Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

From RationalWiki
Jump to: navigation, search

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, claims to be a nonpartisan organization that fights to defend the free speech rights of faculty and students on campus. On paper, this sounds like a legitimate goal, given recent controversies with zero tolerance policies. But FIRE is, in fact, a stealth conservative organization with documented financial ties to the John Birch Society and other far-right political groups in the United States.[1] FIRE holds to a particularly extreme interpretation of the First Amendment which, taken to its conclusion, would seem to imply that Supreme Court cases on the limits of student expression like Tinker v. Des Moines, Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, and Bethel School District v. Fraser never happened.

FIRE has received extensive funding from right-wing foundations like the Scaife Foundation. The cases they take are almost always on behalf of a conservative cause. They will occasionally take on individual progressive or apolitical clients, but never a progressive cause. FIRE has become particularly infamous for campaigning against the Obama administration's attempts to reform sexual assault and harassment codes on college campuses, claiming that it would have a chilling effect on free speech.[2] Because apparently some asshole shouting "Hey, sugartits!" at a female classmate is just as worthy of First Amendment protection as students peacefully protesting their college's choice of commencement speaker. Except, apparently, when it's not, as this is contradicted by FIRE's own president Greg Lukianoff, who considers the protests "the natural result of speech codes" and evidence of a liberal bias in higher education.[3]

FIRE’s leadership is made up of some seriously connected conservatives, most notably Kenneth Cribb, who leads the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an organization with the goal of building young right-wing leaders and creating a right-wing movement on college campuses nationwide. FIRE often claims to be neutral, and even tries to pose as progressive at times. They use this strategy to confuse moderates and progressives who would usually disagree with them. Plus, their former executive director, Thor Halvorssen, told former Students Active For Ending Rape (SAFER) leader Sarah Richardson that FIRE’s goal with regard to campus sexual assault policies is to abolish them altogether.

As of 2008, FIRE's Board of Advisors included the following notable people:

  • T. Kenneth Cribb, former Reagan official. 'Nuff said.
  • Nat Hentoff, author and columnist. Holds what may be described as idiosyncratic views. He espouses generally liberal views on domestic policy and civil liberties, but in the 1980s, he began articulating more socially conservative positions—opposed to abortion, voluntary euthanasia, and the selective medical treatment of severely disabled infants.
  • Roy Innis, National Chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, "better known among real civil rights groups for renting out its historic name to any corporation in need of a black front person".[4]
  • Wendy Kaminer, lawyer, "equality" feminist, social critic and free speech fundamentalist. Advocates that the First Amendment allows anti-abortionists to lure women into disguised "counseling sessions" and laments that Christian student groups aren't allowed to discriminate against gay students.[5]
  • Leonard Liggio, author, law professor, and board member of several libertarian think tanks. Died in Oct. 2014.
  • Herbert London, president of the Hudson Institute. He's an anomaly in New York politics as a pro-life Jewish member of the Conservative Party.
  • John Searle, Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley. Adopted a neoconservative interventionist foreign policy after 9/11.
  • Christina Hoff Sommers, author, "equity feminist" and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

[edit] Footnotes

  1. Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
  2. Conservatives Slam Efforts to Address Rampant Sexual Harassment As ‘De-Eroticizing Universities’
  3. "Everything is political these days. Even commencement speeches', The Washington Post May 14, 2014.
  4. [1] Mother Jones
  5. The American Liberal Liberties Union
Personal tools
Namespaces

Variants
Actions
Navigation
Community
Tools
support