FIRE / Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

LINK: FIRE / Foundation for Individual Rights in Education


About FIRE
Mission

The mission of FIRE is to defend and sustain individual rights at America's increasingly repressive and partisan 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 core mission is to protect the unprotected and to educate the public and communities of concerned Americans about the threats to these rights on our campuses and about the means to preserve them.
Background

America's colleges and universities are, in theory, indispensable institutions in the development of critical minds and the furthering of individual rights, honest inquiry, and the core values of liberty, legal equality, and dignity. Instead, they often are the enemies of those qualities and pursuits, denying students and faculty their voices, their fundamental rights, and even their individual humanity. The university setting is where students are most subject to the assignment of group identity, to indoctrination of radical political orthodoxies, to legal inequality, to intrusion into private conscience, and to assaults upon the moral reality of individual rights and responsibilities. Illiberal university policies and practices must be exposed to public criticism and scrutiny so that the public is made aware of the violations of basic rights that occur every day on college campuses.

In 1998, Harvey A. Silverglate and Alan Charles Kors coauthored The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses. In response, they received hundreds of communications and pleas for help from victims of illiberal policies, double standards, intolerable violations of their rights, and intrusions upon their private consciences. Answering this call for help and seeking to transform the culture, Harvey and Alan founded FIRE.

FIRE effectively and decisively defends American liberties on behalf of thousands of students and faculty on our nation's campuses. In case after case, FIRE brings about favorable resolutions for these individuals who continue to be challenged by those willing to deny fundamental rights and liberties within our institutions of higher education. In addition to individual case work, FIRE works nationally to inform the public about the fate of liberty on our campuses.

FIRE is working to protect individual rights through two Programs: the Individual Rights Defense Program and the Individual Rights Education Program. Ultimately, FIRE seeks to end the debilitating fatalism that paralyzes students and faculty by bringing public attention to the issue while providing protection to those who are now helpless in the face of abuses of power on campuses across the nation.