fire bak
capt 519
SEE ENSTROM
see academic suppression CRT
praise meta // x ** Meta has donated to FIRE.
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AN 6 25
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt is now being raked over the coals in response to her call for ABC to censor a journalist who criticized President Donald Trump and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.
In a Sunday tweet, Keavitt posted a screenshot of a now-deleted post by ABC News' Terry Moran — who — and called on his employer to punish him over his "unhinged and unacceptable" critique of the administration. Moran opined in the post that Miller was not "the brains behind Trumpism" but a "world-class hater" whose "bile" is his "spiritual nourishment." He then said that Trump was also a "world-class hater" whose own "spiritual nourishment" was "his own glorification."
"We have reached out to @ABC to inquire about how they plan to hold Terry accountable," Leavitt tweeted, while mentioning the network's official handle on X.
READ MORE:'Destroyed their credibility': MAGA turns on Trump officials unable to prove conspiracies
Leavitt's tweet was quickly met with widespread condemnation, prompting Daily Beast columnist Julia Davis to ask: "What happened to the First Amendment?" Cybersecurity expert Robert Graham opined that Leavitt's call for ABC to "censor" Moran reflected that Trump's second term was "not the 'free speech presidency,' but quite the opposite." And Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) First Amendment litigator J.T. Morris observed that criticizing people in power is "as American as apple pie – and vital for freedom."
"That's why the First Amendment protects it from thin-skinned officials who would shut it down," he added. "Hopefully, ABC responds with 'get bent.'"
"[Moran] shouldn't have taken the post down," tweeted Never Trump conservative attorney George Conway. "He's a reporter. And he was reporting facts."
Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann also weighed in, saying that Trump and Miller were "everything Moran described." Calling Leavitt "anti-democracy" and "anti-American," Olbermann added that Leavitt "needs to stick to her lane," which he characterized as "covering up the emergence of a dictatorship."
READ MORE:'Not going to buckle': Republican warns Senate he'll tank Trump's bill over this provision
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AN 4 25
One prestigious journal for doctors who work in pulmonary health is now confirming the receipt of a letter sent by Ed Martin, who is the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia in President Donald Trump's Department of Justice.
NBC News reported Friday that the CHEST journal — which is published by the 22,000-member American College of Chest Physicians (ACCP) — got a letter from Martin asking various questions about its editorial practices. This reportedly included whether it was influenced by advertisers, allowed for "viewpoint diversity" and if it protects readers from misinformation.
"“It has been brought to my attention that more and more journals and publications like CHEST Journal are conceding that they are partisans in various scientific debates,” the letter read, which also warned editors: “You have certain responsibilities.”
READ MORE:**Here's how Trump aims to make taxpayers foot the bill for is E. Jean Carroll settlement**
Eric Reinhart, who is a Chicago-based clinician, political anthropologist and social psychiatrist, obtained a copy of the letter and posted it to his X account. He called on editors of journals like CHEST to form a unified opposition to the administration.
"The Trump regime is now using US Attorneys to intimidate academic journals by sending them letters demanding they explain how they ensure ‘viewpoint diversity,'" Reinhart tweeted. "Journal editors should be public about this and coordinate to refuse to comply with these fascist tactics."
JT Morris, who is a senior supervising attorney for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), expressed a similar sentiment regarding Martin's letter to the CHEST journal.
“It’s really unusual when you see a U.S. Attorney from the Distinct of Columbia sending a letter to a publication based in Illinois inquiring about their editorial practices, in particular, a journal from a medical organization,” Morris said. “That screams of a government official going after a publication because it disagrees with what the publication is saying.”
READ MORE:**George Conway predicts Trump's 'inner rage' will make him 'lose again and again' in court**
Click here to read NBC's report in its entirety.
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an 4 25
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr is threatening to revoke the licenses of broadcasters who don’t toe the current administration's line on the wrongful deportation of a legal U.S. resident.
“Comcast outlets spent days misleading the American public—implying that [Maryland father Kilmar] Abrego Garcia was merely a law-abiding U.S. citizen, just a regular ‘Maryland man.’ When the truth comes out, they ignore it,” Carr posted on X Wednesday. “Comcast knows that federal law requires its licensed operations to serve the public interest. News distortion doesn’t cut it.”
Carr then repeated false claims that Garcia “was validated as a member of the violent MS13 gang — a transnational criminal organization,” despite the administration's evidence resting its entire argument of Garcia's gang affiliation upon him "wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie” and the claim of a confidential informant who has not stepped forward.
READ MORE: 'Cannot and will not support': 12 Republicans just dealt a blow to Johnson’s budget bill
Carr’s statement comes on the heels of the Trump administration purging officials and independent agencies in an effort to remake government in his image.
Reaction to Carr’s post on X was quick.
“Chair of the FCC threatens broadcasters that don't peddle the administration's lies about a man who they sent to a hellish prison in another country probably for life,” wrote Harvard Medical School Assistant Professor Adam Gaffney. “Nothing to see here, all is well.”
Former NH Magazine reporter Jesse Singal said it was “insane,” for the “chair of the FCC, a longtime close Trump ally, threatening broadcasters for not serving as megaphones for this administration's endless b------t.”
READ MORE:'Not going to flinch': Expert predicts Supreme Court will hand Trump another 9-0 loss
“The FCC chair should not be implicitly threatening broadcasters on the basis of news channels’ editorial decisions,” posted University of Massachusetts at Amherst Ethics Associate Professor Itai Sher. “This is outrageous and horrible from the standpoint of free speech.”
Other critics lamented the FCC falling under the heel of the White House.
“The FCC is not the Ministry of Truth,” wrote Nico Perrino, executive vice president of free speech group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “It cannot ignore the First Amendment and weaponize its authority to target news outlets for critical coverage of the administration.
See Carr’s original post here.
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BB
10 24
Priscilla Villarreal, known as "Lagordiloca" ("the fat, crazy lady"), is described by The New York Times, as "arguably the most influential journalist in Laredo." She livestreams her reporting on Facebook, covering local crime and news for her 200,000 followers.
In 2017, she was arrested after breaking two stories using information from a confidential police source. An article in FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) says that authorities used "a decades-old statute local officials had never used before to criminalize Priscilla's journalism," which amounted to being arrested for asking a question.
After her release, Villarreal sued the police and prosecutors for violating her constitutional rights. Her case went through several courts with mixed results.
On October 15, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court made a significant decision in her favor. FIRE reports that the Court "granted her petition for review, vacated the Fifth Circuit's 9-7 decision against her, and sent the case back to the Fifth Circuit, ordering it to reconsider Priscilla's claims" in light of a recent Supreme Court decision affirming the right to sue government officials for First Amendment retaliation.
Villarreal told FIRE, "I'm grateful for the Supreme Court's decision. It has been a challenging seven years since Laredo officials attempted to silence me, and this marks a significant step toward rectifying the wrongs I have faced."
HARV BLK WOMan pres resign plag BS stefanik 2 dn 1 to go?
https://www.alternet.org/victory-florida-desantis-censorship-block/
an 3 23
the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday kept in place a preliminary injunction against Florida GOP policymakers' school censorship law in what rights advocates celebrated as "an important victory for professors, other educators, and students."
The appellate court denied a request from Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration and higher education officials to block a district judge's injunction that is currently preventing enforcement of the Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees (WOKE) Act—rebranded by its supporters as the Individual Freedom Act—in the state's public colleges and universities.
DeSantis' Stop WOKE Act "limits the ways concepts related to systemic racism and sex discrimination can be discussed in teaching or conducting training in workplaces or schools," parroting a Trump administration executive order that was ultimately rescinded by President Joe Biden, the ACLU explained last year.
The plaintiffs in one of the relevant cases, Pernell v. Florida Board of Governors, are represented by the national and state ACLU along with the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and Ballard Spahr, who first filed the federal suit last August—the same day U.S. District Judge Mark Walker, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, issued a separate injunction against the law related to employers.
The new appeals court order upholds the injunction Walker issued in November, which began by quoting George Orwell's novel 1984. Calling the controversial law "positively dystopian," the judge wrote at the time that "the powers in charge of Florida's public university system have declared the state has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of 'freedom.'"
Leah Watson, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Racial Justice Program, said Thursday that "the court's decision to leave in place the preliminary injunction is a recognition of the serious injury posed to educators and students by the Stop WOKE Act."
"All students and educators deserve to have a free and open exchange about issues related to race in our classrooms," Watson argued, rather than censored discussions that erase "the history of discrimination and lived experiences of Black and Brown people, women and girls, and LGBTQ+ individuals."
LDF assistant counsel Alexsis Johnson similarly stressed that "institutions of higher education in Florida should have the ability to provide a quality education, which simply cannot happen when students and educators, including Black students and educators, feel they cannot speak freely about their lived experiences, or when they feel that they may incur a politician's wrath for engaging in a fact-based discussion of our history."
the order also pertains to a challenge filed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in September.
"Professors must be able to discuss subjects like race and gender without hesitation or fear of state reprisal," FIRE said Thursday. "Any law that limits the free exchange of ideas in university classrooms should lose in both the court of law and the court of public opinion."
The Stop WOKE Act is part of a nationwide effort by Republican state lawmakers and governors—especially DeSantis, a potential 2024 GOP presidential candidate—to curtail what content can be shared and discussed in classrooms and workplaces.
"Since January 2021, 44 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism,...;Education Week analysis updated on Monday. "Eighteen states have imposed these bans and restrictions either through legislation or other avenues." [twt]
aCLU of Florida staff attorney Jerry Edwards warned Thursday that "lawmakers continue to threaten our democracy by attempting to curtail important discussions about our collective history and treatment of Black and Brown communities."
"This is an important step in preserving the truth, civil liberties, and a better future," Edwards said of the 11th Circuit's decision.
though legal groups welcomed the order, the battle over the law is ongoing. The court will eventually rule on the merits of the case—which DeSantis' press secretary Bryan Griffin highlighted Thursday, adding, "We remain confident that the law is constitutional. Opponents of the law are also undeterred, as Ballard Spahr litigation department chair Jason Leckerman made clear.
"The movement to restrict academic freedom and curtail the rights of marginalized communities is as pervasive as it is pernicious," he said. "We are proud of the work we have done so far with our partners, the ACLU and Legal Defense Fund, but the fight is far from over. Today, we'll take a moment to savor this result—and then we'll keep working."zzz This post has been updated with comment fromFIRE and Gov. Ron DeSantis' press secretary.
ODDLY SILENT ON CRT BAN AT UNIV? lamar high quality data act?
https://www.alternet.org/2022/02/oklahoma-gop-proposed-bill/
violate relig beliefs?
desantis cops?!
creeley shuck and jive
https://www.thefire.org/news/wheres-fire-case-always
1/23
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VICTORY: Harvard dean relents, will offer fellowship to human rights leader}:
:{
}:
:{:{...fIRE requests that the Kennedy School immediately reinstate the original offer to Roth of a}:
senior fellowship with the Carr Center. Given the urgent nature of this matter, we request a
substantive response to this letter no later than the close of business on Friday, January 13,
2023.
Sincerely,
Jessie Appleby
Litigation Fellow not listed in lit or fellow? georgetown jd 2018}:
:{:{https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessieappleby
}:}:
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an 1 23 mia brett
As I explained for the Editorial Board, CRT is a sociolegal framework to analyze ways in which our legal system perpetuates racism.
It’s not anti-white people.
It’s not about making white people feel guilty.
It won’t hurt white people or bring about white genocide.
Yet Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and others are treating CRT as it were a major threat to American life. Not satisfied with controlling k-12 education, many Republicans are now seeking to make the public university system an arm of government control in order to outlaw CRT as well as violate trans people’s rights.
I’m not being hyperbolic when I say this is directly out of Nazi laws passed in 1933. Though if this Republican effort is successful, you might not be able to learn things like that anymore.
Ridiculous but effective
READ MORE: Trump could end DeSantis' presidential hopes with a series of surprising attacks: analyst
In 1933, when Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor, the Nazi party took power in Germany and got down to the business of passing laws to enforce political narratives and other ways of thinking.
Two laws were passed in 1933 that successfully targeted German universities. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service banned “non-aryans” (with a few exceptions) from civil service positions that included university professors.
The Law against Overcrowding in Schools and Universities set strict limitations on the number of Jewish students permitted to attend public and private schools and universities in Germany.
The fascist control of education didn’t stop there. It included reforms to promote German art, philosophy and even “Aryanphysics.” Jewish intellectualism and works portraying an “un-German spirit” were purged. Freud, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Franz Kafka and hundreds of modernist or expressionist artists were deemed decedent, depraved, deviant and degenerate.
Einstein and his theory of relativity represented the Jewish subversion of physics and was driven out of the academy. Only pure German thinkers and early Greek and Roman art unsullied by Jewish influence could be taught in German universities.
Such ridiculous responses to intellectual and artistic pursuits was ridiculous then and its ridiculous now. Relativity and modernism weren’t perversions of science and art anymore than CRT and African American history are undermining the United States.
Though ridiculous, these arguments work.
Fascist control of the academy absolutely serves to perpetuate nationalist propaganda and influence the citizenry to be angry and uninformed in ways that serve the fascist government.
If you know anything about history or racism, DeSantis sounds unhinged, but his plan is working. Twenty-eight university presidents have promised to stop teaching undesirable subjects.
Understanding, not belief
While DeSantis’ Stop Woke Act, which restricts race-related education in workplaces, schools and colleges, has been temporarily blocked by the courts, the governor has found a new way to restrict academic freedom in Florida’s universities.
DeSantis has asked for data on all courses involving race, and all resources spent on CRT or DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion).
He and supporters of the anti-CRT panic claim critical race theory is a “trendy” ideology that teaches people to feel guilt or shame based on their race. (It doesn’t – CRT is about systemic injustice, not individual guilt). Therefore, he justifies this attempt at fascist control in universities by claiming students need to be protected from dangerous teachings on race. (Or, really, any teaching on race, as he is also banning AP African American Studies in high school.)
Fearing that DeSantis will go through their resources with a fine-toothed comb, 28 presidents of Florida state universities and community colleges have agreed to eliminate CRT education.
Technically, their statement regarded teaching “that compels belief in critical race theory or related concepts such as intersectionality.”
Thing is, I don’t know of any concept taught in college that compels belief. Biology teachers will happily teach evolution to creationists as long as those students engage with the material in good faith and answer the questions correctly, according to evolution.
Similarly, CRT isn’t something one “believes” in.
It’s an analytical framework – a tool. I suppose if you don’t “believe” racism exists or that racism is a systemic issue, it’s unlikely you’ll agree with CRT, useful analytical framework or not.
But again – belief not required to do well in class. I’ve taught CRT in many classes and I have no idea what my students believe in at the end of the semester. I only know what they understand.
A request for data on trans healthcare at universities has also been submitted by DeSantis. It’s not clear what such information could be used for, but I think we can agree it won’t be good.
It’s so reminiscent of Nazi Germany that it’s hard to believe republicans aren’t purposefully following a Nazi playbook.
A chilling erosion
In 1919, a Jewish doctor opened the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin. Dr. Hirschfeld amassed a huge collection of books on gender and sexuality. In 1930, the first modern gender reassignment surgery was performed there. In 1933, Nazis destroyed the clinic and burned the books inside, destroying an immense amount of important research on gender non-conforming and gay people.
Hirschfeld’s likeness was reproduced in Nazi propaganda. Trans and gay people were sent to concentration camps along with Jews and Romani for the crime of polluting the Aryan race.
Anti-CRT bills targeting universities have been passed in Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Mississippi, South Dakota and Idaho.Most of these laws prohibit requiring that students “believe” in CRT or the listed divisive concepts which shouldn’t be a problem because university professors don’t care what their students believe.
But these bills are a chilling erosion of academic freedom and a huge step toward fascist academic control in the service of right-wing narratives. While it’s still legal to teach history, remember where such efforts have led and take them seriously.
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FOUNDATION FOR INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS AND EXPRESSION, INC.
STATEMENTS OF FINANCIAL POSITION
JUNE 30, 2022 AND 2021
See accompanying Notes to Financial Statements.
(3)
2022 2021
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Endowment Funds 24,386 24,386
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vmi cadet ppr race sexual assualt v wapo?
https://www.baconsrebellion.com/app/uploads/2022/09/FIRE-Letter-to-VMI.pdf
Georgetown Law provokes backlash by suspending lecturer over tweets
Jordan Howell | February 1, 2022
READ MORE
Dartmouth evades questions after moving Andy Ngo event online, so FIRE goes to the source.
Sabrina Conza | January 31, 2022
READ MORE
FIRE statement on Georgetown’s suspension and investigation of Ilya Shapiro
FIRE | January 31, 2022
READ MORE
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Anthony Dick
Chairman
Anthony Dick is an attorney in Washington, D.C., where his practice focuses on constitutional and appellate litigation. He has argued multiple cases in different U.S. Courts of Appeals, and he has authored successful briefs before the Supreme Court of the United States at both the certiorari and merits stages. He has written articles that have appeared in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, National Review Online, SCOTUSblog, and The Washington Times. In December 2012, Forbes Magazine named him to its “30 Under 30: Law & Policy” list of “today’s disrupters and tomorrow’s brightest stars.”
Anthony is a graduate of the University of Virginia and Stanford Law School, where he served as an articles editor on the Stanford Law Review. Following law school, he clerked for Judge Thomas B. Griffith on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and then for Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. on the Supreme Court of the United States. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia, with his wife and four sons.
Harvey Silverglate
Co-founder
Harvey Silverglate was born in New York (1942) and was educated at Bogota (N.J.) High School (1960), Princeton University (1964), and Harvard Law School (1967).
As Counsel to Boston’s Zalkind Duncan & Bernstein LLP, Silverglate specializes in criminal defense, civil liberties, and academic freedom/student rights law. He has assisted students in trouble since 1969, when he represented student anti-war protesters on trial. He has taught at Cambridge Rindge & Latin School (a public secondary school), the University of Massachusetts College III (in Boston), and Harvard Law School. Silverglate has also served on the Board of the ACLU of Massachusetts for over three decades, including two terms as Board president. He is a long-time affiliate of Harvard College’s Dunster House, where he conducts student “law tables.”
A criminal law and civil-liberties columnist for The Boston Phoenix for nearly four decades, Silverglate now regularly contributes to WGBH News. He has been published in The National Law Journal, Inc. magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Harvard Law Review, The New York Times Book Review, Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly,Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, Media Studies Journal, Cato Journal, Cato Supreme Court Review, Wilson Quarterly, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Reason magazine, and elsewhere. Silverglate is also the author of The Shadow University (with Alan Charles Kors, 1998) and :{Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: (2009). He has lectured and debated at the Ford Hall Forum, the oldest independent forum in the nation devoted to free speech.
Silverglate chaired the Independent Privacy Board of Predictive Networks, Inc., from 2000 until 2002. Earlier, he was litigation counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, advocating freedom in cyberspace. He is an Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute.
Silverglate lived for many years with his wife, portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman, in Cambridge. (Dorfman passed away in May of 2020). Their son Isaac Dorfman Silverglate lives with his wife Annette Morales and their two children in New York City.
John Ellis
John has over 35 years of experience in technology startups and computer-science research, in entrepreneurial, managerial, and technical roles. He co-founded two big-data Internet startups, ad network Turn and online marketer Post Communications, both with successful exits. He led the product and technology turnaround of tarnished search pioneer Alta Vista, ending with an acquisition by Overture and then Yahoo.
Most recently, John was a partner at accelerator Tandem Capital, working in-house with early stage startups on their business and product plans, team building, and fund raising. He identified the Tile team and helped them launch one of the largest crowdfunding campaigns for its wildly popular Bluetooth tracker, and he worked closely with the PacketZoom founder to develop a successful product and business plan for his core networking technology.
John consulted for Amazon’s A9 division for many years, improving team and software processes, leading ad-tech recruiting, and providing detailed guidance on Amazon’s first implementation of machine-learned ranking of search results.
As Entrepreneur in Residence at New Enterprise Associates, he led the launch of Data Domain, an enterprise storage provider acquired by EMC in 2009 for $2.1B.
John spent over 15 years at Xerox PARC, Digital Equipment’s Systems Research Center, and Yale University, researching compilation for VLIWs, programming environments, distributed computing, garbage collection, and wireless PDAs, and receiving two patents in programming-language implementation. He received a BSE from Princeton University and a PhD from Yale University, and his dissertation won the 1985 Association for Computing Machinery Best Dissertation Award and was published by MIT Press.
Joseph Maline
Joseph Maline is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and a Director of Professional Services at immixGroup, responsible for the management of immixGroup’s internal IT staff and computer systems, and working with the immixGroup Solutions line of business in the design, development, and implementation of technical solutions for immixGroup’s clients. As CTO, Mr. Maline oversees all internal IT projects, including technical decisions, project management, and delivery of solutions for the business.
immixGroup is a government business consultancy headquartered in McLean, Virginia, delivering a variety of strategies and services designed to help IT manufacturers Grow and Manage their government business and Government customers more efficiently procure the products and services they require. Working with over 150 IT manufacturers and nearly every government agency, immixGroup has the flexibility to offer its clients the ideal program and growth strategy, whether they sell direct or through the channel, offer emerging or mature technologies, own their own government contracts, or none at all. immixGroup’s clients include Fortune 1000 corporations, federal and state governments, and rapidly growing middle-market companies in the retail, distribution, manufacturing, and service industries.
Mr. Maline graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in the history and sociology of science and from Harvard University with a master’s degree in the history of science. Before joining immixGroup, Mr. Maline served as the CTO of Management Information Consulting, Inc. (MIC), an e-business, systems integration, and information technology consulting firm. He is married with two children and lives in Herndon, Virginia.
John McWhorter
John McWhorter is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, teaching linguistics, Western Civilization and music history. He is a regular columnist on language matters and also race issues for Time and CNN, also writes on language for the Atlantic, and hosts the Lexicon Valley podcast at Slate. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Chronicle of Higher Education, The American Interest, and other outlets. He was Contributing Editor at The New Republic from 2001 until 2014.
He earned his PhD in linguistics from Stanford University in 1993 and is the author of The Power of Babel, Doing Our Own Thing, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, The Language Hoax, and most recently Words on the Move and Talking Back, Talking Black. The Teaching Company has released four of his audiovisual lecture courses on linguistics. He spoke at the TED conference in 2013 and 2016.
Beyond his work in linguistics, he is the author of Losing the Race and other books on race. He has appeared regularly on Bloggingheads.TV since 2006, and produces and plays piano for a group cabaret show, New Faces, at the Cornelia Street Cafe in New York City.
Marlene Mieske
Marlene Mieske is a registered nurse who has spent the past 35 years working with the mentally ill in Boston and New York City. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, she was involved in implementing the de-institutionalization and community mental health policies of that time. She went on to coordinate the Special Studies Clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital. During that time, the clinic conducted the NIMH fluphenazine-decanoate study along with other significant clinical research involving schizophrenia and major depression.
In New York City, Mieske became the first director of psychiatric nursing at Lenox Hill Hospital. In that role, she was instrumental in opening the first psychiatric inpatient unit as well as the first support group for hospital staff taking care of AIDS patients in the early 1980s. After leaving Lenox Hill, she continued her commitment to the mentally ill by working in a day treatment program for people challenged by mental illness and drug addiction.
Presently, Mieske’s focus has shifted to supporting the mentally ill in a broader context. As a member of the Board of Trustees of Fountain House—a club house for the mentally ill in New York City—she is developing and implementing a special education project to help reduce the stigma of mental illness among health care providers and the general public. Mieske’s other interests include participating on the board of PROMISE, at Columbia Presbyterian hospital which supports undeserved children with attention and learning disabilities, and serving on the board of advisers at the New York Civil Right Coalition.
Mieske is a graduate of Albany Memorial School of Nursing and earned her bachelor of science and master of science degrees in nursing from Boston College, with honors. She is married with two sons and resides in New York City.
Virginia Postrel
Virginia Postrel is an author, columnist, and speaker whose work spans a broad range of topics, from social science to fashion, all with an eye toward understanding the personal and social meaning of life in a dynamic, commercial culture.
Postrel is the author of “:{The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:”, published by Simon & Schuster in 2013. Her previous books are “:{The Substance of Style:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:” (2003) and “:{The Future and Its Enemies:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:” (1998). She is writing a book on the history of textiles, technology, and trade, to be published by Basic Books in the U.S. and Hachette in the U.K. She is a regular columnist for :{Bloomberg Opinion:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:.
From July 1989 to January 2000, Postrel was the editor of :{Reason magazine:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: and vice president of the Reason Foundation.
She has been a columnist for :{The Wall Street Journal:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, :{The Atlantic:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, :{The New York Times:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, and :{Forbes:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: and its companion technology magazine :{Forbes ASAP:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:. Her work was featured in :{The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: and :{The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:. Her website is at :{vpostrel.com:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:.
Keith Whittington
Keith E. Whittington is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He writes about American constitutional law, politics and history and American political thought. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas School of Law and Harvard Law School and is a member of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Texas at Austin and completed his Ph.D. in political science at Yale University.
His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Atlantic, among other outlets, and he is a regular contributor to the Volokh Conspiracy blog. He is the author of several books, including Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech; Repugnant Laws: Judicial Review of Acts of Congress from the Founding to the Present; and Constitutional Crises, Real and Imagined.
aha mask vaxxer?
new mutant varient mix with coddle ? safe space BS
- Safetyism
The sacralization of physical and emotional safety is a worrying trend. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw the inability of public health officials to consider the tradeoffs between physical safety and personal freedom.
Progress in science and technology is impossible without physical risk. Progress in ethics and politics is impossible without emotional risk. Yet, society and government seem to be becoming more risk-averse.
CSPI welcomes work investigating the origins, nature, and effects of safetyism. We are also interested in policies and practices that reduce risk aversion or encouragebetter cost-benefit analysis.
mass profs
koch Connections and Sham Grassroots of Parents Defending Education
Posted on April 12, 2021 by Maurice Cunningham
Parents Defending Education is corporate school privatizers going hard right to attack school boards, superintendents, principals, and teachers. It’s a dirty game and it’s about as grassroots as say, a Koch political operation.
Mercedes Schneider has figured out the grassroots angle in Parents Defending Education: Prefab “Grassroots”—PDE needs local connections to claim standing in law suits to chill the free speech of any educator who questions white supremacy. Peter Greene minces no words in Parents Defending Education: Astroturf Goes Hard Right:
PDE is particularly odious because of its whole “turn in any teacher or school that offends you” approach to chilling conversation and teaching. This is not just astrotyurf (sic), but astroturf with its brown shirt on.
So how well has PDE done living up to its self-promotion “as a national grassroots organization?” Really, really badly.
In order to test the grassroots claim I examined the local organizations PDE claims at its IndoctriNation (get it?) map. Wow—it looks like PDE is blanketing the nation. But it’s fake. Two organizations dominate the “grassroots” network: state affiliates of No Left Turn in Education and Moms For Liberty.Mercedes Schneider showed that Parents Defending Education has yet to attain non-profit status from the IRS. Well, neither has No Left Turn in Education or Moms For Liberty. Both are put up jobs to populate PDE’s map and give the appearance of local support. PDE provides links to the Facebook or websites of their “members” so we can see that most of these groups were formed in March or February 2021, rarely earlier. It’s a set up.
Grassroots means folks joining together on the local level in a collective effort to improve their community. Here are some of the membership numbers for No Left Turn in Education affiliates: Alabama, 7; Arkansas, 3; Delaware, 6; Iowa, 2; Idaho, 4; Indiana, 8; Michigan (Betsy DeVos home state), 13; Mississippi, 3; Montana, 2; North Dakota, 2; Massachusetts, 17. Well, you get the idea. And my favorite, Hawaii: 1.
And Moms for Liberty? Arizona, 17; Wright Co, Minnesota, 8; Corpus Christi Nueces, Texas, 70. Both groups have a handful of states with dozens of members and even over a hundred, but almost all of these operations are tied in with the creation of PDE.
If you start alphabetically with No Left Turn in Education Alabama their FB page is bannered with this:
Are those kids adorable or what? So diverse, so happy, so wholesome, so lovely—not a single pimple on their beautiful teenage faces! Why, it’s almost as if they’re . . .models? And you’d better like the pic because it’s on the website of every state affiliate of No Left Turn in Education. So representative of local students!
Moms for Liberty is far right extremism with a cuddly title. It offers to help followers set up a Madison Meetup to discuss the true meaning of the Founding. Readings include the “’Declaration of Independence’ brochure guide by Moms for Liberty” and “How to Read the Declaration of Independence and Constitution” by Paul Skousen, a far right author. His book The Naked Socialist completed the work of his late father W. Cleon Skousen, a supporter of the John Birch Society once described by National Review as an “all-around nutjob.”
Moms for Liberty’s creation story is similar to others in the anti-public education universe: “moms on a mission to stoke the fires of liberty.” In a year and a half Moms for Liberty’s Form 990 tax returns are likely to show thesetwo patriotic moms hauling down in excess of $150,000 each.
As for who is responsible for collecting the names of these culture warriors, PDE has something called a director of outreach and that is Erika Sanzi. She is a veteran of privatization operationsincluding, as Ms. Schneider shows, the billionaire funded Education Post. Ms. Schneider details what we know of Ms. Sanzi’s lucrative attachment to the privatization industry: $82,000 from Ed Post in 2015, $120,000 in 2016, $131,000 in 2017, and $121,000 in 2018.
Perhaps it was Ms. Sanzi who recruited another member, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Here is what the Sourcewatch project of the Center for Media and Democracy has to say: “Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has deep ties to the Koch brothers. The organization has received millions in funding from the Charles G. Koch Foundation, the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, and the Stand Together Trust.” The group is also a pet project of the radical right funders Bradley Foundation and a passel of other anti-democracy billionaires.
Or it could have been PDE president Nicole Neily who brought in the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. PDE’s website says “Nicole Neily is the president & founder of Parents Defending Education. She is also the president of Speech First, a national campus free speech organization, and has worked at the Independent Women’s Forum and the Cato Institute.” According to Sourcewatch
Speech First’s president and only listed employee, Nicole Neily has worked for many Koch-affiliated groups. Neily was the president of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, the Cato Institute’s manager of external relations, the coalition relations manager for FreedomWorks’ Center for Global Economic Growth, and a “Koch summer fellow for both the Center for Financial Privacy and Human Rights and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.”
Additionally, Neily is associated with other Koch-affiliated groups. Neily served as a board member for Young Voices and Young Americans for Liberty.
PDE also just added as a “senior fellow” Elizabeth Schultz, a former school committee person in Fairfax, VA most well-known for carrying water for the Traditional Values Coalition against a motion to include lessons on gender identity and transgender people in sex education classes. Her other major accomplishment is as an underqualified appointee of Betsy DeVos at the Department of Education.
PDE is yet another fake operation acting for right wing billionaires. So who would be dumb or dishonest enough (or both) to fall for the grassroots claim? Fox News, of course.
This looks like another Koch investment in destroying public goods in the United States. Through a joint venture with the Walton Family Foundation called the Vela Education Fund, Koch is underwriting the Christian right :{Home School Legal Defense Association and the pretend progressive National Parents Union:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:. Still, this front seems more explicitly right wing than many other privatization ventures which have tended to put people of color out front and adopt the veneer of liberalism. So will Massachusetts Parents United reject No Left Turn in Education Massachusetts? Is Stop the Wait RI going to condemn No Left Turn in Education Rhode Island? And will National Parents Union vocally denounce the white supremacy of Parents Defending Education? We’ll be watching.
In the darkness of secrecy, sinister interest and evil in every shape, have full swing. . . . Publicity is the very soul of justice.”—Jeremy Bentham
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, democracy, and oligarchy.]
===
https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/trump-administration/
vet admin rats eg grennell carnegie mellon?
ME
political appointees have a long history of moving into higher education after leaving White House administrations. However, universities are being urged to take extra steps to thoroughly vet former Trump administration officials before offering them future employment.
According to The Washington Post, faculty members and students at a number of universities across the United States believe collegiate institutions should "should apply more scrutiny to former Trump officials looking to make similar transitions."
The first wave of criticism came back in May when former Trump official Richard Grenell was granted a one-year fellowship by Carnegie Mellon University. An open letter was written to the university's administrators challenged the decision arguing that "a well-documented record of sexism and support for racist political movements." The criticism leveled at Grenell escalated in November when he publicly supported President Donald Trump's attempt to undermine the outcome of the presidential election.
At the time, Carnegie Mellon administrators defended its decision to hire Grenell but swiftly established committees to review Grenell's appointment and the university's policies in place for hiring. Jonathan Aldrich, a CMU professor and member of the committee put in place to review Grenell's hiring, offered an opinion from both perspectives.
He noted the difficulties that may arise in trying to vet potential hires in light of possible political disagreements. He also questioned whether or not political views would be held to the same standard as behavior and ethics.
"They're going to have to do the hard job of figuring out, even if we disagree with this person's politics, are our issues about politics, or are they about behavior?" Aldrich said, adding, "And maybe if there's serious doubt, we should give the benefit of the doubt to the person."
But despite the damaging impact of Trump's attempted coup, Robert Shibley, executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, argues that attempts to vet former Trump appointees before hiring them to work on college campuses could be akin to "a well with no bottom."
"I think it's likely to lead for a tit-for-tat campaign that's going to lead campuses basically scrambling to find somebody, anybody, who can talk interestingly about an issue without being subject to ade-platform campaign," he said.
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see greg l coddling with haidt
to do: see if devos is basing rollback on rape protections on FIRE bs
silverglate rape exxon?! aclu?
no defense/mention or oreskes? no actual effort to fire her made, only contempated? it was by their poster boy enstrom. fire only defends from adminiration? thus gubmint?
==
UMass Amherst faces new lawsuit over event implicating Israeli-Palestinian conflict
April 29, 2019
This afternoon, a Massachusetts court heard initial arguments in a :{lawsuit:(style="font-weight:400"):}: that seeks to compel the University of Massachusetts at Amherst to cancel an :{upcoming panel:(style="font-weight:400"):}: discussion :{concerning:(style="font-weight:400"):}: “the increasingly vitriolic debate over U.S. support for Israel.” The lawsuit is the latest example of an attempt to use the :{State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism:(style="font-weight:400"):}: — and :{confusion:(style="font-weight:400"):}: over whether it has been adopted by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights — as a legal argument for campus censorship.
While the court has not yet ruled, one lawyer in attendance :{reported:(style="font-weight:400"):}: that the judge was “unimpressed with the bid to censor the event.”
The :{event:(style="font-weight:400"):}:, titled “Not Backing Down: Israel, Free Speech, and the Battle for Palestinian Human Rights,” is set to take place May 4 on UMass’ campus, and features speakers including Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, political activist :{Linda Sarsour:(style="font-weight:400"):}:, Temple University professor :{Marc Lamont Hill:(style="font-weight:400"):}:, and others. The event was organized by UMass professor Sut Jhally and co-sponsored by his Media Education Foundation as well as several academic departments.
The event has garnered criticism from several groups. The Anti-Defamation League of New England :{called on:(style="font-weight:400"):}: the university’s administration to deploy a more-speech response by criticizing and distancing itself from the event. While recognizing that the event was protected by the First Amendment, others have :{called on:(style="font-weight:400"):}: the administration to rescind any university sponsorship and to prohibit faculty members from using “their academic position or the university’s name or resources to promote a personal, political agenda” that they believe imperils the safety of students. In a :{press release:(style="font-weight:400"):}:, the Massachusetts Republican Party said the event was “in violation of the federal government’s guidelines regarding anti-Semitism,” citing the State Department definition’s examples of “claiming that the existence of the State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of Nazis.”
The :{lawsuit:(style="font-weight:400"):}: and :{motion for a preliminary injunction:(style="font-weight:400"):}:, filed Thursday in a Massachusetts state court by three anonymous UMass students, pick up this argument and attempt to give it legal force. The motion for injunctive relief avers that because the Department of Education has “adopted” the State Department’s definition, “allowing a faculty-sponsored BDS event on campus violates the prohibition against anti-Semitism on campuses of the United [States] Department of Education.” Similarly, the plaintiffs argue that because the university :{opposes an academic boycott of Israel:(style="font-weight:400"):}:, the university is legally bound to prevent advocacy of such a boycott on its campus.
The lawsuit wishes away obvious First Amendment problems. First and foremost, a public university that makes space available to the general public cannot limit access to those resources on the basis of the speakers’ views. Nor does the university have the power to rein in the “sponsorship” of the event by professors or academic departments, which the university :{correctly acknowledges:(style="font-weight:400"):}: have academic freedom rights to make decisions free from institutional censorship. While the university opposes an academic boycott of Israel, it does not follow that the university can or should censor those who argue that the university is wrong to do so.
Second, as the :{response:(style="font-weight:400"):}:, filed today, correctly observes, an injunction against speech on a university campus would amount to a prior restraint, one of the most egregious forms of censorship. While the university may penalize unlawful expression after it occurs, it cannot restrain expression based on the remote possibility that someone might say something unlawful.
Third, it is highly doubtful that the State Department’s definition has legal force, precluding a court from ruling that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of their claims (a prerequisite to obtaining a preliminary injunction), at least on this basis. While the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights :{said it would use:(style="font-weight:400"):}: the definition :{in a letter reopening:(style="font-weight:400"):}: :{a 2011 case at Rutgers University:(style="font-weight:400"):}: regarding alleged discrimination against Jewish students at a public event, the Department later distanced itself from that letter, :{saying:(style="font-weight:400"):}: that it “has not adopted any formal definition of anti-Semitism.” Even if OCR or the Department of Education resolved this ambiguity by asserting that the definition is enforceable, and did so in a manner compliant with administrative law, the definition would not be constitutional.
FIRE :{has:(style="font-weight:400"):}: :{repeatedly:(style="font-weight:400"):}: :{predicted:(style="font-weight:400"):}: that the confusion over whether the definition has been adopted by OCR would be used to bolster calls for censorship of students and faculty members critical of the state of Israel. Unfortunately, that prediction has been :{borne out:(style="font-weight:400"):}:, and the deployment here is perhaps the most aggressive attempt to harness OCR’s use of the definition for unconstitutional ends.
FIRE :{takes no position:(style="font-weight:400"):}: on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or movements arising therefrom, such as BDS, beyond :{pointing out:(style="font-weight:400"):}: that academic boycotts, or censorship of political opponents or supporters of BDS, might :{endanger:(style="font-weight:400"):}: academic or expressive freedom. This meritless lawsuit would have the university violate the First Amendment to censor BDS proponents — the very academic censorship that underlies the university’s :{opposition:(style="font-weight:400"):}: to academic boycotts of Israel.
Update (May 2, 2019, 3:20 p.m.):According to a :{livestream:(style="font-weight:400"):}: of representatives of Jewish Voice for Peace of Western Massachusetts, which had intervened in defense of the event, the judge denied the injunction on First Amendment grounds, as an injunction would amount to a prior restraint on speech. Rick Sobey of the Boston Herald :{quotes:(style="font-weight:400"):}: the judge: “I can’t enjoin a forum just because someone may say something at that forum that fits someone’s definition of anti-Semitism or racism or homophobia or anything else.”
That’s the right result and, barring an unwise appeal, should bring an end to this frivolous lawsuit.
Schools: University of Massachusetts – Amherst
https://www.thefire.org/drexel-professor-resigns-after-months-long-investigation-exile-from-campus/
white genocide tweet
==
University of California at Los Angeles: Non-Reappointment of Controversial Professor
Category: Free Speech
Schools: University of California, Los Angeles
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) refused to reappoint an environmental health sciences professor, stating that his controversial research failed to accord with the department’s “mission.” Dr. JamesEnstrom engaged in successful whistleblowing against a prominent member of the department, and there had been many years of debate between Enstrom and some of his colleagues over research on air pollution. After FIRE intervened, Enstrom was given a reprieve while his appeals continued. Enstrom filed a lawsuit against UCLA in June 2012, assisted by the American Center for Law and Justice. The case is currently before a federal district court.
March 18, 2013 | » Read More
July 03, 2012 | » Read More
June 14, 2012 | » Read More
June 13, 2012 | » Read More
June 04, 2012 | » Read More
January 03, 2012 | » Read More
August 08, 2011 | » Read More
April 15, 2011 | » Read More
March 29, 2011 | » Read More
January 28, 2011 | » Read More
January 03, 2011 | » Read More
September 17, 2010 | » Read More
August 26, 2010 | » Read More
August 19, 2010 | » Read More
August 16, 2010 | » Read More
July 29, 2010 | » Read More
July 01, 2010 | » Read More
June 09, 2010 | » Read More
February 10, 2010 | » Read More
February 09, 2010 | » Read More
June 18, 2009 | » Read More
April 09, 2009 | » Read More
December 31, 2008 | » Read More
April 26, 2006 | » Read More
April 01, 2004 | » Read More
claimed somewhere to have defended ward C?
https://www.thefire.org/cases/depaul-university-censorship-of-student-group-protesting-ward-churchill/
DePaul University: Censorship of Student Group Protesting Ward Churchill
Category: Free Speech
Schools: DePaul University
A student group that protested a campus appearance by University of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill has become DePaul University’s latest victim of censorship. FIRE denounced DePaul’s Orwellian actions after the university banned its College Republicans from posting flyers protesting Churchill’s visit and actually changed its own rules to prevent the organization from attending a workshop that he would be leading. The school issued a formal warning condemning the student group.
January 06, 2006 | » Read More
December 21, 2005 | » Read More
December 21, 2005 | » Read More
December 20, 2005 | » Read More
December 20, 2005 | » Read More
December 20, 2005 | » Read More
December 12, 2005 | » Read More
November 23, 2005 | » Read More
October 28, 2005 | » Read More
October 26, 2005 | » Read More
October 15, 2005 | » Read More
September 28, 2005 | » ReadMore
capt 917
on LI seems like ppl work up ladder?
greg at fire 2016
http://www.chronicle.com/article/What-Lies-Ahead-in-the/241160
http://www.npr.org/2017/05/29/530555442/free-speech-advocate-on-the-state-of-college-campuses
liberal atheist"
=
BROWN, SARAHSource:Chronicle of Higher Education. 3/24/2017, Vol. 63 Issue 29, pA14-A18. 5p.Document Type:ArticleSubject Terms:*FREEDOM of speech
*UNIVERSITIES & colleges
*UNIVERSITY faculty -- Legal status, laws, etc.
*COLLEGE students -- United States
*STUDENTS
*SOCIAL media & society
UNITED States
LEGAL status, laws, etc.
DREXEL UniversityPeople:LUKIANOFF, GregAbstract:The article presents a profile of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a U.S. organization that aims to protect university professors and students from perceived threats to their free speech. The article includes mentions of Drexel University. The organization's president and CEO, Greg Lukianoff, comments in the article about how the speed of social media challenges FIRE and makes it difficult to research and respond in time to provide support.Full Text Word Count:4095ISSN:0009-5982Accession Number:121971236
In a Polarized Climate, Free-Speech Warriors Seize the Spotlight
FREE SPEECH
PHILADELPHIA
GREG LUKIANOFF is a relentless campaigner who has traveled to dozens of campuses in the past 16 years to decry threats he sees to free speech. More often than not, he's also tuned into Twitter. But on Christmas Eve, the president and chief executive of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education was off the grid.
Meanwhile, George Ciccariello-Maher, an associate professor of politics and global studies at Drexel University, was sending a tweet. At 7:48 p.m. on December 24, Mr. Ciccariello-Maher wrote, "All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide."
Even on a holiday, it didn't take long for the professor's provocative words -- which he intended as satire-- to awaken the social-media outrage machine. Conservative news outlets pounced. As the controversy boiled, Drexel faced calls to fire Mr. Ciccariello-Maher. Meanwhile, the professor's supporters called on Mr. Lukianoff's organization, known as FIRE, to come to his aid.
"Where are you on this Drexel shit Greg," one Twitter user wrote on December 26.
Mr. Lukianoff, who was in New York with his family and trying to keep up with a rambunctious 1-year-old son, sighed.
"Can you give us a couple days?" he recalled thinking.
THROUGHOUT its 18-year history, FIRE has prided itself on its ability to quickly come to the defense of students and professors ensnared in free-speech and academic-freedom disputes.
That fight looks a lot different than it used to. "We're at a stage where so many people are interested in this topic," Mr. Lukianoff eays, "and the information moves so quickly." First Amendment controversies play out in minutes, not days. Now FIRE's staff members say even they can't always gather facts and research fast enough.
Mr. Ciccariello-Maher wasn't fired or disciplined, but he faced a public rebuke from Drexel officials for his choice of words. His case was one of several that recently propelled campus free-speech issues to the forefront of the national consciousness.
Over the years, FIRE has drawn criticism from some college administrators for, in their view, blowing the scope of free-speech threats out of proportion. The organization tends to cherry-pick a handful of extreme examples, these critics say, and use them to make sweeping statements about the state of expression at all colleges. In the grand scheme of highereducation, they say, the number of campus speakers disinvited in a given year is minuscule.
At the same time, though, new flashpoints are appearing on FIRE's radar with increasing frequency: professors who make provocative statements, students who protest speakers, colleges that, in FIRE's opinion, overreact to such situations by shutting down constitutionally protected speech. Last year FIRE received about 900 requests from students, professors, and others to intervene when they felt their rights had been violated, and Mr. Lukianoff says he expects more in 2017.
Those controversies have come to life in a campus climate that has grown ever more polarized since President Trump's election. His victory has also emboldened people with extreme right-wing, racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic views, and on occasion, they have spoken on college campuses.
When anarchist-driven violence marred student protests of Milo Yiannopoulos's scheduled appearance at the University of California at Berkeley, and when protesters at Middlebury College shouted down the controversial political scientist Charles Murray, whose work has often been criticized as racist, FIRE faced a barrage of questions: Where do you stand on this? Why is this happening? How can you support the free-speech rights of bigoted speakers like Mr. Yiannopoulos?
FIRE has also faced questions about Mr. Trump. The president himself vowed during the presidential campaign to "end the political correctness and foster free and respectful debate," and he threatened to cut Berkeley's federal funding if the campus "does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view."
Asked about Mr. Trump's apparent interest in issues that are central to FIRE's mission, Mr. Lukianoff pauses, choosing his words carefully. Mr. Trump is sending "dramatically mixed signals" to FIRE, he says finally. He found the president's threat against Berkeley -- which did not acknowledge that the administration had in fact gone to great lengths to allow Mr. Yiannopoulos to speak -- to be reprehensible.
For some, speech fights like those at Berkeley and Middlebury -- not to mention academe's recurring debates over trigger warnings, microaggressions, and safe spaces -- reinforce the argument that FIRE has been promoting for nearly two decades: Free expression on campuses is under attack. That environment has opened the door for the organization to play a central role in shaping public discourse and standing up for free expression.
Yet FIRE has also found itself in the cress hairs of increasingly fraught campus free-speech disputes.
On the one hand, when people like Mr. Yiannopoulos come to campus, some critics question whether they are creating the kinds of environments where speech and debate can flourish. But others say that, with campus tensions running high, it's more important than ever for FIRE to defend free speech for all, and encourage people to listen to one another.
WHEN FIRE was founded, in 1999, Alan Charles Kors, a historian and a conservative, and Harvey A. Silverglate, a lawyer and a liberal, conceived of an organization that could "defend and sustain individual rights at America's increasingly repressive and partisan colleges and universities." The slogan: "Because your liberty is a precious thing."
The group emerged as an ally to anti-abortion and Christian students who claimed that colleges wouldn't recognize their organizations or allow them to bring in certain speakers. It also jumped into academic-freedom debates, challenging the American Association of University Professors, which for decades had owned the task of defending controversial faculty members.
The AAUP's investigations into individual professors' cases could take months. The more-agile FIRE wrote letters to institutions and publicized them in the news media within days -- and seemed to get results. One professor had this to say in 2004 about FIRE and the AAUP: "One is a SWAT team, and the other is like the CIA."
When Mr. Lukianoff joined FIRE, in 2001, he became the small shop's fifth employee. Now it boasts 50 staff members and a dozen interns who join each summer, as well as revenue of more than $6 million.
Its funding is primarily made up of grants and donations, some of which come from nonprofit groups like the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which have generously supported conservative causes. Some observers have questioned how that money influences FIRE's work; Mr. Lukianoff says it doesn't come with any strings attached.
FIRE has moved its Philadelphia headquarters four times in the past dozen years because the staff keeps growing. Its current home is a modern 12th-floor space with First Amendment decor, overlooking Independence Hall.
At one end of the office are boxes of FIRE swag and T-shirts strewn across a few tables, items the organization typically distributes free to students. Daniel Burnett, the communications manager, offers this reporter a pair of FIRE sunglasses, which she politely declines.
Much of the group's work force is young; Mr. Lukianoff is in his early 40s. It's also politically diverse. While 26-year-old Molly Nocheck, director of campus outreach, was a student at Ohio University, she was heavily involved in Students Defending Students, a campus organization that trains a network of students to defend their peers in campus disciplinary hearings. A "Pennsylvania for Hillary" sticker is posted prominently above her desk.
Will Creeley, FIRE's senior vice president for legal and public advocacy was a student activist, founding a campus chapter of the Green Party and campaigning for Ralph Nader in the 2000 election. Since then, the 36-year-old has been a Democrat. Robert Shibley, executive director of FIRE, is Lebanese and identifies as a conservative and evangelical Christian. Mr. Lukianoff, a first-generation American whose father was a refugee from Yugoslavia, is a lifelong Democrat and an atheist.
The chief executive -- a sharp, thoughtful, happy warrior of sorts -- met this reporter in Washington at FIRE's satellite office, where he's based.
Mr. Lukianoff says his group's work is especially important now, given the shifts he sees taking place in the battle lines of campus -free-speech fights.
"For my entire career, the best constituency on campus had been students" in terms of understanding the importance of free speech, he says. FIRE's focus had long been on targeting administrative censorship of those students. Four years ago, he says, he noticed a change.
IN 2013, Ray Kelly, who spent 14 years as police commissioner of the City of New York, was scheduled to speak at Brown University. Students tried, and failed, to get him disinvited, saying his support for the city's widely criticized stop-and-frisk policy made his presence an insult to minority students. When Mr. Kelly did show up, students shouted him down, and the speech was canceled after half an hour.
"It's not like that's unprecedented on campuses," Mr. Lukianoff says. "But in this case, it was the pridewith which the students continued to take the shutting down of Ray Kelly's speech that was different to us."
In 2015, Mr. Lukianoff and the New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt examined those dynamics in a widely discussed cover story in The Atlantic, titled "The Coddling of the American Mind." The piece argued that as students increasingly demand protection from microaggressions and ideas they don't like, they are threatening free academic inquiry and harming their own mental health.
As protests against racism and demands for safe spaces swelled at the University of Missouri, Yale University, and dozens of other campuses in the fall, the story proved popular. It raised FIRE's profile as a leading voice against a climate on campuses where, as Mr. Lukianoff and Mr. Haidt wrote, "everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse." (The timing of its publication with the protests was a coincidence, Mr. Lukianoff says; he'd been thinking about writing such a piece for years.)
FIRE staff members say that many student activists that fall were rightly using their free speech to call attention to what they saw as racial injustice at their institutions, and that conversations about race and diversity that wouldn't have occurred otherwise took place on many campuses.
What distressed Mr. Lukianoff was the significant number of students who were demanding, for instance, that publications be punished for running columns that took contentious stances, as was the case at Wesleyan University, or that people be fired for taking a stand on something, as was the case at Yale.
In the fall of 2015, Nicholas Christakis, a professor of social and natural science at Yale and leader of a residential college, was confronted by a group of mostly black students in a campus courtyard. At the time a heated debate was taking place over an email about Halloween costumes sent by his wife, Erika Christakis,who wrote, "Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?" A group of student activists was demanding that the Christakises be removed from their residential-college positions.
During the encounter, one student in particular raised her voice for several minutes, accusing Mr. Christakis of not "creating a home" for students of color within the college and demanding to know, using an expletive, who had hired him.
Mr. Lukianoff -- who happened to be at Yale because he was speaking at a conference there the next day -- took videos of the confrontation, as did several other observers, and published them on FIRE's YouTube account. He said he wanted to make sure there was evidence that Mr. Christakis had acted calmly. (Mr. Christakis kept his faculty position, but he and his wife eventually resigned from the residential college. She no longer teaches at Yale.)
Conservative publications like The Daily Caller and the Washington Examiner seized won the confrontation, dubbing the student "shrieking girl" and linking to FIRE's video, which eventually had more than 1.6 million views.
That fueled a perception among some student activists, professors, and others that FIRE had purposely tried to make the video go viral and unfairly spun the standoff so it would fit neatly into the group's arguments about coddled students who demand protection from offense. One Yale professor told The New York Times that FIRE's framing the incident as a free-speech issue was "a complete misconstruction of what happened."
MR. LUKIANOFF says he was critical only of the Yale students' demand for the Christakises to be fired, not of their activism. But it's situations like the Yale protests that lead some people to question who FIRE is really defending.
When Michael Roth, Wesleyan's president, was dealing with a tense scuffle in 2015 over funding for the campus newspaper, The Wesleyan Argus, he recalls FIRE's attacks on some Wesleyan students for not respecting the newspaper's editorial independence. The Argus had published a student column that was critical of the Black Lives Matter movement, which led students of color on the campus to demand that the newspaper lose its funding because it wasn't creating a "safe spaces" for their voices.
FIRE's reaction, Mr. Roth says, was "a knee-jerk absolutist response that ignored the free-speech rights of the protesters." And in the end. he says, his administration strongly supported the Argus's right to publish contentious viewpoints. "FIRE, in order to perhaps raise its own profile among the donor class that supports anything that's anti-political-correctness, was making hay with a situation that, in the end, affirmed the value of the free press," he says.
Gregory P. Magarian, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, doesn't believe that FIRE limits its attention to right-leaning causes. But he has noticed a pattern: Its work tends to draw the attention of conservative news sites that try to capitalize on perceived liberal biases.
"It seems that a lot of what they're doing is feeding or having a symbiotic relationship with the sort of conservative outrage machine," he says.
Concerns about who FIRE really defends can give some students and professors pause about turning to the group for help. Recently, Mr. Creeley says, FIRE offered to defend a student who had been punished for his activism regarding Palestine. "The student didn't want anything to do with us," Mr. Creeley says. "He said, I'm not going to work with you, because you're conservative."
But Alice Dreger, formerly a clinical professor of medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University, says that portrayal doesn't fit her experience. Ms. Dreger, a self-described liberal, resigned in 2015 because, she said, Northwestern officials had interfered with an article she guest-edited in a campus journal about a nurse who helped the author regain his sexual function after he was paralyzed. FIRE had written a letter to Northwestern asking it to "abandon any future plans to dictate or censor" the journal's content.
She admits that, when FIRE asked her to speak at its annual student conference last year, "I was expecting to find nothing but pasty-faced young white men," many of whom "wanted to bash feminism." Instead, she says, "there were an astonishing number of people of color in that room."
Ms. Dreger knows that some of FIRE's donors are prominent conservative foundations. "There's no question that they're a well-funded organization," she says, noting that FIRE had paid her well to talk at its conference. But she's also a FIRE donor, and she knows other leftist academics who are, too.
Those who accuse FIRE of partisan bias haven't done their research, Mr. Lukianoff says: "If you're not going to bother to actually read our material, that's not on me."
In response to criticism, FIRE staff members deliver a practiced line that they are nonpartisan and uphold everyone's right to free speech and due process. Mr. Lukianoff can rattle off a half-dozen recent FIRE cases that don't involve conservative causes. It's clear that he and his staff are well versed in defending their organization against attacks -- and somewhat frustrated that they have to do it so often.
FIRE's stances, however, have often positioned the group on one side of debates that have become politicized -- for instance, its attacks on the Obama administration's guidance to colleges on how Title IX, the gender-equity law, applies to sexual misconduct.
Bob Casey Jr., a Democratic U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, questioned then-nominee Betsy DeVos during her January confirmation hearing about how she would deal with campus sexual violence as education secretary. He cited as a concern her foundation's $25,000 in donations to FIRE. The senator's spokesman later wrote on Twitter that "we'll gladly take on the far right groups determined to roll back the progress we've made on campus sexual assault."
FIRE also defends the right of sexual-assault victims to publicly criticize institutional policies, Mr. Lukianoff notes. The group did just that in 2013, he says, in the case of a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
One result of having a campus culture war, Mr. Lukianoff says, is that people tend to pay attention only to developments that fit their preconceived narratives about colleges, and to sort people and organizations into ideological boxes.
He points to a case at Northern Michigan University from last year, when a student who sought counseling after experiencing sexual assault was told not to discuss thoughts of self-harm with other students, or risk facing disciplinary action. FIRE sent the university a letter condemning the policy, but the case wasn't widely covered in the national news media, he says. "Whose culture-war narrative does that fit? Nobody's."
FIRE's stature has been bolstered by the increased attention to campus culture, but the group's staff members say they work independently of whatever is going on or being said around them. The only thing FIRE can control, Mr. Creeley says, is how its staff responds to cases.
"It's been going on 11 years doing this work," he says. He slowly lets out a breath. "I can't control the reaction of third-party actors. We don't send it to the College Fix like, Hey, check this one out. They're going to find it regardless."
"It's been a long process of sort of coming to terms with being stuck in the middle of the culture war," Mr. Lukianoff adds.
He recalls the first cases he helped handle at FIRE, many of which involved students and professors being censored for talking about 9/11. The country was on edge, and FIRE received a lot of hate mail. "I never let it change what FIRE did," Mr. Lukianoff says, "but it weighs on you after a while. It can become kind of exhausting."
FIRE has also taken a lot of heat for supporting the right of Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at colleges. The stance reflects the group's emphasis on defending all constitutionally protected expression, even when that speech is racist, sexist, or bigoted.
'Prohibitions on hateful speech do nothing to stop hate," Mr. Lukianoff wrote in his 2012 book, Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate. He also emphasizes that the First Amendment's most crucial purpose is protecting minority viewpoints: "the weak, the unpopular, the oddballs, the misfits, and the underdogs."
"If the only price that we have to pay for this freedom is that we sometimes hear words that we find offensive," he says, "it is well worth it."
But that broad approach is one that some people say doesn't always make sense in the present climate, particularly now that white nationalists and other extremists who add questionable value to academic debates are doing a lot more talking.
Certain kinds of expression do qualify as assault and harassment, says Mr. Roth, the Wesleyan president. His sense is that Mr. Lukianoff believes "the only way to defend free speech is to defend a free market of ideas." In some cases, Mr. Roth says, "universities shouldn't legitimate points of view that are abusive to members of the university community and other members of society."
Mr. Ciccariello-Maher, the Drexel professor, doesn't think colleges should give a platform to people like Mr. Yiannopoulos. Students should engage in debate with people who don't agree with them, the professor says, but they should be able to feel safe when doing so -- and they shouldn't be subjected to questions about their very existence on campus.
Also, when it comes to student activists, FIRE often rails against the so-called heckler's veto, in which audience members shout down a speaker, Mr. Ciccariello-Maher says. "But the reality is, it's very hard to protect speech and just say 'it shouldn't be too loud' or 'it shouldn't be too deafening.'"
Jon B. Gould, a professor of public affairs and law at American University, wants to see FIRE defend more speakers and students who are Muslim, black, and the like -- people who won't necessarily feel welcome and safe on all campuses and in the current political climate. "Up until now, they have seemed to focus most of their attention on what they claim to be progressive restrictions against conservative speakers," he says. "I think that's more than just a coincidence."
Mr. Gould has cast doubt on the rigor of FIRE's methods for rating colleges based on their "speech codes," and he questions what its agenda might be. But he admits that the organization is taking on an unenviable job at a challenging time. "They are in a tough spot right now where a lot of who they're having to defend are the most vile speakers," he says. "There's a part of me that actually feels bad for them."
Even those who find fault with FIRE's positions at times say the explosive tensions characterizing the recent protests at Berkeley, Middlebury, and elsewhere make the presence of a civil-liberties organization especially valuable.
"It's incredibly important to have an institution like FIRE in the mix of the free speech conversation," Mr. Roth says. He says that he's less critical of the organization now than he was last year, and that he cares about what FIRE thinks on questions of free speech and academic freedom.
Most of the time, he says, he and other college leaders "know what to do" when a speech controversy arises. In some cases, however, FIRE's voice is welcome -- as it was when Middlebury students shouted down Charles Murray. "They have a principled stand that's worth taking seriously," Mr. Roth says.
FOR NEARLY two decades, FIRE has been a gadfly in higher education, leveraging public attention to bring about change. Now some scholars see another potential niche for FIRE to fill: creating spaces for the kinds of difficult debates the organization holds up as essential on college campuses.
There is a need for "new creativity" to figure out how to talk across polarization, says Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of educational history at the University of Pennsylvania. In this era, "we've added to our list of people and ideas that need protection," he says, noting that he's had students "come out" in his office as supporters of Mr. Trump.
If people are actually muzzling their own speech because they're afraid of conflict, he says, it's essential "to create venues and mechanisms and systems where we can all use our speech to promote understanding, rather than just bitterness and misunderstanding." That's incumbent on everyone, not just FIRE, he says -- but FIRE can certainly help make that happen.
The group has experimented with such a role, hosting a pilot program of debates on campuses last academic year about issues like college athletes' pay and the Second Amendment. Mr. Lukianoff says FIRE will very likely do that again in the future and plans to release a debate guide this spring so that students can organize their own.
In 1999, Mr. Kors, one of FIRE's founders, said he hoped the organization would eventually be able to "extinguish itself" -- the idea being that, if FIRE had its intended influence, it would no longer be needed. But as controversies around campus free speech burn ever brighter, it seems that FIRE will do the same.
Protesters took to the streets at the U. of California at Berkeley in February after an appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos was canceled.
Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE: "We're at a stage where so many people are interested in this topic, and the information moves so quickly."
Protesters at Middlebury College face away from the stage and chant during an appearance this month by the political scientist Charles Murray.
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huffpo blog many links
THE BLOG 02/17/2016 09:46 am ET Updated Feb 17, 2017
The 10 Worst Colleges for Free Speech: 2016
By Greg Lukianoff
ASSOCIATED PRESS
This past year will be remembered as the year that freedom of speech (or the lack thereof) on U.S. campuses became international news. Even President Barack Obama felt compelled to comment on the issue (three separate times). Although those of us who have worked for years on the frontlines defending freedom of speech on campus think the media was a little late to the story, we can all agree that last year was an especially contentious one.
While some students filed lawsuits to fight campus “free speech zones,” others demanded new, restrictive campus speech codes. Some campuses renewed their commitments to freedom of speech, while others backpedaled. Perhaps the most striking trend of the last year was the number of professors, even tenured professors, who found their livelihoods under threat for what they said either on or off campus.
With an epic year behind us, we are proud to present the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s (FIRE’s) list of the worst schools for free speech in 2016. This is our fifth annual list, and it covers the time that has passed since we published our fourth list during this time last year.
One school that people may have expected to see on the list that did not make it is Yale University. As you may know, FIRE strongly opposed last year’s effort by Yale students to get two professors, Erika and Nicholas Christakis, fired from their posts at the university. The controversy arose after Erika Christakis sent an email defending students’ autonomy and questioning if it is the proper role of colleges to tell students what Halloween costumes they should wear.
While no charges were brought against either of the Christakises, both professors announced that they will not teach in the spring. Nicholas cancelled his spring 2016 class to go on sabbatical, and Erika resigned from teaching. Of course, this is a very bad outcome for Yale. But because the university did publicly defend the professors’ free speech and academic freedom rights, we decided that Yale did not edge out the 10 schools who made the list this year. FIRE will, however, keep a close eye on Yale to see if it lives up to its glowing promises of freedom of speech.
Another university, or, in this case, university system, that did not quite make this year’s list, but easily could have, is theUniversity of California (UC) system. For several years now, the board of regents of the UC system has proposed, with some support from students, an expansion of the definition of anti-Semitism that would present serious First Amendment concerns and chill constitutionally protected speech, including criticism of Israel’s government. We at FIRE have strongly opposed this move from the start, but given that the proposed language has not yet been adopted, the UC system did not make the list this year. However, if the UC system adopts the proposed definition, I can all but guarantee you that it will make this list next year — and likely end up on the losing end of a First Amendment lawsuit.
This year’s list contains cases from all over the spectrum — from large public colleges, to three private Catholic schools, and more. If you believe we missed a college, or want to nominate a college for next year’s list, please let us know in the comments. Most of all, if you want to challenge your own school’s speech codes, please get in touch with us.
Mount St. Mary’s University
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Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland did everything it could this month to ensure it would find itself on this “worst of the worst” list in 2016. On February 8, the liberal arts university took the extraordinary step of firing Thane M. Naberhaus, a tenured professor, and Ed Egan, the student newspaper’s faculty advisor, in the midst of a mushrooming scandal surrounding first-year university President Simon P. Newman’s plan to oust low-performing freshmen.
The plan became national news in January after the student newspaper reported that Newman sought to use a student survey as a basis to identify students to dismiss, which would boost retention rates, and that he told a concerned faculty member, “This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies ... put a Glock to their heads.” The professors were notified of their firings in letters that stated they were “persona non grata“ at the university and were no longer welcome on campus or at any university activity, and that failure to comply with the letter would result in “legal proceedings.”
Newman also demanded and received the resignation of Provost David B. Rehm, who was previously critical of Newman’s retention plan.
While Mount St. Mary’s is a private, Catholic institution, it makes promises of free speech and academic freedom to its community that it is morally and legally obligated to uphold — promises it broke in firing the faculty members.
The firings unleashed a storm of criticism, and on February 12, Newman announced at a faculty meeting that Egan and Naberhaus had been reinstated. Although Newman’s reversal is a welcome development, Mount St. Mary’s actions have caused lasting damage to the community’s confidence in the administration. Naberhaus, in fact, has already stated that he refuses to return. If disagreeing with the administration on an important issue within the university community is a fireable offense, no form of dissent is safe at the Mount.
Northwestern University
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Northwestern University earns its place on this year’s list for its heavy-handed and chilling treatment of not one but two prominent faculty members. Northwestern was thrust into the national spotlight last spring, after professor Laura Kipnis found herself the subject of a Title IX investigation for an essay she wrote that was, ironically, critical of the over-enforcement of Title IX. In the essay, she criticized the “sexual panic” that has resulted from Title IX’s unchecked expansion, using a widely reported-upon case at her own university as an example. During her Title IX investigation — which dragged on for more than 70 days — Kipnis was denied even the most basic information necessary to defend herself. She was not allowed, for example, to review any evidence submitted against her, a due process deficiency that is unfortunately common during campus investigations. Northwestern cleared Kipnis only after she published an explosive and damning account of her treatment in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
At the same time that Kipnis was undergoing her Title IX ordeal, administrators at Northwestern’s medical school were censoring a faculty-produced bioethics journal, fearing that one article’s discussion of oral sex would be detrimental to the medical school’s “brand.” Northwestern then announced the creation of an oversight committee to review the journal’s content prior to publication. This new prior review requirement so incensed professor and author Alice Dreger, who edited the journal issue featuring the controversial article, that she resigned her faculty position at Northwestern as a result.
Louisiana State University
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Teresa Buchanan served Louisiana State University (LSU) for nearly 20 years as a tenured professor who inspired her students, won millions of dollars in grant money for the university, and developed a top-notch early childhood education teacher training curriculum. However, in June 2015, only a few months before she was eligible to retire, LSU fired her for her alleged occasional use of profanity. LSU ignored that she used this as a pedagogical technique to prepare her adult students to be effective teachers. The university claimed Buchanan’s teaching methods violated its policy prohibiting “sexual harassment” of students, although not a single student had ever accused her of sexual harassment.
LSU’s policy defines sexual harassment as “unwelcome verbal, visual, or physical behavior of a sexual nature,” mirroring the language of the sexual harassment definition propagated by the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice in 2013 as “a blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country.” A faculty panel unanimously opposed firing Buchanan, but without explanation, LSU’s top administrators overruled the panel and fired her, prompting censure by the American Association of University Professors and the LSU faculty senate.
Left with no other choice, Buchanan sued LSU in federal court on January 20, 2016, for violating her First Amendment and due process rights. FIRE has been predicting since the day the “blueprint” definition of sexual harassment was released that it would be used to stifle speech and limit academic freedom. Although we regret being proven right, we are proud to sponsor Buchanan’s lawsuit as part of our Stand Up For Speech Litigation Project and look forward to the restoration of unfettered dialogue between professors and students at LSU.
University of California, San Diego
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In November 2015, the student government at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) cut all student media funding in an effort to censor The Koala, an unapologetically satirical student newspaper that has long been known for its provocative content. After The Koala published an article in 2015 mocking the concept of “safe spaces” on campus, the UCSD administration released a statement denouncing the newspaper and the “offensive and hurtful language it chooses to publish.” Following the administration’s lead, the UCSD Associated Students Council, which funded The Koala and many other student organizations through mandatory student activity fees, decided to strip funding from all student print media organizations in an attempt to punish the newspaper, seeming to acknowledge that it could not defund just The Koala because of its offensive content and still purport to comply with the First Amendment.
If this sounds familiar, it should. In 2010, in response to another controversial move by The Koala, the council president froze all student media funding until the council could develop policies to prevent student funds from going to groups supporting hateful speech. FIRE and others spoke out, noting that the First Amendment prohibits the council from distributing student activity fees in a manner that discriminates against groups based on the viewpoints they express. And the council certainly cannot punish an entire category of student organizations in order to target the speech of one unpopular paper. After weeks of controversy, the council finally voted to restore student-media funding.
FIRE, the American Civil Liberties Union of San Diego and Imperial Counties, and the Student Press Law Center have all written to the council and the university to point out that defunding all student media in order to censor a single controversial publication is just as unconstitutional today as it was in 2010. But with New Year’s Day come and gone and the funding yet to be restored, UCSD joins our list of the worst free speech offenders of the past year.
Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota
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Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota fired popular classics adjunct professor Dave Hillman after he translated Seneca’s Medea and then worked with the drama department to put on an authentic production of the play. The administration apparently did not approve of Hillman’s decision to have cast members point fascina — phallus shaped objects — at audience members to replicate the ancient practice of “confronting viewers with their lavish and corrupt lifestyles,” as Hillman explained.
The official justification for firing Hillman is not clear. The university says he was terminated for sexual harassment, but it never explained to him the details of his alleged misdeeds, such as the name of the target of the harassment and when it happened. Saint Mary’s also fired Hillman from his job as a janitor at the university, leaving him unable to afford asthma medication for his daughter.
On February 3, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) wrote to Saint Mary’s urging the university to explain Hillman’s charges and provide him with a fair hearing. The AAUP also asked Saint Mary’s to revise its sexual harassment policies to “comport with Association-supported standards.”
Like Mount St. Mary’s in Maryland, Saint Mary’s of Minnesota is a Catholic university, but it promises freedom of expression to its faculty and students. Saint Mary’s therefore violated its contractual and moral duty to uphold its pledges when it fired Hillman without due process, thus removing a dedicated professor whose only sin appears to be doing his job too well.
University of Oklahoma
[The college students were freely singing, “There will never be a n**** in SAE… You can hang them from a tree, but they’ll never sign with me.”]
:{
other incidents nat'l http://abcnews.go.com/US/oklahoma-racist-video-history-trouble-involving-sigma-alpha/story?id=29496865
}:
Last March, University of Oklahoma (OU) President David Boren unilaterally expelled two members of the university’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity for their “leadership role in leading a racist and exclusionary chant,” as shown in a video posted online. However, as First Amendment expertsEugene Volokh and Erwin Chemerinsky pointed out at the time, OU is a public university and cannot punish speech that does not fall into one of the few and narrowly defined categories of speech not protected by the First Amendment, like true threats or incitement to imminent lawless action. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that offensive speech, even racist speech, is protected by the First Amendment. Therefore, the expulsion of the two OU students without notice of the charges against them or an opportunity to contest those charges was one of the most brazen violations of free speech and due process rights to occur on campus in 2015.
What’s worse, after the expulsions, numerous colleges across the country seized on OU’s unconstitutional actions as a signal that they have an “all clear” to toss freedom of speech and basic fairness out of the window. But public colleges do so at their own peril. If a student decides to stand up to their college, the courts are quite clear on whose side they will rule.
Marquette University
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Marquette University makes this year’s list for the same reason it made last year’s list: its ongoing campaign to strip the tenure of longtime professor John McAdams based on the writings on his personal blog. McAdams criticized a graduate student instructor for suppressing a student’s opinions against same-sex marriage during a class discussion. After the instructor received criticism from readers of McAdams’ blog, Marquette suspended McAdams without due process and without a hint of regard for his free speech or academic freedom rights.
But that was only the beginning. In public statements the university repeatedly insinuated, without any evidence, that McAdams had violated Marquette’s harassment policy, labeled him a threat to safety, and effectively held him directly responsible for the comments and actions of his readers — a position wildly opposed to basic free speech principles.
Marquette announced it was seeking his termination last January, and McAdams is now in his third semester of being banned from teaching and being on campus as he appeals his case. Unless it wants to take up permanent residence in this feature, Marquette must resolve McAdams’ case and return him to the classroom without further delay.
Colorado College
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As protests over racial issues publicly roiled campuses across the country in late 2015, college administrators were eager to avoid the perception that they were indifferent to racial tensions. Sometimes, this impulse resulted in colleges disciplining students perceived to be engaging in racially charged speech. At Colorado College, a student responded anonymously to a post on the social media application Yik Yak that read “#blackwomenmatter” with the joke “They matter, they’re just not hot.” After administrators learned that student Thaddeus Pryor may have been responsible for the joke, they summoned him to a meeting at which he admitted to writing it. Colorado College responded by imposing a 21-month suspension, during which Pryor was forbidden from taking courses for academic credit at any other institution. Following Pryor’s appeal and a letter from FIRE reminding Colorado College that its actions violated the freedom of expression that the college promises to its students, Pryor’s suspension was reduced to six months. But any suspension for clearly protected speech is unacceptable at an institution that claims to value free speech, and Colorado College’s repeated failure to live up to these ideals warrants its inclusion on this year’s list of worst offenders.
University of Tulsa
While many colleges on this list earned their spot for punishing students for what they said, the University of Tulsa earned its place because it punished a student for what someone else said.
In September 2014, Tulsa student George “Trey” Barnett was notified by Senior Vice Provost Winona Tanaka that eight harsh interim measures, including his removal from classes and a theater production, had been imposed on him because his then-fiancé authored Facebook posts that criticized a Tulsa professor and other members of the Tulsa community. A month later, Tanaka found Barnett guilty of harassment and of retaliation for sharing information about the complaint with his fiancé, who provided Tanaka with a sworn affidavit acknowledging that he, not Barnett, was the author of the Facebook posts. Barnett’s punishment was severe — he was suspended until at least January 2016 and barred from receiving a degree in his major when he returned to classes. Barnett appealed the decision, and his appeal was summarily denied in January 2015.
However, Tulsa didn’t earn a spot on this year’s list just for its attack on one student’s fundamental rights; it also targeted Tulsa’s student newspaper, The Collegian, for covering Barnett’s suspension.
Last month, Barnett announced that he was fighting back. On January 13, he filed a lawsuit, alleging that Tulsa failed to provide him with “any meaningful due process” in finding him guilty of harassment and retaliation. Barnett’s lawsuit also claims that Tulsa subjected him to “substantial mental anguish” and violated its free speech promises. We’re hoping this lawsuit will ensure that Tulsa doesn’t end up on our “worst” list next year.
Wesleyan University
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It’s been a rough year for the student press, and at few institutions has that been more evident than at Wesleyan University. Wesleyan was plunged into controversy last fall after its main student newspaper, The Wesleyan Argus, published a student column critical of the Black Lives Matter movement. Students mobilized in opposition to the column’s publication, circulating a petition calling for Wesleyan’s student government to defund the Argus unless specific demands were met. Among the petitioners’ plans to get its demands met was a movement to support “recycling” the Argus — another way of saying they would round up and destroy copies of the newspaper if their demands went unmet. Indeed, the Argus reported that several hundred copies of the paper were stolen in the midst of the controversy.
Wesleyan’s student government then took up the issue, voting last fall to approve a dangerous resolution that could turn free speech at Wesleyan on its head. Under the new resolution, which may take effect this fall, the Argus could see $17,000 in funding — more than half its budget — revoked and reallocated to other student publications. Worse, the proposal would allocate funding in significant part based on a popular vote of the whole student body, an open invitation to viewpoint discrimination if ever there was one. If Wesleyan doesn’t wise up to the dangerous flaws in the new funding scheme, an already chilled atmosphere for free speech will turn truly frosty.
Follow Greg Lukianoff on Twitter: www.twitter.com/glukianoff
Greg Lukianoff
President and CEO, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
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This Blogger’s Books and Other Items from...
Freedom from Speech
Freedom from Speech
by Greg Lukianoff
Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate
Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate
by Greg Lukianoff
==
nb not on the payroll, just riding wave:
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-bent-becoming-tyrant-and-liberals-have-never-looked-more-helpless-stop-him
Donald Trump’s pardon of Joe Arpaio is only another of the hastening steps on his not-so-long march toward an authoritarian presidency. However incoherent his intentions, he's bent on becoming a tyrant—or at least trying to become one. And too many of us who know this are clueless about how to stop him, at least partly because we’re obsessed with secondary, almost irrelevant developments. Sometimes it seems as if we’d do anything but confront the most important challenge. Let me try, starting with how liberals have been dodging the full truth.
That haplessness in the face of a real challenge was on display at the Washington, D.C. bookstore Politics & Prose on Sunday evening, asColumbia professor Mark Lilla held forth on the dangers—and as he sees it, the evils—of racial and sexual identity politics before a seemingly contrite white audience. That was until a questioner asked him if he realizes he’s riding the crest of a lavishly funded, brilliantly orchestrated conservative campaign, led by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, to inflate identity politics’ noxious excesses in “politically correct” demonstrations on campuses in order to distract us from the far-greater dangers closing in on us.
Lilla, promoting his book "The Once and Future Liberal," mostly ducked the question, at first pleading ignorance of the campaign and then insisting, with something like circular logic, that liberals need to acknowledge that those noxious excesses do hobble their chances of winning elections. A week earlier, the magazine’s editor David Remnick pushed him to justify his sweeping, sardonic dismissals of today’s social movements and campus racial and sexual protocols on the grounds that they insult and alienate voters in aggrieved, white, working-class communities like the one he grew up in.
It’s an old argument (one I made 20 years ago at the same Politics & Prose bookstore). The argument still has merit, but is correcting the politically correct really what we should be doing now in the teeth of Trump’s attempted political lockdown? Or should we, like Lilla’s questioner at the bookstore, be focusing instead on what’s really causing the injuries and resentments that carried him to the White House?
"When I read Lilla's book and then talked with him for the New Yorker Radio Hour,” Remnick notes, “I found much to disagree with, not least his cutting dismissals of ‘social-justice warriors’ or movements like Black Lives Matter, which he sees as a ‘textbook example of how not to build solidarity.” Remnick questioned Lilla’s antipathy to social movements and to the follies of campus “political correctness” that Lilla thinks drive many of those movements.
Lilla acknowledged that part of the problem of campus “correctness” is driven by late-adolescent groping for identity and communal belonging, and that factors unrelated to identity politics are indeed in play. But his conversation with Remnick ends where it should have begun. It doesn’t ponder the far more overwhelming factors that are driving Trump’s march.
...
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off
U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights: Federal Lawsuit Challenges April 4, 2011, “Dear Colleague” Letter
June 16, 2016
Category: Due Process
On June 16, 2016, a former University of Virginia School of Law student filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Department of Education’s (ED’s) unlawful mandate that colleges abandon due process protections and try sexual misconduct cases using the lowest standard of evidence.
...
October 13, 2014
Category: Due Process
On September 28, 2014, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law SB 967, a bill that requires California’s university and college students to obtain verifiable “affirmative consent” for sexual activity. Under this bill, students must receive not just explicit consent to sexual activity but ongoing consent—although it is impossible to tell how often students must pause to receive explicit consent in order for their sexual activity to qualify as consensual. The bill also codifies use of the “preponderance of the evidence” standard of proof, meaning that a student accused of sexual assault will be found guilty if fact-finders determine it is only slightly more […]
June 4, 2014
Category: Due Process
Occidental College found a student “responsible” for sexual assault despite the fact that police refused to charge him and text message evidence indicates that both parties consented to having sex.
April 30, 2014
Category: Due Process
The White House fails to answer FIRE’s grave and continuing concerns about campus civil liberties.
==
2013 in Review: Threats from Washington, Victories in the States
December 30, 2013
PHILADELPHIA, December 30, 2013—As 2013 comes to a close, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) looks back on a year that was headlined by dire threats to free speech and student rights on campus. Yet through concerted effort, FIRE was able to win crucial legislative and regulatory victories against those threats while continuing to expand the sphere of the First Amendment and due process on campus.
The year’s top threats to student rights on campus came, unfortunately, from the federal government. Most prominently, in May, the Departments of Education and Justice **used a settlement with the University of Montana** to attempt to implement what they called a “blueprint” for sexual harassment regulations on campus. This blueprint would have served as a de facto national speech code at nearly every university in America, public and private.
“The federal ‘blueprint’ effort was certainly the gravest threat to free speech on campus in 2013,” said FIRE President Greg Lukianoff.
After months of activism **from FIRE and other organizations**, with an assist from Senator JohnMcCainand attention from major media ranging from the ***Los Angeles Times*editorial board** to Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator **George Will**, the new head of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) signaled that the government was **finally backing away** from the idea of the settlement as a national “blueprint,” although OCR has more to do by letting every college in the country know that they will not, in fact, be held to the blueprint’s unconstitutional standards.
Rolling back this regulatory effort was actually FIRE’s second major Washington victory of the year. Thanks in part to FIRE’s advocacy, an **attempt to add a provision** to the Violence Against Women Act that would have permanently written the low “preponderance of the evidence” standard for sexual misconduct cases on campus into federal law was **defeated in Congress**. A 2011 OCR guidance letter requiring that evidentiary standard is still in place, but FIRE is continuing its efforts to get it withdrawn. Use of this “50.01% likelihood” standard on campus means that students are being officially labeled as rapists by colleges using **deficient procedures and marginal evidence**—procedures that have led to a **rash of lawsuits** by the accused against their own universities.
While Washington mostly saw battles to preserve important student protections, far more positive developments happened in several states. **Virginia** and **Idaho** passed laws guaranteeing the right of belief-based student organizations to make belief-based choices about how to govern themselves, while North Carolina **passed a first-in-the-nation law** guaranteeing university students the right to hire counsel when facing non-academic campus disciplinary action.
Other highlights of 2013 include:
==
https://thinkprogress.org/devos-sexual-assault-bf7801b8264c
...
DeVos has also donated to a group that opposed the guidance. The Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation made donations totaling $25,000 to Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which has shared articles dismissive of sexual assault survivors. One read, “Unfortunately, much of the feminist ‘war on rape’ has conflated sexual assault with muddled, often alcohol-fueled, sexual encounters that involve miscommunication.”
In April, the department welcomed Candice Jackson as the deputy assistant secretary and acting assistant secretary of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which oversees investigations into how universities handle campus rape.Jackson has previously called the women who accused Trump of sexual assault during the campaign “fake victims.”
Whatever the department decides on the 2011 guidance, it is already making moves that would adversely affect sexual assault survivors. An internal Office for Civil Rights memo sent by Jackson narrows the approach of investigations into civil rights complaints, which includes campus rape. This means that the department will stop requiring staff to look at three years of complaint information in order to understand systemic discrimination within a school district or university. The memo also loosened oversight of regional offices.
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This attempt to formalize suppression of anti-occupation advocacy on college campuses is long-standing and widespread. The New York state legislature actually passed “a bill that would suspend funding to educational institutions which fund groups that boycott Israel.” Such legislation is becoming commonplace, as the group United With Israel boasted just last month:
Florida became the fifth state in the U.S. to introduce a resolution to confront the anti-Israel BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement when it passed a law on December 21, similar to the first anti-BDS legislation introduced in Tennessee last April.
By doing so, Florida has joined Tennessee, New York, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. Another 35 states are reportedly considering similar legislation.
The commendably consistent pro-campus-speech group FIRE, while expressing some criticisms of the BDS movement, has repeatedly documented and denounced attempts to suppress BDS advocacy on campus:
==
larry summers funder, women can' make it in college brooksly born et al kicked his ass
==
The demand from Healey’s ?office mirrors ones filed by ?attorneys general in New York and the U.S. Virgin Islands that press ExxonMobil on what its internal research dating back to 1976 said about climate change versus what the oil company said publicly.
Civil rights attorney Harvey Silverglate called theExxonMobil ?climate-change investigations“pure ?harassment.”
“It is outrageous for any law ?enforcement official to be seeking to win this battle for minds by flexing law enforcement muscle and trying to shut up the other side,” Silverglate told the Herald. “It’s not the way scientific or factual or even political battles are settled in this country, which last I checked is still a free country."
http://www.harveysilverglate.com/archive/
The new panic: campus sex assaults | February 20, 2015
chris christie
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304007504579349011669560726
wiki
Harvey A. Silverglate (born May 10, 1942) is an attorney in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the co-founder, with Alan Charles Kors, of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), for which he also serves as the current Chairman of the Board of Directors.[1]
He holds degrees from Princeton University ('64) andHarvard Law School ('67). He is a practicing attorney, specializing in civil liberties litigation, criminal defense, academic freedom, and students' rights cases. He is Of Counsel to the Boston-based law firm Zalkind Duncan & Bernstein.
In addition to his law practice, Silverglate is also a journalist and writer. He was a columnist for theBoston Phoenix, writing on politics, law, and civil liberties.[2] He also writes a regular column for Forbes.com, and has written columns and op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, theLos Angeles Times, the National Law Journal, Reason magazine, and other publications.[3] He authored two books, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses (co-authored with Alan Kors) and Three Felonies a Day, which details the extension of vague federal criminal laws into daily conduct that would not be readily seen as criminal.
Silverglate was a featured speaker at a rally by Demand Progress in memory of Aaron Swartz[4]and wrote an op-ed for Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly about his prosecution by the U.S. Attorney's Office. Lawyers familiar with the case told him the Middlesex County District Attorney'splan had been to resolve Swartz’s case by having it "...continued without a finding, with Swartz duly admonished and then returned to civil society to continue his pioneering electronic work in a less legally questionable manner."[5][6] As he explained to CNET's Declan McCullagh
Under such a disposition, the charge is held in abeyance (“continued”) without any verdict (“without a finding”). The defendant is on probation for a period of a few months up to maybe a couple of years at the most; if the defendant does not get into further legal trouble, the charge is dismissed, and the defendant has no criminal record. This is what the lawyers expected to happen when Swartz was arrested.[5]
"Tragedy intervened", Silverglate wrote in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, "when [United States Attorney Carmen] Ortiz’s office took over the case to 'send a message".[6]
Silverglate was a member of the board of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and also taught at Harvard Law School, the University of Massachusetts Boston, and at theCambridge Rindge and Latin School.[3]
Silverglate was a candidate in the 2009 Harvard Board of Overseers elections. After collecting 315 signatures from Harvard alumni, he was nominated as a petition candidate in early February 2009. His platform[7] focused on reforming the student disciplinary board, eliminating speech codes, and restoring the student voice in university outreach efforts. His campaign had been covered inThe Boston Globe[8] and the Harvard Law Record,[9] and he made an appearance on Greater Boston with Emily Rooney.[10] Election results were announced at commencement, June 4, 2009, and Silverglate finished in eighth place, with 11,700 votes, 1600 short of winning a seat.[11]
Silverglate is married to the portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman. Their son Isaac lives in New York City.[3]
Books
- Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent (September 2009)
- The Shadow University: The Betrayal Of Liberty On America's Campuses by Alan Charles Kors(Author) and Harvey A. Silverglate (Author) ISBN 0-06-097772-8 (1999)
==
Kirsten Powers
FOR THE MOTION
PowersColumnist, USA Today & Contributor, FOX News Kirsten Powers is a columnist for USA Today and Daily Beast, where she writes about politics, human rights, and faith, and the author of the forthcoming release, The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech. She joined FOX News Channel in 2004 and currently serves as a rotating panelist on Outnumbered and as a network contributor, providing political analysis and commentary across FOX News’s daytime and primetime programming, including Special Report with Bret Baier and FOX News Sunday. She previously served as a columnist for The New York Post, a communications consultant at Human Rights First and for the New York State Democratic Committee and vice president for international communications at America Online, Inc. From 1993 to 1998, Powers worked as deputy assistant U.S. trade representative for public affairs in the Clinton administration. She began her career as a staff assistant at the Office of President Bill Clinton, on the Clinton/Gore Presidential Transition Team.Learn more
Angus Johnston
AGAINST THE MOTIONAngus JohnstonHistorian of Student ActivismAngus Johnston is a historian of American student activism, and of student life and culture more broadly. An advocate of student organizing, he is the founder of the website StudentActivism.net. He teaches history at the City University of New York, where he received his PhD in 2009 with the dissertation “The United States National Student Association: Democracy, Activism, and the Idea of the Student, 1947-1978.” Johnston is particularly interested in student activism beyond the 1960s, in the history of student government, and in the role of students in the university. He regularly participates in scholarly and popular discussions on these topics, and his writing has appeared in several journals and anthologies. He has delivered lectures and workshops on the history of American student activism to undergraduate audiences at colleges across the country. Johnston received his BA in history from Binghamton University.Learn more
Jeremy Mayer
AGAINST THE MOTION
Jeremy MayerAssoc. Prof., George Mason & Co-Author, Closed Minds?Jeremy Mayer is an associate professor in the School of Policy, Government, and International Affairs at George Mason University. Most recently, he is the co-author of Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American Universities (2008) and co-editor of Media Power, Media Politics, 2nd Ed. (2008). He has written articles on diverse topics such as presidential image management, Christian right politics, federalism and gay rights, and comparative political socialization in several journals, and has offered political commentary to major networks and national newspapers. Previously, Mayer taught at Georgetown University and Kalamazoo College, where he won a campus-wide teaching award. He is a recipient of the Rowman & Littlefield Award in Innovative Teaching for the American Political Science Association, the only national teaching award in political science. He also has studied politics at Oxford, Michigan, and Brown.
http://intelligencesquaredus.org/about/speakers/item/1319-greg-lukianoff
Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), is the author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate(2012) and Freedom from Speech (2014). He has published articles in Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Stanford Technology Law Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, and numerous other publications. He is also a blogger for Huffington Post and authored a chapter in the anthology New Threats to Freedom (2010).
Lukianoff is a frequent guest on local and national syndicated radio programs, has represented FIRE on national television, and has testified before the U.S. Senate about free speech issues on America’s campuses. After focusing on the First Amendment and constitutional law at Stanford Law School, Lukianoff practiced law and interned at the ACLU in Northern California. He is a co-author of FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus.
Publications:
Greg Lukianoff, The Wall Street Journal, September 8, 2014
Greg Lukianoff, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, March 21, 2014
Greg Lukianoff, The Huffington Post, April 12, 2013
Interview with Greg Lukianoff, TheBestSchools.org
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
==
maloney: indoc u?
[T]here is a quote from a guy in the film from a guy who describes himself as a liberal Democrat he is now the president of the organization called FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and they actually defend people whose rights have been trampled on campus. And they are very successful and primarily their task is just to get the stories out. So they're an example of how shedding light on the problem can be effective.
Now they, the gentleman who is the president of it now his name is Greg Luganov [ph], I interviewed him for the film when he was their head litigant and I asked him that very question. And he said, I didn't really believe it was happening myself until I became the guy who got the FIRE cases.
==
...
:{State lawmakers in Georgia and Pennsylvania approved non-binding measures urging ideological diversity on campus, and Florida legislators considered an ABOR-based bill this year that was ultimately rejected by the state Senate.}: In addition, faced with possible passage of ABOR-based legislation, state universities in Colorado and Ohio have pledged to take steps to protect students from political or religious discrimination. Many in academia are dismayed by the demands for external controls on campus speech. While most agree that some professors do push agendas, most say that politicization of courses or grading is the rare exception, not the rule, and that the new Horowitz-inspired bills are the real examples of politicization. “Let's be clear about Mr. Horowitz. He's not St. Peter,” says University of Southern California professor of higher education William Tierney. “He's the academic equivalent of Howard Stern. He does not have a dispassionate, 'I'm just a guy who wants to create a better climate on campus' approach.” But if professors are distressed by some conservative students' demands for protection, they have only themselves to blame, says David French, president of FIRE, which advocates and litigates for free campus speech. French says conservatives today are merely taking advantage of a serious breach in academic freedom that liberals began creating in the 1980s: imposing speech codes that banned so-called hate speech to protect students who claimed they were harassed on the basis of gender or race. “For two decades universities have been running around telling people they have a right not to be offended,” he says, “so they have only themselves to blame” if conservative students echo the same cry. Meanwhile, gender- and ethnicity-speech battles continue.Horowitz says a particularly troubling example involved Harvard University President Lawrence Summers. In January Summers became the target of outrage when he suggested that “intrinsic differences” between men and women may account for the low representation of women at top levels of science. Women's groups and some faculty members loudly called for his resignation, and Summers ended up issuing repeated apologies. 9 The story demonstrates that a vocal minority of liberal faculty themselves have tried to stifle academic freedom, with chilling results on speech, saysHorowitz. “Most faculty are not ideologues, but the others said that you shouldn't even discuss an academic idea,” he says. “The idea that you're going to vomit if somebody even mentions something like this should set off alarm bells for everybody.” As colleges and lawmakers debate the nature and limits of academic freedom, here are some questions being discussed: Should universities add conservative professors and courses to ensure ideological balance? Some students, conservative activists and state legislators say liberal arts faculties are dominated by left-leaning professors and that the bias intimidates conservative students, shuts down worthwhile ideas and discourages conservatives from teaching. But many academics say critics can cite few actual incidents of ideologically based hiring or grade discrimination and that professors' political views seldom affect their teaching. Horowitz claims left-wing domination of liberal arts faculties is accelerating, as current faculty exclude would-be conservative teachers.“You would pretty much have to have your head examined to pursue a Ph.D. in fields like history, for example, which are dominated by Marxists” and other liberals sympathetic to them, he says, “who . . . have no interest in a plural intellectual universe.” 10 While a 50-50 balance isn't necessary, universities must make an effort to include conservative faculty or they will lose public support, according to David Gelernter, a Yale computer science professor. “When a university is overwhelmingly dominated by the left, balance becomes an issue,” he said. For its own good, a university should ensure that every political viewpoint “with a significant constituency . . . has at least a toehold, a self-sustaining outpost” on campus. 11 But Stanley Fish, professor of humanities and law at Florida International University, says allowing demographics or political influences to shape university decisions abandons the key principle of academic freedom: that professors, as the top experts in their fields, must be allowed to pursue knowledge in their own way. The primary educational imperative “is to seek the truth about a body of materials or texts” and teach students according to the findings, Fish says. Doing otherwise exchanges the educational imperative for a political imperative, he says. 12 Other academics argue that the conservatives are overreacting. Evidence of ideologically based discrimination is nearly non-existent, they argue. “There are very few documented cases that I've been able to find,” says Richard De George, a University of Kansas philosophy professor and author of a book on ethical issues related to academic freedom. “I'd like to see some evidence that indoctrination is taking place.” And, while studies show that a vast number of academics vote Democratic, he says, there is no evidence that departments ask for applicants' party affiliation during the hiring process. But Students [heh] for Academic Freedom says bias is evident in curriculums that reflect only liberal points of view. For example, the SAF contends that a course in peace studies and conflict resolution at Indiana's Ball State University is unacceptably biased because it discusses only peaceful means of resolving conflict. 13 The course reinforced “the idea that non-violent means were the only legitimate sources of self-defense,” wrote Ball State student Brett Mock, whose complaint launched SAF's campaign. “This seemed to me to be indoctrination rather than education.” 14 A course in conflict resolution that focuses entirely on peaceful means is “illegitimate” for a liberal arts curriculum that promises “broad” studies approaching issues with “neutrality,” says Horowitz. Offering such a course in a liberal arts context was “a kind of consumer fraud,” he said. |  | But Ball State President Jo Ann Gora wrote that the course content was broader than Mock and Horowitz describe and that no false advertising occurred. On the midterm exam, for example, students were asked to use the philosophical concept of a “just war” to argue both for and against the Iraq war, Gora pointed out, and the course's syllabus clearly stated that the course would emphasize the “study of peace initiatives and mediation.” 15 As tuitions rise, the politicization of curriculums is increasingly troublesome to parents and students, according to Steven Roy Goodman, an independent education consultant in Washington, D.C. “Where it was once students who did the acting out . . . now the professors and administrators are more likely to be playing politics, and more and more Americans with college-age kids are getting fed up with it,” he wrote. “I counsel families of all political stripes . . . but they all agree on one thing: The overly politicized atmosphere on campuses is distracting colleges from providing a solid education.” 16 Professors argue, however, that the essence of academic freedom lies in their ability to shape their curriculums according to their own reasoned conclusions. For example, university departments seek intellectual “balance” among teachers, but not the kind of political liberal/conservative “balance” perceived by the public, said Fish. “Many political science departments . . . are divided by whether or not they favor quantitative or qualitative methods of research and analysis. So in a department where 95 percent of the professors voted for [Sen. John] Kerry, there will be a 50/50 split,” but it will not track “partisan politics, it will be a split that tracks disciplinary politics.” 17 Critics are taking a U.S.-centric worldview, while scholars must take a global view, says Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas, Austin. In fact, he points out, from a worldwide perspective there is very little far-left activity in U.S. politics. Thus, while U.S. faculties may be more left-leaning than the general population, they are not considered ultra-left when compared to left-wing views widely held by faculties in the rest of the world. In universities, “there has to be some acknowledgment of the wider world,” he says. Moreover, there is more to a university than its liberal arts courses, and conservative views dominate in other departments, adds Jensen, who has drawn criticism for speaking out on issues such as his opposition to the Iraq war. “I'm not neutral in the classroom,” he says. “But nobody else is either.” One member of Jensen's department teaches media management from the industry point of view, “and in that class no critique of the industry is ever raised. My colleague is teaching the conventional wisdom, but nobody ever says, 'You're a running dog of capitalism.' ” Likewise, he says, conservative viewpoints are never challenged in business schools. “If you want to find political correctness, go to the business school and propose to offer a course on worker-owned corporations.” You'll be turned down flat, Jensen says. But Horowitz rejects the idea of bringing ideological balance to business and professional courses, where the objective, he says, is “training,” not education. A “diversity of viewpoints” is only necessary in liberal arts colleges, he said, “where it is appropriate to look at society and its institutions in a philosophical way.” 18 Even some professors who generally disagree with Horowitz's tactics agree that some professors cross the line toward political indoctrination. It's possible to teach the most controversial topics without forcing a point of view, says De George. “I teach Marxisim. I've never had any complaints from anybody, and I have had Marxists, anti-Marxists and military people in the class.” William Van Alstyne, a professor of constitutional law at Virginia's William and Mary School of Law, says, “My field is, in my own professional view, seriously corrupted. Professors are devoted to their own visions of social justice, and students quickly get the idea that analysis will be in terms of social justice” rather than purely legal reasoning. Such an approach compromises the definition of academic freedom and exploits “a semi-captive group,” he says. Should students be protected from speech that offends them or their beliefs? Beginning in the 1980s, colleges around the country adopted so-called speech codes, most of which remain in force today. Intended to make campuses more hospitable places for women, gays and racial and ethnic minorities, the codes generally banned speech that amounts to ridicule, promoting stereotypes or — in some cases — simply makes someone feel bad. In a:{ March 2001 ruling, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals endorsed the idea that students have a right to be protected against at least some classroom speech. “Speech that . . . creates a hostile learning environment that ultimately thwarts the academic process is speech that a learning institution has a strong interest in preventing,}:” wrote the court. 19 The case involved John Bonnell, a literature professor at Michigan's Macomb Community College, who was suspended after a student complained that sexual language Bonnell used in his classroom was “offensive . . . and degrading to women.” 20 “The college's interest in preserving a learning environment free of sexual harassment, among others, outweighs” Bonnell's “claimed free speech and academic freedom interests,” wrote Judge Eric L. Clay in overturning a lower court's order that the college reinstate Bonnell. Nowadays, few university administrations or academics openly support speech codes. Nevertheless, bans on speech or writing deemed hateful or harassing still exist on many campuses, and both liberal and conservative students and faculty often seem happy to appeal to those principles to squelch speech they object to. Last year, for example, the University of Utah began exempting students with religious objections from certain class assignments after a five-year court battle with Christina Axson-Flynn, a Mormon theater student who complained that drama professors harassed her because of her religious views. 21 Until recently, those who've filed grievances generally complained of feeling harassed on the basis of gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation. In the past few years, however, some students have begun seeking protection from professors they say harass them because of their conservative political or religious views. Today learning is stifled by widespread intimidation of conservative students by professors who have the life-shaping power to grade students' work, according to Luann Wright, a California-based writer. After her son complained about discrimination in his college classes, Wright founded the Web site NoIndoctrination.org to publicize politically biased classes. Since September 2002, the site has listed 166 such courses nationwide, representing about 30 percent of complaints submitted. Wright posts only complaints she deems substantial. “The university should be a marketplace of ideas, a safe place to explore a variety of perspectives. But I don't see that happening,” Wright said. Instead of feeling free to join academic discussions, conservative students keep their opinions to themselves, out of fear. “There's so much of it out there.” 22 Wright's aim: “To give a voice to the voiceless. Too often college courses . . . promote blatant sociopolitical agendas with alternative viewpoints being ignored, dismissed or ridiculed.” 23 If a student's views are not “radically liberal, feminist or environmentalist,” they do not speak out in class out of “fear of being shot down or having our grade lowered,” a University of Washington student wrote on the NoIndoctrination.org Web site, describing his experience in a psychology course. “I strongly urge religious and conservative students . . . to avoid this course. I really have no idea if [the professor] would actually lower a student's grade based on their opinions . . . but you cannot be sure.” The student said that while he received an excellent grade in the course, he felt “gypped” for not feeling free to express his opinions. 24 Speech-code skeptics— who today come from all sides of the political spectrum — have long complained that the bans, while intended to promote justice, in fact constrain academic discussion and professors' academic freedom to run classrooms according to their professional judgment. And students who seek protection against speech that makes them uncomfortable misunderstand the purpose of education, say other academics. “Often students think they have the right not to be challenged,” but being educated requires it, says Jensen of the University of Texas. Kevin Mattson, a history professor at Ohio University, opposes speech codes because he sees them as representing “the therapeutic view” of education — that college classes should “be all about building your self-esteem by hearing your own views echoed.” But “at the college level . . . it really should be about being challenged.” Other academics argue that those who ban certain types of speech become harassers themselves. “History has shown time and time again that when you try to censor speech in the name of feelings, you end up becoming a bully,” says Donald Downs, a professor of law, political science and journalism at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Under the school's now-defunct speech code, for example, numerous faculty members say they were dragged through painful, years-long investigations of allegedly harassing classroom behavior before eventually being cleared of all wrongdoing. And, by trying to protect students from speech that troubles them, “you infantilize them,” argues Downs, who led a successful 1999 effort to repeal his university's speech code. “We respect students as being young adults who have the capacity to handle discussions, but if they're going to run to Big Brother and complain, we can't.” Universities have a responsibility to foster civil discussion, but that doesn't mean banning tough or unpopular debate, says Downs. “Civility doesn't mean we're always going to be nice,” he says. “There's nothing wrong with heated, strong criticism and argument, and when it is over, we retreat back into our social selves. If we're afraid of offending someone, there isn't going to be free thought.” “No one denies that a college can and should ban true harassment,” according to FIRE's Lukianoff and Boston-based attorney Harvey Silverglate, who coauthored a book on campus speech. But “it should be obvious that allowing colleges to promulgate broad and amorphous rules that can punish speech . . . will result in self-censoring and administrative abuses.” The result, they argued, will be an entire generation of American students “who are learning that its members should hide their deeply held unpopular beliefs, while other students realize that they have the power, even the right, to censor opinions they dislike.” 25 Should academic free speech be limited in times of war or national emergency? Historically, the strongest challenges to free speech and academic autonomy have occurred during wartime. Supporters of curtailment warn that if authority figures like professors voice too much dissenting opinion, the country is weakened. Many in academia, however, argue that refraining from critical speech just when national passions run highest risks silencing criticisms that may be crucial to decision making. Donald Kagan, a professor of history and classics at Yale University, says too many academics opted to criticize U.S. policies rather than to offer patriotic support in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks. Academics should squelch their desire to criticize during such times, for the good of the country, Kagan contended. “Most Americans “unequivocally supported their government's determination to prevent future attacks by capturing or killing the perpetrators . . . and removing the leaderships of states that gave refuge to these people,” he wrote. But “that is not what we have seen . . . from the faculty of most elite universities. Their first concern has been to discuss the motives of the attackers. We need, they say, to reflect on the deeper causes of this conflict.” Rather than fostering patriotism, such ideas have made faculties “part of our country's problem” in the campaign against terrorism, he concluded. 26 :{Others want academic institutions to actively squelch such dissenters.Voicing harsh criticisms of U.S. policy surrounding the Iraq war should be a firing offense at universities, said Rep. J. D. Hayworth, R-Ariz.}: After Nicholas De Genova, an assistant professor of anthropology at Columbia University, said at a 2003 teach-in that the “only true heroes” of the Iraq war “are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military,” Hayworth circulated a petition in Congress urging Columbia to fire De Genova. (It didn't.) “As for academic freedom, what exactly is academic about wishing a bunch of young Americans slaughtered in battle?” Hayworth said. 27 Horowitz says there's a difference between thoughtful, patriotic criticism of the nation's war plans and criticisms that cross the line into treason, though he admits that the distinction can be hard to draw. On the treasonous side, he includes criticism that President Bush deceived the nation into supporting the war with Iraq, saying that such attacks on the nation's leader during wartime “sap our will” and “undermine patriotism,” potentially weakening the resolve of soldiers and citizens alike. With the war on terror in progress, the country is not well served by partisan academic attacks on the president that may “make us vulnerable to an enemy that wants to destroy us,” he says. But defenders of academic free speech say that it's especially valuable in difficult times. It's precisely when people's passions are running high and mostly in the same direction that it's most important to “raise the critiques of the dominant culture,” because that is when vital critical questions are most likely to be overlooked, says Jensen of the University of Texas. It's far too easy to accept the majority view “as neutral . . . apolitical” while trying to squelch critics by accusing them of “proselytizing” for extreme opinions, he says. Today's political debates often sound like “two drunks in a bar,” says Jensen. But encouraging university faculty and students to be more politically outspoken could bring “a deeper and richer sense of argument” to political discourse. Instead, debates over war too often lead only to charges that critics “aren't American.” “Intellectual freedom — the freedom to ask questions, to uncover facts, to speak independently without fear — is the foundation of our democracy and remains of critical importance, especially in a time of crisis,” reads a resolution adopted by the scholarly group the American Studies Association in November 2002. 28 Rather than limiting professors' freedom to express their views, including in political speeches made off campus, universities' primary duty should be to protect academic speech, whose fragility and value both become clear in times of crisis, according to University of Pennsylvania history professor Alan Charles Kors. The idea that the off-campus political speech of professors should be silenced on the grounds that academia should speak with a single voice in troubled times “is absurd, immoral, and an invitation to a mediocre professorate,” he wrote. “Free speech is indispensable to a free and, in the deepest sense, adaptive society.” 29 But students don't seem to buy this argument. Another fast-growing trend on campuses is shouting down invited speakers because of their political views. Conservatives like Horowitz are frequently victims of this tactic, but liberals, such as Iraq war opponents, also have been shouted off campuses in recent years. [1] Ahmad Al-Qloushi, “Dissident Arab Gets the Treatment,” FrontPageMagazine.com, Jan. 6, 2005. | [2] Ibid. [3] Ibid. [4] Joseph A. Woolcock, “Foothill Professor Responds,” Campus Report Online, Feb. 14, 2005,http://campusreportonline.net. [5] Quoted in James Joyner, “California Professor Flunks (Awful) Pro-U.S. Essay,” Outside the Beltway Web log, Jan. 16, 2005; www.outsidethebeltway.com. [6] “Defending a Patriotic Arab Student's Rights,” FrontPageMagazine.com, March 31, 2005. [7] Jerry L. Martin and Anne D. Neal, Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It, February 2002; http://www.goacta.org/publications/Reports/defciv.pdf. [8] Greg Lukianoff, “FIRE's Letter to President Gordon,” Oct. 23, 2001, www.thefire.org. [9] For background, see Sarah Glazer, "Gender and Learning," *CQ Researcher*, May 20, 2005, pp. 445-468. [10] “Putting Professors' Politics Under the Microscope,” Colloquy Live, The Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com/colloquylive/2004/02/politics/, Feb. 18, 2005. [11] Quoted in “Affirmative Reaction: When Campus Republicans Play the Diversity Card,” Forum,Harper's Magazine, September 2005, p. 64. [12] Ibid. [13] “The 'Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution' ” Program at Ball State University: Indoctrination or Education?” www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org. [14] Quoted in ibid., p. 6. [15] Jo Ann Gora, letter to Students for Academic Freedom, Sept. 23, 2004, www.bsu.edu. [16] Steven Roy Goodman, “Hey Profs, Come Back to Earth,” The Washington Post, April 10, 2005, p. B1. [17] “Affirmative Reaction,” op. cit., p. 66. [18] Quoted in “Putting Professors Under the Microscope,” op. cit. [19] Opinion, Bonnell v. Lorenzo, 2001 FED App. 0057P (6th Circuit), March 1, 2001,http://pacer.ca6.uscourts.gov/. [20] Ibid. [21] Angie Welling, “U., Axson-Flynn Settle Civil-Rights Suit,” Desert Morning News, July 15, 2004. [22] Quoted in Kendra Hamilton, “Academic Freedom's Thin Line,” Black Issues in Higher Education, March 11, 2004, p. 34. [23] www.noindoctrination.org. [24] Ibid., posting #272, Dec. 3, 2003. [25] Harvey Silverglate and Greg Lukianoff, “Speech Codes: Alive and Well at Colleges,”Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug. 1, 2003; www.harveysilverglate.com. [26] Donald Kagan, “Terrorism and the Intellectuals,” The Intercollegiate Review, spring 2002, p. 3. [27] Quoted in Billy House, “Hawyorth Urges Congress to Demand Firing of Prof for War Remarks,” Arizona Republic, April 1, 2003. [28] ASA Newsletter, March 2003, www.georgetown.edu/AmericanStudiesAssn/newsletter/archive. [29] “Tests for Academic Freedom in a Time of War,” Colloquy, The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 17, 2003. Document APA Citation — See Alternate Citation Style Clemmitt, M. (2005, October 7). Academic freedom. CQ Researcher, 15, 833-856. Retrieved from http://library.cqpress.com/ Document ID: cqresrre2005100702 Document URL: http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/cqresrre2005100702 |
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https://www.thefire.org/fire-guides/fires-guide-to-first-year-orientation-and-thought-reform-on-campus/
[obligatory nazi ref]
Campus Attempts to Reform and Dictate Beliefs and Attitudes
Students entering colleges and universities deserve a rich intellectual environment where they find themselves invited into freewheeling debates, with many, many different voices, on a wide range of important topics. Unfortunately, many colleges today behave, instead, like “enclaves of totalitarianism,” a term that the Supreme Court coined to describe violations of free speech in high schools, in the case of Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969). If secondary schools, which educate children, are prohibited from becoming totalitarian, colleges and universities, which educate adults, are held to a much higher standard. Unfortunately, these institutions all too often betray their obligation to honor diversity of opinion, freedom of conscience, open debate, and the free marketplace of ideas.. As one can see in abundance on the website of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), college officials frequently suppress ideas and speakers with whom they disagree, and use coercive tactics that violate the individual rights of students to formulate their own beliefs. (See www.thefire.org.)
Methods of enforcing officially approved points of view go beyond mere censorship. Campuses often adopt an official orthodoxy on matters of politics, values, and worldview, and they try to force students to mouth and even to believe the points of view that the administrators believe to be appropriately progressive or “politically correct.” These methods of thought reform include:
- Mandatory diversity “training” that aims to intimidate students into abandoning deeply held beliefs so that they will adopt the university’s preferred political stance. The distinction between “education” and “training” or “indoctrination” is important. While it is permissible, indeed valuable, to educate students about controversial issues and views of race, sex, and sexuality in our society, the university has no right to coerce students into adopting only one approved point of view on these issues.
- Ideologically tilted speech codes that privilege one point of view over others. Although civility codes that are neutral among competing viewpoints (that is, codes that control the manner in which a thought is expressed, but that don’t seek to control the content of thought itself) also offend the First Amendment, ideologically biased codes and double standards infringe terribly on freedom of conscience by silencing individuals selectively. (The courts are harsher on censorship that seeks to outlaw a particular point of view than they are on censorship that attacks, instead, the form of the expression, even though the latter is also protected.) One example of such codes is that of Shippensburg University, whose rules FIRE successfully challenged in a 2003 lawsuit. The Shippensburg code stated, “Shippensburg University’s commitment to racial tolerance, cultural diversity and social justice will require every member of this community to ensure that the principles of these ideals be mirrored in their attitudes and behaviors.” (Emphasis added.) Similarly, FIRE has criticized professors who compel students to sign statements agreeing to certain viewpoints or behaviors in order to limit debate to “acceptable” viewpoints.
- The use of nondiscrimination policies as a weapon to expel from campus or to suppress certain student groups that dissent from administrative campus orthodoxy, such as (these days) conservative religious groups, who often disagree with the college’s stance on social issues such as gay rights and abortion. (At other periods of our history, of course, conservative religious groups were more in favor, while other more liberal groups were more out of favor. The pendulum of oppression usually swings, which is why it is so crucial to agree to protect individual rights not as a political tactic, but as a way of being human.) Although it is appropriate and important for the university to punish invidious forms of discrimination, it is wrong for the university to transform such neutral antidiscrimination enforcement responsibilities into a set of coercive double standards, an ideologically biased weapon that is applied selectively against certain groups.
- The imposition of mandatory psychological counseling, accountability training, or other forms of counseling as punishments for campus offenses. Often universities will agree to “leniency” for those accused of various campus offenses so long as the accused individuals agree to attend re-education sessions. Too many students agree to attend such sessions, mistakenly believing that it is not a form of “punishment” to sit through hours of coercive indoctrination.
Just as the framers of the First Amendment battled against the establishment of an official state-approved religion, a freedom contained in the First Amendment’s religion clause, so does the First Amendment prevent the state from forcing citizens to believe, or mouth, an officially sanctioned point of view, whether political, philosophical, or personal. Free individuals disagree about and debate such views, and they seek to change each other’s beliefs by persuasion and argument, not by coercion and force.
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~ pirg student fees
https://www.thefire.org/fire-guides/fires-guide-to-student-fees-funding-and-legal-equality-on-campus/fires-guide-to-student-fees-funding-and-legal-equality-on-campus-full-text/#Contents3
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bs bios
Greg Lukianoffis an attorney and the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). He is the author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate and Freedom From Speech, as well as a co-author of The Atlantic’s September 2015 cover story, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” written in partnership with Jonathan Haidt.
Greg has also been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, TIME, The Boston Globe, Forbes, the New York Post, U.S. News & World Report, The Stanford Technology Law Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Reason, CNET, The Daily Caller, Congressional Quarterly, The Charleston Law Review, and numerous other publications.
Greg, along with Harvey A. Silverglate and David French, is a co-author of FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus. He is also a blogger for The Huffington Post and Ricochet.com. Greg is a frequent guest on local and national syndicated radio programs; has represented FIRE on national television shows, including CBS Evening News and CBS This Morning, NBC’s Today Show, CNN’s New Day, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, Fox’s Special Report and The O’Reilly Factor, Fox Business’s Stossel and The Independents, The Kelly File with Megyn Kelly, and MSNBC’s Dr. Nancy;
and has testified before both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives about free speech issues on America’s campuses. In 2008 he became the first ever recipient of the Playboy Foundation Freedom of Expression Award and in 2010 he received Ford Hall Forum’s Louis P. and Evelyn Smith First Amendment Award on behalf of FIRE. Greg is also an executive producer for Can We Take a Joke?, a feature-length documentary that explores the collision between comedy, censorship, and outrage culture on and off campus.
Greg is a graduate of American University and of Stanford Law School, where he focused on First Amendment and constitutional law. Before joining FIRE, Greg practiced law in Northern California, interned at the ACLU of Northern Californiaand the Organization for Aid to Refugees in Prague, Czech Republic, and was the development manager of the EnvironMentors Project in Washington, D.C. Greg is also a proud member of the board of directors of Philadelphia’s Theatre Exile. In his free time, Greg also runs the Genetic Music Project, an open source genetic art project combining music and science.
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[Organization for Aid to Refugees (OPU) was established in 1991 in Prague as a non-profit, non-governmental, humanitarian organization.
During its first years of existence, OPU primarily focused on people who had been persecuted in their home countries for being part of a specific social group, for political, ethnical, religious or racial reasons, or on those foreigners who were granted asylum and temporary protection. Today OPU provides assistance to third-country nationals and migrants in distress.
In cooperation with the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs – within the Transition Promotion Program, OPU realizes projects in Georgia that seek to support activities of the local NGOs working with refugees, and to help the refugees to reintegrate into the public life.
Link to the official webpage: http://www.opu.cz/en/
]
Robert Shibley
Executive Director
Robert L. Shibley, FIRE’s executive director, is a native of Toledo, Ohio, and a graduate of Duke University and Duke University School of Law. Robert’s undergraduate experience serving as the managing editor of theDuke Review newspaper, which frequently decried (and faced) administrative censorship and bias, led him to a career defending the rights of college and university students and faculty members. Since starting at FIRE in 2003, Robert has aided students and faculty members at dozens of colleges and universities. He is also a member of the bar in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Florida. As Executive Director, along with traveling to various campuses to speak about First Amendment issues,
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Robert has represented FIRE publicly on Stossel, Fox and Friends, and Lou Dobbs Tonight, in national and international radio and TV interviews, and in published editorials in USA Today and The Washington Post, as well as the New York Post, Boston Globe, Minneapolis Star Tribune, National Review, Providence Journal, Daily Oklahoman, and other newspapers and magazines. He also writes occasional columns for The Daily Caller, Forbes.com, and Pajamas Media. Robert and his wife Araz live in Apex, North Carolina, with their two daughters, Grace and Cecily.
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Peter Bonilla Staff
Director, Individual Rights Defense Program
Peter Bonillajoined FIRE in 2008 and has worked with FIRE’s Individual Rights Defense Program since 2009, becoming director in 2013. As director he oversees the management of FIRE’s extensive caseload and advocates directly to universities on behalf of students and faculty facing censorship on campuses nationwide. Peter has authored numerous columns for outside publications, commented frequently for radio, print, and television media, and lectured to students and faculty at conferences around the country.
Prior to joining FIRE, Peter was Literary Manager of Philadelphia’s InterAct Theatre Company, one of the country’s top theatres for the development and production of new politically and socially-themed plays. He is also a past recipient of a fellowship in playwriting from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and his first play was developed (with stage and film actor David Strathairn) at Philadelphia’s PlayPenn New Play Development Conference, and premiered to critical acclaim in Arizona in September 2011. In 2009, Peter was a contestant on the television game show Jeopardy! His undergraduate degree, with a double major in theater arts and economics, is from the University of Pennsylvania.
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Will Creeley Staff
Vice President of Legal and Public Advocacy
Will began defending student and faculty rights for FIRE in 2006 after graduating from New York University School of Law, where he served as an associate executive editor for the New York University Law Review. Will has appeared on national cable television and radio on behalf of FIRE and has spoken to students, faculty, administrators, and attorneys at events across the country. Will’s writing has been published by the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jurist, Inside Higher Ed, Daily Journal, the Charleston Law Review, and many other outlets. Will edited the second edition of FIRE’s Guide to Due Process and Campus Justice, co-edited the second edition of FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus, and has coauthored amicus curiae briefs submitted to a number of courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States and the United States Courts of Appeals for the Third, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits. Will has taught FIRE’s Continuing Legal Education programs in New York, Pennsylvania, and online. A member of the New York State Bar and the First Amendment Lawyers Association, Will serves as Co-Chair of the Education Subcommittee of the American Bar Association’s Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice.
Will graduated magna cum laude from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study in 2003. A proud native of Buffalo, New York, Will now lives in Philadelphia with his wife and son.
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https://issuu.com/thefireorg/docs/ar_final_issu
anual rept
donors cap, trust
kirby
fidelity
pope fnd
MS giving
milken family
dodge jones fdn
PARK FDN
pieere goodrih
reason fdn
searle freedomtrust
harvet silvergate
scaife
schwab
bof
bradley
postrel
rockwell
vanguard
malkin fund
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Virginia Postrel "is the author of The Substance of Style (2003) and The Future and Its Enemies (1998). She writes the “Economic Scene” column for The New York Times every four weeks and maintains an influential weblog on her dynamist.com website.
"From 1989 to 2000, she was editor of Reason magazine and vice president of the Reason Foundation. Reason was a finalist for the National Magazine Awards in 1993, 1996, and 1998. In 1995, she received theMencken Award for Commentary from the Free Press Association for an editorial in Reason and also founded Reason Online. She was editor-at-large of Reason from 2000 to 2001.
"She has been a columnist for Forbes and Forbes ASAP, and her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Wired, Strategy and Business, and Men’s Journal, among many other publications.
"Before moving to Reason, she was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and Inc. She is a graduate of Princeton University, with a degree in English literature." [1]
- Member of the Environmental Task Force of the **National Center for Policy Analysis**
[http://www.desmogblog.com/national-center-policy-analysis
2014
According to a2014 publication by the NCPA, “Given the uncertainty in climate science, adaptation appears to be a more cost-effective approach than mitigation.” [5]
The National Center for Policy Analysis quotes climate change skeptic Matt Ridley, who originally wrote in The Spectator that “Climate change has done more good than harm so far and is likely to continue doing so for most of this century. This is not a right-wing fantasy; it is the consensus of expert opinion.” [6]
1991
The following is from the summary of a 1991 “task force report” by the Political Economy Research Center/National Center for Policy Analysis (see full report here):
“Currently, scientists disagree on whether global warming has already occurred, whether significant global warming will occur in the future, whether warming would be harmful or somewhat beneficial to humans and whether, if harmful, it is better to adjust to the warming or try to prevent it. At least two of the world's leading climate scientists — Arizona State physicist Sherwood Idso and Soviet climatologist Mikhail Budyko — argue that we should welcome a CO2 buildup with open arms. In general, those scientists who welcome global warming, or at least do not worry about it, take the longer view — considering the historical variations in the earth's temperature and cycles in carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration).” [7]
Note: It is unclear why the authors consider Sherwood Idso, with a PhD in soil science (and the president of the climate skeptic group, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change), one of the world's “leading climate scientists.”]
Related SourceWatch
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the right has to explain why it loses elections not to mentio n the battle for ideas, so it has created the conventient bogeymen the Libeal Media and universities Liberal Educations/Arts (sen as a problem at least as far back aas the Powell Memo). Subgroup is liberal holywood (HUUAC McCarthy blacklist) Limosine Liberal (some no doubt just jealousy that handsome ppl make so much money and get all th girls, and a sort of pseudo-populist aspect to easy snarkery going after celebs).
Consev Ent Complex (with Fox showing it could be not just successful but LUCRATIVE) is part of Powell mirror /80's gang of 5 Ctr-culture move.
Newish incarnation/eruption is PC police on college campus (but recall Acc in Media , Horowitz etc etc).
odd anti PC errupted 1s/lately in europe?
December 17, 2014
Hypatia Livingston
Posted with permission from Breitbart Unmasked
After 15 years of writing policy papers and serving as experts in the media, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a small branch of the vast-spanning Koch billionaire-funded network, has emerged from the shadows to mount an aggressive lawsuit campaign targeting campus policies and forcing universities to pay for what they deem "First Amendment" offenses.
The result of the onslaught of lawsuits brought by FIRE will likely be sweeping changes in the way speech is carried out in day to day campus life - based on policies penned from "libertarian" interpretations of speech, often written by the right-wing group themselves.
The group itself is not limiting itself to speech policies, however, as we previously reported. FIRE has been working with students accused of sex crimes on campus and plans to litigate on their behalf.
The implications and the fast-moving nature of the flurry of lawsuits is a bit terrifying. The funding behind them seems to have come out of nowhere. But rest assured, it's a well-orchestrated onslaught. There's been very little coverage so far of what's happening. Vulnerable universities and colleges are folding to pressure – settling these cases out of court and permanently rewriting their school's policies – for better or worse.
The Stand Up For Speech Litigation Project
In June, 2013, FIRE put out a press release announcing what it termed the "Stand Up For Speech Litigation Project."
According to a press release published at the right-leaning Accuracy in Academia project, the project goal was "to eliminate unconstitutional speech codes at universities by targeting First Amendment violations and initiating lawsuits." Libertarian attorney Robert Corn-Revere was to serve as the leading counsel to students and faculty members "participating" in the project - i.e. bringing lawsuits against the universities who they believed were running afoul of the First Amendment.
"For 15 years, FIRE has fought for free speech on campus using public awareness as our main weapon, but more is needed," said FIRE President Greg Lukianoff, "We have already coordinated two lawsuits in the past nine months, and this morning we brought four more."
The lawsuits are quick-hitting complaints on basic first Amendment issues - incidents that could probably have been resolved without suing and robbing the schools of much-needed funds. But that's that's not the purpose of the lawsuits. They're basically a method of suing schools into submission.
The litigation itself was designed to be settled out of court for small lump sums and force the schools to revise their policies to adhere to FIRE's interpretation of the First Amendment, the press release explained:
:{
}:
"For example, the lawsuit against Modesto Junior College in California was filed after a security guard and a staffer told a student that he couldn't pass out copies of the Constitution on Constitution Day 2013. The College settled the lawsuit for $50,000 and made policy revisions."[branded by CTT?]
On September 17, 2014 - Constitution Day - FIRE announced they had mailed out 300 letters threatening schools with legal action if they did not immediately amend their policies:
"In a national certified mailing sent today, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) warns the leaders of more than 300 of our nation's largest and most prestigious public colleges and universities that they risk First Amendment lawsuits by continuing to maintain speech codes that violate student and faculty rights. The letters are being mailed from the main post office near Independence Hall in Philadelphia today to mark the 227th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution."
"Public colleges and universities have no excuse for violating basic First Amendment rights by maintaining unconstitutional speech codes," said Azhar Majeed, Director of FIRE's Individual Rights Education Program, in press release announcing the letter campaign:
"But they need not risk the possibility of an embarrassing federal lawsuit. They can easily rectify these policies by working cooperatively with FIRE, as theUniversity of Florida and Plymouth State University have done recently."
A sample letter provided on the FIRE website spans six long-form pages and details the lawsuit wins that FIRE has scored in 2014.
It bears the ominous threat: "More such lawsuits will follow until public colleges and universities finally understand that complying with the First Amendment is not optional."
You can read the whole thing below…
Stand Up for Speech Certified Mailing FIRE
Where did this aggressive lawsuit effort come from? Who is funding it?
FIRE is a member of the vast right-wing network funded by the Koch brothers' circle of like-minded one-percenters.
Koch family foundations have written checks as high as $250,000 for general operating costs for FIRE, according to Sourcewatch. The John William Pope Foundation, also part of the vast Koch donor network, donates to the tune of $150,000 regularly.
:{
}:
One donor in particular may explain the timing of the current campaign and the aggressive efforts behind expansion – the conservative-leaning Sarah Scaife Foundation. Up until July, the late Richard Mellon Scaife administered the grants to his favorite right wing organizations, including such conservative strongholds as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), The Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute. In 2013, Scaife wrote a check for $150,000 to FIRE. In 2012 and 2011, he donated similar amounts, according to tax documents posted on the foundation's website.
Scaife, a billionaire with a passion for advancing the conservative agenda, passed away on July 4, 2014 and left nearly all of his $1.3 billion fortune to his network of foundations. As a result, the Sarah Scaife Foundation is set to have assets of about $800 million in spending power after absorbing the smaller, similarly focused Carthage Foundation.
Michael W. Gleba, president and acting chairman of the Sarah Scaife Foundation and Carthage Foundation, now oversees the funds. Deeply embedded in the seat of power within conservative policy-making infrastructure, Gleba also serves on the board of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, another think tank aimed at dismantling what they see as the "liberal agenda" within colleges and universities.
Prior to the lawsuit project, The Alliance Defense Fund was the go-to Koch-related group that took right-wing, campus-based "free speech" lawsuits to court. Since early 2014, they have veered away from school-centered speech and have begun to focus on corporate speech after becoming heavily involved in the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court case.
It appears, for all intensive purposes, that FIRE has stepped up to fill this void.
We will continue to keep you updated on the organization's mov...
==
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE
srcwtch 2011
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education or FIRE is a group which claims to "defend and sustain individual rights at America's increasingly repressive and partisan colleges and universities." It is an advocate on such issues as "free speech" codes, religious liberty, due process for students, allocation of funding for student organizations, and defense against ideological indoctrination. FIRE is a major proponent of the intellectual diversity movement which aims to dismantle the so-called liberal bias in higher academia.
FIRE produces many Guides for students on their issues, including one on first-year orientation and "Thought Reform on Campus."
FIRE also has a legal network which connects students who feel their rights have been violated by faculty or administrators with attorneys specializing in FIRE's major talking points.
Thor Halvorssen "was the first Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of FIRE." [1]
Funding
"FIRE’s Guides to Student Rights on Campus are made possible by contributions from thousands of individual donors and by grants from:"
- The Achelis and **Bodman Foundations**
- Aequus Institute **Earhart Foundation**
- Pierre F. and Enid Goodrich Foundation
- The Joseph Harrison Jackson Foundation
- **John Templeton Foundation**
According to Media Transparency's profile, FIRE has also received grants from:
- Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
- Sarah Scaife Foundation
- F.M. Kirby Foundation
- Castle Rock Foundation
- Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation
Board of Directors
- Harvey Silverglate - Co-founder and Chairman
- William J. Hume
- Joseph Maline
- Marlene Mieske
- Daphne Patai
- Virginia Postrel denier
- James Wiggins
- Kenny J. Williams (deceased)
Board of Advisors
- Lloyd Buchanan
- **T. Kenneth Cribb**
- William Dunn
- Benjamin Hammond
- Nat Hentoff
- Roy Innis
- Wendy Kaminer
- Woody Kaplan
- Leonard P. Liggio
- Herbert I. London
- Peter L. Malkin
- Milton Rosenberg
- Candace :{de Russy:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:
- **John R. Searle**
- **Ricky Silberman**
- **Christina Hoff Sommers**
- David Brudnoy
External links
- Official website
- Debra England, "Top 10 charitable gift ideas for this holiday season," TownHall.com, December 16, 2006.
==
William J. (Jerry) Hume "joined Basic American, a food processing company, in 1967. He has been a member of the Basic American Board since 1980 and was elected Chairman of the Board in 1985. Hume is a graduate of Yale and Harvard Universities.
"Hume is chairman of the Foundation for Teaching Economics and of Biologically Integrated Organics, Inc. He is also a member of the Hoover Institution Board of Overseers and the boards of the Heritage Foundation, the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, and the American Education Reform Foundation.
"Hume has actively endorsed education reform for many years and has served on the California State Board of Education and the National Assessment Governing Board. He is married to Patricia (Patti) Hume. Both of their two daughters are married and are medical doctors, and their son is a writer and poet. They have one grandchild. In his spare time, Hume enjoys fly fishing." [1]
- Founding Committee, Club for Growth
- Director, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
==
Ricky Silberman "is a cofounder and a member of the Board of Directors of the Independent Women’s Forum. Silberman is also the former vice chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission(EEOC)." [1]
==
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/
wiki
Greg Lukianoff is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). He previously served as FIRE's first director of legal and public advocacy until he was appointed president in 2006.[1] A graduate of American University and Stanford Law School, he has described himself as a "pro-choice liberal."[2]
Lukianoff has published articles in the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Chronicle of Higher Education, The Atlantic, Inside Higher Ed, and the New York Post. He is a blogger for the Huffington Post[3] and served as a regular columnist for the Daily Journal of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Along with Harvey A. Silverglate and David French, Lukianoff is a co-author of FIRE's Guide to Free Speech on Campus. He testified before the United States Congress on the state of free speech on college campuses, and appeared in the films Brainwashing 101 and Indoctrinate U, on the same topic. He has made numerous appearances on nationally syndicated television shows.[4]
He has also appeared on various news shows, including Stossel on more than one occasion. Before joining FIRE, Lukianoff worked for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, the Organization for Aid to Refugees, and the EnvironMentors Project. He lives in New York City.
References
- FIRE Names Greg Lukianoff as President. Retrieved May 28, 2008 Archived 31 December 2010 at WebCite
- Washington University Law School Club Feud Is Resolved. Retrieved May 28, 2008. Archived 31 December 2010 at WebCite
- Huffington Post- Greg Lukianoff Bio. Retrieved May 28, 2008 Archived 31 December 2010 at WebCite
- FIRE - Events and Media Appearances Archived 31 December 2010 at WebCite
External links
 | Wikiquote has quotations related to: Greg Lukianoff |
- Living people
- American lawyers
- American University alumni
- Free speech activists
- The Huffington Post writers and columnists
- People from New York City
- American social liberals
- Stanford Law School alumni
==
note poster boy hypocrisy:
The October 2014 email discussion, led by infamous climate denier Fred Singer, asks whether it would make sense to file a lawsuit to try and stop the release of the new feature length documentary, Merchants of Doubt– a film tracing the tactics used by Big Tobacco to spread misinformation and how those same tactics are now being used by those attacking climate change science and the 97% consensus.
As an expert-for-hire who has taken money from both Big Tobacco and fossil fuel companies over the span of his career, S. FredSinger is a major focal point in Merchants of Doubt.
But where the really interesting story lies, is in two of the recipients of the Singer email who share an uncannily similar history.
One recipient is Willie Soon, a name familiar to loyal DeSmog readers who have no doubt seen stories on the Willie Soon Harvard-Smithsonian scandal over the past few weeks. Dr. Soon, has been making headlines for his funding from utility (coal) and oil companies, in exchange for publishing peer reviewed scientific papers that question the role of carbon dioxide pollution in warming the planet.
Another recipient on the Singer email chain, James Enstrom, advised Singer to launch grievances with Stanford, Harvard and University of California against Naomi Oreskes and Stanton Glantz — an intimidating 'attack the messenger' tactic we'll revisit in a moment.
Enstrom is a former University of California Los Angeles epidemiologist who has been makingheadlines as of late after UCLA settled a wrongful termination suit that Enstrom had filed. Some right-wing blogs have portrayed Enstrom as a hero for winning the suit last month, in which he claims he was let go by UCLA in an attempt to “purge an academic dissenter.”
==-
adams, IRE unc rape http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/05/mike_adams_unc_wilmington_conservative_professor_wins_academic_freedom_lawsuit.html
==
kochsucker:
Adam Kissel graduated from Harvard University and from theUniversity of Chicago, where he served as Student Liaison to the Board of Trustees and earned a master's degree from the Committee on Social Thought.
Over five years at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), he has spoken about free speech, religious liberty, academic freedom, and due process on college campuses in more than 15 states, at CPAC, and for professional and community organizations. His academic interests include the history and theory of liberal education and rhetoric's relationship with philosophy. He also has served as a professional editor for Nobel laureate James Heckman and for faculty in a variety of disciplines. In recent years, Mr. Kissel won a First Prize in education reporting from the National Education Writers Association and was named a “Champion of the First Amendment” at Iowa State University. He now works in higher education philanthropy in the D.C. area.
Cost: $1,000 negotiable; prefers to make own travel arrangements
Invite Adam to your campus!
Topics: Academic Freedom Constitution Education Free Speech Religious Liberty
==
LI
Adam Kissel
Senior Program Officer, University Investments, at Charles Koch Foundation
Arlington, VirginiaPhilanthropy
Current
Charles Koch Foundation
Previous
Institute for Humane Studies, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), Jack Miller Center/Lehrman American Studies Center
Education
Harvard University
Websites
Company Website
329
connections
Join LinkedIn and access Adam’s full profile. It’s free!
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Experience
Program Officer, Higher Education
Charles Koch Foundation
July 2012 – Present (3 years 6 months)
Visiting Fellow
Institute for Humane Studies
2015 – 2015 (less than a year)
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)
Vice President of Programs
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)
September 2010 – July 2012 (1 year 11 months)
FIRE's mission is is to defend and sustain individual rights at America's colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, legal equality, due process, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience—the essential qualities of individual liberty and dignity. FIRE's programs protect the unprotected and educate the public and communities of concerned Americans about the threats to these rights on our campuses and about the means to preserve them.
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)
Director, Individual Rights Defense Program
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)
September 2007 – September 2010 (3 years 1 month)
Director of Faculty and Program Development/Director of Curriculum Development
Jack Miller Center/Lehrman American Studies Center
2006 – 2007 (1 year)
Programs of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute designed to develop new academic centers and provide resources for developing the next generation of college professors dedicated to teaching about America's history, institutions, and founding principles.
--
scrape:
Derek Johnson
Director of Educational Development at the Charles Koch Institute
Molly Hurt
Peter Brasdovich
Senior Program Coordinator at Charles Koch Foundation
Ryan Stowers
Director, Higher Education at Charles Koch Foundation
Brian Hooks
President, Charles Koch Foundation & Charles Koch Institute
Brennan Brown
Higher Education, Adjunct Professor of Economics
Debi Ghate
Director, Academic Investments at Charles Koch Foundation
John Hardin
Director, University Relations at the Charles Koch Foundation
Matt OBrien
Senior Student Relations Coordinator, Charles Koch Foundation | Supporting scholarship focused on improving well-being
==
orphan, enstrom UCLA?
==
https://www.thefire.org/cases/university-of-oregon-derecognition-of-student-group-for-offensive-publication/
7/15
FIRE’s Latest
July 17, 2015
July 16, 2015
July 16, 2015
July 15, 2015
July 15, 2015
July 15, 2015
July 15, 2015
==
After 15 years of writing policy papers and serving as experts in the media, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a small branch of the vast-spanning Koch billionaire-funded network, has emerged from the shadows to mount an aggressive lawsuit campaign targeting campus policies and forcing universities to payfor what they deem "First Amendment" offenses.
The result of the onslaught of lawsuits brought by FIRE will likely be sweeping changes in the way speech is carried out in day to day campus life - based on policies penned from "libertarian" interpretations of speech, often written by the right-wing group themselves.
The group itself is not limiting itself to speech policies, however, as we previously reported. FIRE has been working with students accused of sex crimes on campus and plans to litigate on their behalf.
The implications and the fast-moving nature of the flurry of lawsuits is a bit terrifying. The funding behind them seems to have come out of nowhere. But rest assured, it's a well-orchestrated onslaught. There's been very little coverage so far of what's happening. Vulnerable universities and colleges are folding to pressure – settling these cases out of court and permanently rewriting their school's policies – for better or worse.
The Stand Up For Speech Litigation Project
In June, 2013, FIRE put out a press release announcing what it termed the "Stand Up For Speech Litigation Project."
According to a press releasepublished at the right-leaning Accuracy in Academia project, the project goal was "to eliminate unconstitutional speech codes at universities by targeting First Amendment violations and initiating lawsuits." Libertarian attorney Robert Corn-Reverewas to serve as the leading counsel to students and faculty members "participating" in the project - i.e. bringing lawsuits against the universities who they believed were running afoul of the First Amendment.
"For 15 years, FIRE has fought for free speech on campus using public awareness as our main weapon, but more is needed," said FIRE President Greg Lukianoff, "We have already coordinated two lawsuits in the past nine months, and this morning we brought four more."
The lawsuits are quick-hitting complaints on basic first Amendment issues - incidents that could probably have been resolved without suing and robbing the schools of much-needed funds. But that's that's not the purpose of the lawsuits. They're basically a method of suing schools into submission.
The litigation itself was designed to be settled out of court for small lump sums and force the schools to revise their policies to adhere to FIRE's interpretation of the First Amendment, the press release explained:
"For example, the lawsuit against Modesto Junior College in California was filed after a security guard and a staffer told a student that he couldn't pass out copies of the Constitution on Constitution Day 2013. The College settled the lawsuit for $50,000 and made policy revisions."
[on the video, the cop and the school officials are polite and clear; cop pts out that the literature was printed by heritage fdn]
On September 17, 2014 - Constitution Day - FIRE announced they had mailed out 300 letters threatening schools with legal action if they did not immediately amend their policies:
"In a national certified mailing sent today, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) warns the leaders of more than 300 of our nation's largest and most prestigious public colleges and universities that they risk First Amendment lawsuits by continuing to maintain speech codes that violate student and faculty rights. The letters are being mailed from the main post office near Independence Hall in Philadelphia today to mark the 227th anniversary of the signing of the U.S. Constitution."
"Public colleges and universities have no excuse for violating basic First Amendment rights by maintaining unconstitutional speech codes," said Azhar Majeed, Director of FIRE's Individual Rights Education Program, in press release announcing the letter campaign:
"But they need not risk the possibility of an embarrassing federal lawsuit. They can easily rectify these policies by working cooperatively with FIRE, as the University of Florida and Plymouth State University have done recently."
A sample letter provided on the FIRE website spans six long-form pages and details the lawsuit wins that FIRE has scored in 2014.
It bears the ominous threat: "More such lawsuits will follow until public colleges and universities finally understand that complying with the First Amendment is not optional."
You can read the whole thing below…
Stand Up for Speech Certified Mailing FIRE
IRE is a member of the vast right-wing network funded by the Koch brothers' circle of like-minded one-percenters.
Koch family foundations have written checks as high as $250,000 for general operating costs for FIRE, according toSourcewatch. The John William Pope Foundation, also part of the vast Koch donor network, donates to the tune of $150,000 regularly.
One donor in particular may explain the timing of the current campaign and the aggressive efforts behind expansion – the conservative-leaning Sarah Scaife Foundation. Up until July, the late Richard Mellon Scaife administered the grants to his favorite right wing organizations, including such conservative strongholds as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), The Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute. In 2013, Scaife wrote a check for $150,000 to FIRE. In 2012 and 2011, he donated similar amounts, according to tax documents posted on the foundation's website.
Scaife, a billionaire with a passion for advancing the conservative agenda, passed away on July 4, 2014 and left nearly all of his $1.3 billion fortune to his network of foundations. As a result, the Sarah Scaife Foundation is set to have assets of about $800 million in spending power after absorbing the smaller, similarly focused Carthage Foundation.
Michael W. Gleba,president and acting chairman of the Sarah Scaife Foundation and Carthage Foundation, now oversees the funds. Deeply embedded in the seat of power within conservative policy-making infrastructure, Gleba also serves on the board of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute,another think tank aimed at dismantling what they see as the "liberal agenda" within colleges and universities.
Prior to the lawsuit project, The Alliance Defense Fund was the go-to Koch-related group that took right-wing, campus-based "free speech" lawsuits to court. Since early 2014, they have veered away from school-centered speech and have begun to focus on corporate speech after becoming heavily involved in the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court case.
It appears, for all intensive purposes, that FIRE has stepped up to fill this void.
We will continue to keep you updated on the organization's movements.
==
Partner
DWT
March 2003 – Present (12 years 4 months)
Partner
Hogan & Hartson
1994 – 2003 (9 years)
Chief Counsel to Chairman James Quello
Federal Communications Commission
1993 – 1994 (1 year)
Mass Media Advisor to Commissioner Quello from 1990-93
Corn-Revereis a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, specializing in First Amendment, Internet and communications law. He has served as counsel in First Amendment litigation involving the Communications Decency Act, the Child Online Protection Act, Internet content filtering in public libraries, public broadcasting regulations and export controls on encryption software. In 1999 Mr. Corn-Revere was listed on a 30th Anniversary Roll of Honor by the American Library Association Office of Intellectual Freedom and Freedom to Read Foundation for his role as lead counsel inMainstream Loudoun v. Board of Trustees of the Loudoun County Library. He successfully argued United States v. Playboy Entertainment Group, Inc., 529 U.S. 803 (2000), in which the United States Supreme Court struck down Section 505 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 as a violation of the First Amendment. Mr. Corn-Revere also served as lead counsel in Motion Picture Association v. FCC, 309 F.3d 796 (D.C. Cir. 2002), in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit vacated video description rules imposed on networks by the FCC.
Before joining Davis Wright Tremaine L.L.P. in March 2003, Mr. Corn-Revere was a partner at Hogan & Hartson L.L.P. in Washington D.C. from 1994 to 2003. Before that, he served as Chief Counsel to Interim Chairman James H. Quello of the Federal Communications Commission. Previously, from 1990 until 1993, he was Commissioner Quello’s Legal Advisor. He has written extensively on First Amendment, Internet and communications-related issues and is a frequent speaker at professional conferences. He is co-author of a three-volume treatise entitled Modern Communications Law, published by West Publishing Company, and is Editor and co-author of the book, Rationales & RationalizationsR, published in 1997. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Pike & Fischer’s INTERNET LAW & REGULATION. From 1987 to 2001 Mr. Corn-Revere taught at the Communications Law Institute of the Columbus School of Law, Catholic University of America. He is Chairman of the Media Institute’s First Amendment Advisory Council and is a member of the Institute’s Board of Trustees. From 2000-2002, Mr. Corn-Revere served on the Board of Trustees of the Freedom to Read Foundation, affiliated with the American Library Association.
==
bs site
https://www.thefire.org/
huffpo col
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-lukianoff/my-testimony-in-front-of_b_7494280.html
==
2 profile kristol stop trump
five things you need to know about the prospective candidate.
- French graduated from Harvard Law School, and served in Iraq in Diyala Province as SquadronJudge Advocate for the 2nd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, where he was awarded the Bronze Star. [2x?] He is a major in the United States Army Reserve (IRR).
- He lives in Tennessee with his wife Nancy, a New York Times best-selling author, and their three children.
- He is the past president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and has defended religious liberty on college campuses, serving as a senior counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice and the Alliance Defending Freedom.
David Frenchis a staff writer at National Review, an attorney (concentrating his practice in constitutional law and the law of armed conflict), and a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He is the author or co-author of several books including, most recently, the No. 1New York Times bestselling Rise of ISIS: A Threat We Can’t Ignore.
He is a graduate of Harvard Law School, the past president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and a former lecturer at Cornell Law School. He has served as a senior counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice and the Alliance Defending Freedom. David is a major in the United States Army Reserve (IRR). In 2007, he deployed to Iraq, serving in Diyala Province as Squadron Judge Advocate for the 2nd Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, where he was awarded the Bronze Star. He lives and works in Columbia, Tennessee, with his wife, Nancy (who is also a New York Times bestselling author), and three children.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/author/david-french
qtd in http://www.cato.org/blog/wisconsins-criminalization-political-speech
pro gun, islamophobe,xian
http://www.nationalreview.com/author/david-french
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/06/david-french-trump-intimidated-my-family.html
hmn rational wiki, itself libtard
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, is an American organization that defends individual rights, especially the right to free speech, in higher education. Much like the ACLU, this often leads to them defending unpopular or controversial speech. Unlike the ACLU, FIRE ends up disproportionately defending conservative speech, but this may be more due to more liberal speech being less likely to require defending at universities, which tend to be more left-leaning. This has led to claims of it actually secretly being a conservative group.
Contents [hide] |
[edit]School ratings system
FIRE maintains a list of ratings of college speech policies that grade schools as being green, yellow, red, or grey (not rated), which they claim apply equally to private and public universities.[1] However, to get a rating of exempt a private school just needs to say they have a higher dedication than freedom of speech.This means that the majority of the exempt schools are conservative christian schools.[2] Rather than being rated as having extremely poor speech policies with a note that they do this on purpose, they just aren't rated at all. This just happens to allow the most egregious offenders, the aforementioned conservative christian schools, to not be rated as the student speech squashing entities that they are.
It is of course completely unrelated that this makes the list of worst offenders look a whole lot less conservative. It makes more sense to view the exempt schools, which specifically state they don't care about free speech, as even lower on the scale, perhaps even at the level of "car crash".
[edit]Work against campus sexual assault reform
One of the focuses of FIRE is protecting due process rights on campus. Colleges, even public colleges, have historically enjoyed greater latitude in ability to punish individuals who are caught breaking campus rules. Campus judicial tribunals often don't need to prove a crime "beyond a reasonable doubt", meaning they can punish someone for a crime even if the evidence isn't there to actually convict them in a court of law.[3]Whereas you might need to prove someone committed a rape with over 98 or 99 percent certainty to punish them in a court, you may only need 51 percent certainty in a tribunal.[4] However, this leads to a situation where the government of the United States, through a public run institution, can punish someone without having given them a real trial.
This has led to FIRE protesting recent pushes in the fight against sexual assault on college campuses. They have argued that the push to lower the burden of proof to just "preponderance of the evidence" results in grave consequences to students who are convicted under lower standards.[5] Colleges have surely done a bad job dealing with claims of rape historically, but FIRE argues that lowering the burden of proof and increasing the risk of punishing innocent individuals is not the answer, even if it leads to some rapists going free. In one particularly extreme case, when North Dakota State University expelled a student over an allegation which the police determined was false and made with malicious intent, the school refused to rescind its expulsion even after police put out an arrest warrant for the accuser for filing a false police report; it was not until FIRE threatened to sue that the school reopened its investigation, and found him not responsible.[6]
[edit]Claims of conservative bias
FIRE has often been accused of having a conservative bias.[7] While they do defend many conservative causes, it is difficult to determine whether this is because conservatives are more likely to actually have their individual rights violated at schools, or because FIRE is more likely to defend an individual that is conservative. Since professors tend to be liberal, it doesn't take too much to imagine that these professors would be less likely to attempt to censor views they personally agree with. The argument for FIRE being conservative, or at least conservative-leaning, is bolstered by the number of conservative and/or Koch-funded organizations that fund FIRE such as the Bradley Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Castle Rock Foundation..[8]. However, it could be that conservative groups, afraid of a liberal boogeyman, happen to want to dump more money on a group that appears more conservative. Whether or not they are more likely to protect conservative speech, the cases they take do generally involve protecting the constitutional rights of individuals threatened by government entities (and even the ACLU protected the speech rights of Nazis).
FIRE’s leadership is made up of some seriously connected conservatives, most notably Kenneth Cribb, a former Reagan official who now also 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. Greg Lukianoff, the President of FIRE, has previously argued in front of an audience that liberals are stifling intellectual diversity on campuses in America.[9] Although Lukianoff is a liberal and a registered Democrat (and he delights in reminding everyone of this all the time) FIRE’s board is populated by an assortment of libertarian intellectuals and Republican business people. Even his publisher, Encounter Books, specializes in conservative authors such as William Kristol, Thomas Sowell and Roger Kimball.
When academic freedom comes under fire by conservatives, FIRE is often found MIA, and in other cases they even contribute with their own repression:
But the most glaring omission in the book is that Lukianoff avoids any discussion of the threat to free speech and academic freedom posed by the so-called “Academic Bill of Rights,” model legislation drafted by rightwing activist David Horowitz in 2004 to promote “intellectual diversity” in the higher education and to protect students from the alleged liberal bias of the professoriate. As written, the ABOR would have mandated hiring quotas for conservative faculty and political monitoring of course reading lists in the humanities and social sciences at public universities, severely curtailing academic freedom in the process. Versions of the ABOR were introduced into more than two dozen state legislatures and came perilously close to becoming law in Georgia and Pennsylvania.:{ Yet FIRE never once spoke out publically against the legislation. Indeed, Lukianoff’s immediate predecessor as FIRE President, David French, during the debate over the ABOR, repeatedly made public comments about the “ideological monoculture” supposedly prevailing inside the ivory tower that echoed the spurious claims being made by Horowitz and his supporters. }: French also testified before and served as legal advisor to the Pennsylvania state legislature’s McCarthyite investigation of academic freedom in that state, an investigation directly inspired by Horowitz and the ABOR movement. One FIRE Advisory Board member, Candace de Russy, used her position on the State University of New York Board of Trustees to push energetically for the adoption of Horowitz’s proposal as official policy throughout the SUNY system.[10] |
Even if it is true that FIRE has a bias towards supporting conservative causes, they appear to be able to avoid ridiculous cases that could easily discredit them. The President of FIRE, Greg Lukianoff, called out Ben Stein for Expelled, saying it wasn't clear Ben really cared about Academic Freedom; Greg, in the thousands of cases he has seen, says he couldn't recall a single student being expelled for supporting ID.[11] Not exactly astounding evidence for FIRE merely being shills. Greg appears to have taken a great deal of care to not fall for conservative memes about universities being Liberal indoctrination centers, as Michael Shermer was arguing for, and instead saying that it isn't generally the professors who are doing the worst (with some exceptions), but the college administrators.[12]
[edit]See also
- ACLU
- Intelligence Squared Debate: Liberals are Stifling Intellectual Diversity on Campus
[edit]External links
[edit]Footnotes
- ↑ Using the Database FIRE.
- ↑ Search Results. Fire.
- ↑ Hawkins, Dana. Is there any justice in campus courts?.
- ↑ Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. USLegal.
- ↑ The Politics of Campus Sexual Assault FIRE. 6 Nov. 2011.
- ↑ https://www.thefire.org/cases/university-of-north-dakota-accuser-is-criminally-charged-with-lying-to-police-but-school-refuses-to-reopen-misconduct-case/
- ↑ Sweet Jesus, FIRE is conservative!. SAFER. 13 Dec. 2005.
- ↑ Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. SourceWatch.
- ↑ Liberals Are Stifling Intellectual Diversity, Campus Audience Decides After Hearing Both Sides of the Argument FIRE. 26 Feb. 2015.
- ↑ http://academeblog.org/2013/05/08/review-of-unlearning-liberty/ Review of Greg Lukianoff, Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate
- ↑ Lukianoff, Greg. Teach the controversy? LA Times. 16 Apr. 2008.
- ↑ Shermer, Michael, & Lukianoff, Greg. Marxist professors or sensitive students? LA Times. 14 Apr. 2008.
==
wikifluff?
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is a non-profit group founded in 1999 that focuses on civil liberties in academia in the United States. Its goal 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--the essential qualities of individual liberty and dignity".[1]
One of FIRE's main activities has been criticism of university administrators whose activities have, in FIRE's view, violated the free speech or due process rights of college and university students and professors under the First Amendment and/or Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. FIRE lists over 170 such instances on its website.[2]
FIRE was founded by Alan Charles Kors, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvey A. Silverglate, a civil-liberties lawyer in Cambridge, Massachusetts.[3]Silverglate remains the chairman of FIRE's board,[4] while Kors is Chairman Emeritus. Since March 23, 2006, FIRE's President has been Greg Lukianoff, who previously served as interim president.[5]
FIRE has no stated political affiliation, and has represented the causes of parties with varied political viewpoints, ranging from conservative,[6] liberal,[7] and religious[8]student groups to other activists such as members of **PETA**[9] and Professor Ward **Churchill**.[10]
- 1 Issues
- 2 Leadership
- 3 Cases
- 4 Campus Freedom Network
- 5 Memberships
- 6 See also
- 7 References
- 8 External links
Issues
One of FIRE's primary focuses is opposition to campus "speech codes."[11] FIRE identifies as speech codes those college and university policies prohibiting expressions that the institutions consider to be sexually, racially, religiously or otherwise offensive in content if such policies prohibit speech that would be protected by the First Amendment in the off-campus society.[12] FIRE has taken stances on campus sexual misconduct policies; for example, it denounced the American Association of University Women's report on sexual harassment as "fatally flawed"[13] and sided with the defendants in joining[14] an amicus brief in Lyle v. Warner Brothers Television Productions et al.[clarification needed]
Another issue is opposition to campus "security fees" that some campuses impose on organizations hosting controversial or unpopular speakers on the theory that they should pay for extra security the colleges deem necessary due to the likelihood of demonstrations and disruption of the events.[7] FIRE bases its opposition to such fees on the Supreme Court ruling in Forsyth County, Georgia v. The Nationalist Movement; the Supreme Court stated that "speech cannot be financially burdened, any more than it can be punished or banned, simply because it might offend a hostile mob."
FIRE has also voiced support for freedom of association by funding and operation of "expressive" student organizations, including campus religious organizations that may discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or religious belief in membership (for example at Tufts University[15][16] and at the Milwaukee School of Engineering)[17] and fraternities that may engage in "off-color"[18] or "misogynistic"[19] speech.
The group also targets situations where students and faculty are adjudicated outside the bounds of due process afforded to them by Constitutional law or stated university policy.[20]
University ratings
FIRE maintains a blog, The Torch,[21] and a detailed listing of universities in the United States, called Spotlight. The 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"). In April 2007, Jon B. Gould, an author and George Mason Universityfaculty member, criticized FIRE's rating methods, claiming that FIRE had grossly exaggerated the prevalence of unconstitutional speech codes.[22]
As of March 2008, FIRE rated most institutions "red"; of the eight universities of the Ivy League, two were rated "green" (Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania), four were rated "red" (Brown, Cornell, Harvardand Princeton) and the final two (Yale and Columbia) were rated "yellow".[23]
Leadership
FIRE is composed of professors, policy experts, and public intellectuals who span the ideological spectrum. Its board includes conservatives, liberals, and libertarians.[24]
FIRE's president since March 2006 is Greg Lukianoff, who previously served as interim president after the retirement of David French.[5]
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.[25] As of 2008, Silverglate was still active with the organization as chairman and served on the Board of Directors, while Kors was no longer listed as an active board member. Also included among FIRE's directors were molecular biologist Richard Losick, feminist scholar Daphne Patai, and proprietarian author Virginia Postrel.[4]
As of 2008, FIRE's Board of Advisors included the following notable people:[26]
- T. Kenneth Cribb, former Reagan official.
- Nat Hentoff, author and columnist.
- Roy **Innis**, National Chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality.
- Wendy Kaminer, lawyer, feminist, and social critic.
- Leonard Liggio, author, law professor, and board member of several libertarian think tanks.
- Herbert London, president of the Hudson Institute.
- John Searle, Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley.
- Christina Hoff Sommers, author and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Cases
Public universities
In 2003 and 2004, FIRE acted on behalf of Cal Poly student Steve Hinkle, who was punished for posting a flier on a public bulletin board announcing a College Republicans-sponsored speech by Mason Weaver, a black social critic, and author of the book It's OK to Leave the Plantation, which argued against dependence on government. Some students at the campus Multicultural Center found the flier offensive. Hinkle politely offered to discuss the flier, but to no avail. After he left, a student called the university police, whose official report stated that officers had responded to complaints about "a suspicious white male passing out literature of an offensive racial nature."
The Cal Poly Judicial Affairs Office, after a seven-hour hearing in February 2003, found Hinkle guilty of "disruption of a campus event," as several students in the Multicultural Center public area claimed that they were having a meeting at the time, although no sign, announcement, or record of that event existed. Despite repeated attempts by FIRE to get Cal Poly's admin to correct the problem, FIRE brought suit in Hinkle's name. Eventually, Cal Poly settled out of court. The sequence of events is fully detailed in a FIRE press release, issued May 6, 2004.[27]
FIRE 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. In explicit response to FIRE's intervention, University of Alaska President Mark Hamilton ordered that the investigation cease on constitutional grounds, stating that "there was nothing to investigate"; he was formally commended for defending academic freedom by Democratic governor Tony Knowles and by unanimous vote of both houses of the Alaska legislature.[28]
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,[29] 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.[30]
FIRE sparred with the University of New Hampshire in 2004 over its treatment of student Timothy Garneau, who was expelled from student housing after he wrote and distributed a flier joking that female classmates could lose the "Freshman fifteen" by taking the stairs instead of the elevator. After FIRE publicly criticized the decision, Garneau was reinstated. He had been living in his car for three weeks.[31]
In 2007, FIRE took issue with a document from a Resident Assistant training session at the University of Delaware's Office of Residence Life Diversity Facilitation Training. The brief handout, compiled and presented by Dr. Shakti Butler, included a controversial definition of the word "racist". The author noted that it "applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality".[32][33] About this event, Walter E. Williams wrote, "This gem of wisdom suggests that by virtue of birth alone, not conduct, if you're white, you're a racist."[34][35]
FIRE sent a letter[36] to the President of University of Florida on November 29, 2007, expressing outrage that the Vice-Chancellor had sent a mass email which condemned a showing of the movie Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West and called for an apology from those responsible.[37] The state Attorney 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.[38]
In 2007, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) disciplined a university employee, who also was a student, for reading "Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan". This book was available in the university library.[39] FIRE took its criticism of IUPUI public. The chancellor finally apologized to the employee-student after mounting criticism from FIRE, the ACLU, and other free speech groups.[40]
In May 2007 Valdosta State University expelled T. Hayden Barnes, who had protested against the construction of two new parking garages on the campus which he saw as encouraging the use of private transportation. University President Ronald Zaccari misconstrued a caption of the proposed garages as the "Ronald Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage" as a threat to himself. With FIRE support, the expulsion was overturned and a court found VSU to have violated Barnes's due process rights.[41]
In 2008, college professor Kerry Laird was ordered by Temple College to remove the quote, "Gott ist tot" (God is Dead), a famous quote from Nietzsche, from his office door. FIRE wrote a letter to the Temple administration hinting at the possibility of legal action[42] and stated, "Please spare Temple College the embarrassment of fighting against the Bill of Rights, by which it is legally and morally bound."[43] Temple has since lifted the ban.
Private universities
At Tufts University in 2000, FIRE defended a Christian group that had been de-recognized 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.[15][16]
FIRE has also criticized Columbia University's sexual misconduct policy;[44] according to FIRE, the policy "lack[ed] even the most minimal safeguards and fundamental principles of fairness".[45][46] 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.[47]
FIRE criticized Brandeis University on both free speech and due process grounds in early 2008 over its treatment of veteran politics professor Donald Hindley. Provost Marty Krauss informed Hindley in October 2007 that comments he made in his Latin American politics class violated the school's anti-harassment policy. Krauss placed a monitor in Hindley's class and ordered him to attend racial sensitivity training.[48]
FIRE, along with Brandeis' own Committee on Faculty Rights and Responsibilities, has criticized Krauss for never explicitly telling Hindley what specific in-class comments constituted harassing speech and for not granting Hindley a process by which to appeal the decision. According to Brandeis' student press, Hindley is rumored to have used the epithet "wetback." An anonymous student-witness, quoted in the Brandeis Hoot,[49]called Hindley's remarks "inappropriate." Other students praised Hindley's pedagogical approach as encouraging "students to face racist narratives head on" and that any disagreement "is a dispute for students and faculty to solve through rational dialogue, not one for the administration to settle in secret inquisitions."[50]
In 2010, FIRE criticized DePaul University for denying recognition to a group advocating for decriminalization of non-medical cannabis in the United States stating that student groups must "be congruent with our institutional goals regarding the health and well-being of our students." [51]
Campus Freedom Network
FIRE now has a Campus Freedom Network.[52][53]
Consisting of over 3,000 members, FIRE's Campus Freedom Network consists of students dedicated to FIRE's mission and to establish a social network for supporters of free speech rights on college campuses. The Campus Freedom Network hosts annual summer conferences, with the next planned in July 2013 at Bryn Mawr College.[54]
Memberships
FIRE is a member of the Free Expression Network.[55]
See also
References
- Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. "About FIRE". Retrieved 2008-03-25.
- Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. "Case Archive". Retrieved 2008-03-25.
- Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. "FIRE's Founders". Retrieved 2008-03-25.
- Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. "Board of Directors". Retrieved 2008-03-25.
- "FIRE Names Greg Lukianoff as President" (Press release). Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. 2006-03-23. Retrieved 2008-03-25.
- "Bake Sale Battles Continue".
- Bob Egelko (2009-03-29). "Campus security bills for speakers challenged". San Francisco Chronicle.
- "Christian Cleansing at UNC-Chapel Hill".
- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. "Victory for Animals and Free Speech!". Retrieved2008-03-25.[dead link]
- Lukianoff, Greg (2005-02-09). "FIRE Letter to University of Colorado at Boulder Interim Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano, February 9, 2005". Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Retrieved 2008-03-25.
- Leo, John (Winter 2007). "Free Inquiry? Not on Campus". City Journal (Manhattan Institute for Policy Research). Retrieved 2008-03-25.
- "What are Speech Codes?". Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Retrieved 2012-02-18.
- "AAUW Sexual Harassment Report Is Fatally Flawed" (Press release). Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. 2006-01-26. Retrieved 2008-03-25.
- "FIRE Joins Amicus Brief in *Friends* Writers' Case" (Press release). Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. 2005-02-10. Retrieved 2008-03-25.
- "Tufts University: Refusal to Allow Evangelical Christian Club to Reject Homosexual Leadership". Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Retrieved 2008-03-25.
- "Tufts University to Reconsider Status of Christian Group", Beliefnet.com. Accessed March 31, 2008.
- "Milwaukee School of Engineering: Threat to Christian Group’s Freedom of Association". Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Retrieved 2008-03-25.
- French, David (2005-05-10). "Is Dartmouth Really Free?". Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Retrieved 2008-03-25.
- Sarabyn, Kelly (2008-03-13). "Yale Caves into Its Women's Center's Speech-Repressing Demands". Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Retrieved 2008-03-25.
- Miller, John (2005-10-24). "Pariahs, Martyrs — and Fighters Back". National Review.
- "FIRE's The Torch". Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Retrieved 2008-03-25.
- Gould, Jon B. (April 2007). "Returning Fire". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 2008-03-25.
- "Welcome to FIRE's Spotlight". Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Retrieved 2008-03-25.
- Tamar Lewin (April 24, 2003). "Suit Challenges a University's Speech Code". New York Times.
- Strausbaugh, John (2007-08-19). "A Maverick Mogul, Proudly Politically Incorrect". The New York Times. Retrieved 2008-03-25.
- "Board of Advisors". Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Retrieved 2008-03-25.
- "Major Victory for Free Speech at Cal Poly", Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Press Release, May 6, 2004. Accessed October 6, 2008.
- "There is nothing to investigate", Elizabeth Wright, Issues & Views, 2001. Accessed April 12, 2011.
- "Amicus Briefs", Feminists for Free Expression. Accessed March 31, 2008.
- Jaschik, Scott (October 7, 2005). "Arizona State Ends Class Limited to Native Americans". Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved March 31, 2008.
- Kennedy, Dan (July 1, 2005). "The Eighth Annual Muzzle Awards: Dishonorable mentions". Boston Phoenix. Retrieved March 31, 2008.
- University of Delaware Requires Students to Undergo Ideological Reeducation (FIRE Press Release, October 30, 2007)
- Victory at University of Delaware (FIRE Press Release, November 2, 2007)
- Academic Cesspools by Walter E. Williams, October 17, 2007
- Academic Cesspools II by Walter E. Williams, November 7, 2007
- "FIRE's letter to University of Florida Vice President for Student Affairs Patricia Telles-Irvin, November 29, 2007". FIRE. 2007-11-29. Retrieved 2013-06-19.
- Phi Beta Cons on National Review Online[dead link]
- Stripling, Jack (2007-12-14). "News". Gainesville.com. Retrieved 2013-06-19.
- Political Correctness vs. Freedom of Thought - The Keith John Sampson Story on the Fire website
- "Iupui encyclopedia topics". Reference.com. Retrieved 2012-02-16.
- Lipka, Sara (2010-09-07). "Former College President Is Found Personally Liable for Expelling Student - Students - The Chronicle of Higher Education". Chronicle.com. Retrieved 2012-02-16.
- Jaschik, Scott (2008-11-07). "College Ends Ban on Nietzsche Quote, Inside Higher Ed". Insidehighered.com. Retrieved 2013-06-19.
- "Letter to Temple College President Glenda O. Barron". FIRE. 2008-11-05. Retrieved 2012-02-16.
- "New Procedure for Handling Sexual Misconduct Charges at Columbia University Is Challenged", Karen Arenson, The New York Times. New York: 5 October 2000. Accessed 27 March 2008.
- Schifrin, Nick (October 5, 2000). "Outside Groups Attack New Misconduct Policy]". Columbia Spectator. Retrieved March 31, 2008.
- "Columbia University Unable to Defend Policy in Public", Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Press Release, March 13, 2001. Accessed March 31, 2008.
- Lieberman, Tallie (April 30, 2001). "Allen Resignation Met with Surprise". Columbia Spectator. RetrievedMarch 31, 2008.
- "Brandeis Professor says his Right to Free Speech Violated, Boston Globe, 7/1/05". Boston.com. Retrieved2013-06-19.
- "Student Reveals Nature of Hindley Complaint, The Hoot, 11/16/07". Thehoot.net. Retrieved 2013-06-19.
- "Why we must defend Hindley, The Hoot, 11/16/07". Thehoot.net. Retrieved 2013-06-19.
- "Discriminatory Treatment of Student Organizations at DePaul University". FIRE. 2010-10-18. Retrieved2012-02-16.
- Luke Sheahan (August 28, 2008). "Going Back to School? Join the CFN". FIRE. Retrieved 2008-08-28.
- "thecfn.org". thecfn.org. Retrieved 2013-06-19.
- "Announcing FIRE’s 2013 Summer Conference". FIRE. Retrieved 30 April 2013.
- Free Expression Network. "Organizations « Free Expression Network:". Retrieved 2013-04-30.
- :{
}:
- :{
}:
- :{
}:
- External links
- Official website
- FrontPage Magazine article
- Organizational Profile – National Center for Charitable Statistics (Urban Institute)
- Freedom of expression organizations
- Civil liberties advocacy groups in the United States
- Public education in the United States
- Organizations established in 1999
- Government watchdog groups in the United States
==
Greg Lukianoff is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). He previously served as FIRE's first director of legal and public advocacy until he was appointed president in 2006.[1] A graduate of American University and Stanford Law School, he has described himself as a "pro-choice liberal."[2]
Lukianoff has published articles in the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and the New York Post. He is a blogger for the Huffington Post[3] and served as a regular columnist for the Daily Journal of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Along with Harvey A. Silverglate and David French, Lukianoff is a co-author of FIRE's Guide to Free Speech on Campus. He testified before the United States Congress on the state of free speech on college campuses.
Lukianoff appeared in the films Brainwashing 101 and Indoctrinate U, both written and directed by conservative[4] filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney. He has made numerous appearances on nationally syndicated television shows.[5]
He has also appeared on various news shows, includingStosselon more than one occasion.
Words are supposed to hurt.
That's considered a legitimate way of fighting things out. And what did it replace in the historical scene? It replaced actual violence.
Words are supposed to be free so we can actually fight things out, in the battleplace of ideas, so we don't end up fighting them out in civil wars.
If we try to legitimately ban anything that can hurt someone's feelings, everyone is reduced to silence. – Stossel, 2009
Before joining FIRE, Lukianoff worked for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, the Organization for Aid to Refugees, and the EnvironMentors Project. He lives in New York City.
References
- FIRE Names Greg Lukianoff as President. Retrieved May 28, 2008 Archived 31 December 2010 at WebCite
- Washington University Law School Club Feud Is Resolved. Retrieved May 28, 2008. Archived 31 December 2010 at WebCite
- Huffington Post- Greg Lukianoff Bio. Retrieved May 28, 2008 Archived 31 December 2010 at WebCite
- A Conservative Answer to Michael Moore
- FIRE - Events and Media Appearances Archived 31 December 2010 at WebCite
External links
==
http://www.dailyemerald.com/2005/03/11/hate-speech-impersonating-satire/
Hate speech impersonating satire?
Daily Emerald Archives — March 11, 2005 0 0 0
What was not addressed throughout the Oregon Commentator’s funding process is a larger discussion about the issue of privilege and how it relates to publishing responsible news content. As one of the students most frequently “targeted” by the publication during the previous school year, I feel inclined to write this.
Unlike ASUO Senator Toby Hill-Meyer, I did not feel my physical safety threatened as the result of what the Commentator published about me. That’s because for most folks, I fall within the following categories: white, male, and heterosexual. My social identity is represented, reinforced and legitimized by most media sources and can be loosely defined as the “norm” of this society. Because mine is an identity situated within this norm, I rarely feel insecure with this inherited privilege. Further, anything that potentially threatens my privilege would take recognizing that it comes at the expense of others, and “othering” what doesn’t reflect the norm — say, if you identify as homosexual, transgendered, colored, etc. This realization might also lead me to sympathize, or even identify with that Other, perhaps, altering my perspective or behaviors, instead of hiding behind terms such as “satire.”
There can be little doubt that the media — advertisement, films, television, music — is one of the most powerful socializing tools that exists within this society. From my own experiences with both the staff and content of the Oregon Commentator, it rarely deviates from this white,
heterosexist model of journalism.
In David Jagernauth’s Feb. 4 Emerald column, he writes, “Until we have mastered the technology whereby printed words are able to leap off the page and slap you in the face, no story has ‘directly hurt’ anybody. And even so, is ‘hurt’ now the standard for acceptable and unacceptable speech?” Yet, words do have an effect, whether “indirect” or “direct.” The power of the printed word disseminated across a large viewing audience does shape attitudes, and a campus publication does influence the campus it reaches.
So it is not unexpected that Commentator staff members would turn to the First Amendment instead of taking responsibility for their privilege. And as the microcosmic vanguard for white, patriarchal America on campus, the law fully supports the publication’s position. Of course, “feelings” aren’t considered within a system of law that prides itself on supposed
“rationality” and “objectivity.”
After all, if we were to consider feelings in our decision-making process, how it feels to have your privacy invaded might count. For example, how I felt when staff members of the Commentator carried on a debate about my physical appearance, or my choice of notebook paper in class on their Web site’s blog. Or, when responding to one of my articles about Valentine’s Day, one staff member referred to me as a “rock fucker.” We might also consider that one of the first times my writing was republished in the Commentator (volume 20, issues 7 and 8), they were juxtaposed with pictures of bound and gagged women. We might also question why a publication claiming not to promote hate speech entitles their quintessential, year-end issue “The Hate Issue.”
I hope for a continued presence of conservative and liberal journalism on campus. But the challenge for all concerned is to look beyond this spectrum, and even the rules themselves, to take responsibility for creating a safer campus and a more tolerant community.
Aaron Shakra is a former Pulse Editor for the Oregon Daily Emerald
==
‘Cuckservative’ Has Got to Go
(Lane Erickson/Dreamstime) September 18, 2015 4:00 PM @DAVIDAFRENCH
Yesterday afternoon I wrote a short post noting a small irony about Ann Coulter: Even while she was slamming the GOP for “pandering” on issues like abortion and Israel, she herself was using specific language that panders to the small, race-obsessed far-right crowd that is particularly focused on those same issues. This group — known to smear conservatives who disagree with them as “cuckservatives” or “cucks” — has a set of beliefs that go far beyond antipathy toward Israel and indifference toward abortion.
Many of them are unapologeticallywhite-nationalists, hate interracial adoption and other “race-mixing” practices, and think about the issue of immigration primarily, if not exclusively, in racial terms. While this small white-nationalist crowd has latched onto Donald Trump, I don’t think Trump panders to them (his rhetoric departs from theirs significantly on abortion and Israel), I don’t think he cares for them, and I think it’s unfair to hold him responsible for their support. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I feel differently about Coulter. Her shtick has always involved cultivating an extreme online persona, and lately that seems to mean deliberately stoking the cuckservative-obsessed crowd, only to distance herself ever-so-slightly when the Twitter fur flies. She thus enjoys the best of both worlds — praise from the worst and defense from good-faith conservatives who grow tired of PC nonsense and sympathize with many of her arguments. When I posted my piece, I thought it might cause a bit of a reaction from Twitter trolls, and it did. They combed through Facebook to find pictures, Googled my family, and then handed out “awards.” I’m going to post a small sample to demonstrate a sad truth:
When it comes to race, the far Left and the far Right — the so-called “alt-right” — are remarkably similar. @genophilia @DarklyEnlighten @DavidAFrench @NancyAFrench @Ricky_Vaughn99 pic.twitter.com/f6yDIW4f72 — Bill Ainsworth (@ainsworthbill71) September 18, 2015 That’s my “Cucky” award for adopting a black child. (I will note that I don’t live in Memphis, though I do love the Grizzlies.)
The fact that my youngest child is from Ethiopia was a point of real contention: .@DavidAFrench<— Major #cuckservative. Raises Jamal’s kids instead of his own. Needs to grow a pair. @NancyAFrench #NRORevolt — Lord Humungus (@DarklyEnlighten) September 18, 2015 Then there’s this lovely tweet, which harks back to a bizarre porn fetish where a white man apparently watches a black man have sex with his wife: @society_strong @genophilia @NancyAFrench @DavidAFrench David likes to watch 3 Black men sharing his wife — Ahmed Quraishi (@AQpk_) September 18, 2015
I could go on and on and on. This is not the first time that my family’s been attacked on racial grounds. Several years ago, my wife made the mistake of allowing the Huffington Post to interview her at CPAC — while she was holding our youngest child. The comments on the interview, which have since been deleted, soon devolved into a leftist carnival funhouse of hate focused in part on our decision to adopt a black child.
But the comments weren’t as bad as the private messages, which included threats to contact child protective services and direct attacks on our motivations for adopting. Shunning the slur disempowers the trolls and forces the radical Left to confront the race hatred that fuels its own rage.
Online trolls are one thing, but the federal government is another entirely. Amid ongoing controversies over international adoption and longstanding claims from the far Left that interracial adoption constitutes a form of “cultural genocide,” the Obama administration launched a wave of adoption audits, auditing 68 percent of families, including our own, who claimed the adoption tax credit in 2011 and 69 percent of such families in 2012. The normal audit rate for a middle-class family is roughly 1 percent. As I said at the time, while I think bureaucratic inertia and sheer stupidity are perhaps the best explanation for the IRS’s actions, ideologically driven malice is also possible given the agency’s demonstrated far-Left bias. On the alt-right, the race-obsessed get Twitter accounts; on the far Left, they get tenure — and then go on to celebrate only the most radical voices as truly “authentic.”
Recently, Yale even hired one of Twitter’s foremost race-trolls, DeRay McKesson, to help teach a class called “Transformational Leadership in the #BlackLivesMatter Movement.” Many on the left are doing their best to march our nation toward the madness of race obsession and eternal conflict.
RELATED: Donald Trump, Ann Coulter, and ‘No Apologies’ Conservatism And in that quest, the far Left needs the alt-Right —fringe views like those expressed in the tweets above help stoke liberal extremists’ paranoia and provide ammunition for their own radicals. The alt-Right, in turn, feeds off the far Left’s rhetoric to bolster its own credibility. Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/424277/cuckservative-has-got-go-david-french Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/424277/cuckservative-has-got-go-david-french
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/424277/cuckservative-has-got-go-david-french
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