group, although the student was permitted to remain a member of the group. FIRE defended the group on religious freedom grounds, arguing that members of student groups that have an expressive purpose should be allowed to organize and operate religious groups based on that expressive purpose.

FIRE has also criticized Columbia University's sexual misconduct policy ; according to FIRE, the policy "lack[ed] even the most minimal safeguards and fundamental principles of fairness". 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.

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.

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 case in which the University was investigating her for a poem she had published on sexual abuse involving Native Alaskans. After FIRE intervened, the president of the University of Alaska, Mark Hamilton, in explicit response to FIRE, ordered that the investigation cease, on constitutional grounds, stating that "there was nothing to investigate"; he was formally commended for defending academic freedom by the Democratic governor of Alaska, and by unanimous vote of both houses of the Alaska legislature. . FIRE 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.

In 2007, it took issue with the University of Delaware's Office of Residence Life Diversity Facilitation Training document, which teaches that the term racist "applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality". "This gem of wisdom suggests that by virtue of birth alone, not conduct," wrote Walter E. Williams about this "racist nonsense" which was eventually dropped, "if you're white, you're a racist".

FIRE sent a letter to the President of University of Florida on November 29, 2007 expressing outrage because the Vice-Chancellor had sent a mass email condemning a showing of the movie Obession: Radical Islam's War against the West and calling for an apology from those responsible. The state Attorny General had threatened legal action due to possible freedom of speech violations. Two weeks later, the Vice-Chancellor and President signed a follow-up statement retracting the call for apology.