FIRE’s Programs

FIRE’s Individual Rights Defense Program encompasses FIRE’s work to defend liberty on behalf of students and faculty at colleges and universities across America. The program provides effective assistance to these individuals and promotes accountability through public exposure of abuses. While many of the cases we accept can be resolved quickly and amicably by FIRE’s office staff, FIRE sometimes refers individual cases to its Legal Network, a group of pro bono attorneys who share its principles, values, and goals. The Individual Rights Defense Program represents FIRE’s most direct form of involvement on campuses and includes the following projects:

Free Speech on Campus Project

FIRE believes it is essential that our nation’s future leaders be educated as members of a free society, learning to debate and to resolve differences peacefully, without resorting to administrative coercion. Unfortunately, too many colleges and universities have attempted to outlaw speech and expression that do not conform to various “politically correct” campus orthodoxies. Through this project, FIRE defends and enhances freedom of expression at America’s institutions of higher education. Issues covered by this project include the elimination of “free speech zones,” which limit where students can express controversial views on campus, in favor of opening the entire campus to free speech. The project also works to defend freedom of the press and academic freedom and to oppose the censorship of dissenting viewpoints.

Students and faculty who have been punished for their speech may submit cases through FIRE’s website. FIRE vets these cases for accuracy and context in order to determine how best to assist the individual student, faculty member, or student group. FIRE then writes letters to college administrators on behalf of the victim, explaining why a policy or punishment is unjust. If the administrators do not respond, FIRE uses its extensive Media Network to publicize the story in the belief that colleges and universities often cannot justify in public the actions they have taken in private. Where necessary, FIRE links individuals to appropriate legal aid through its Legal Network, providing individuals and their attorneys with legal memoranda and other assistance.

Read more about the issue of free speech.

Speech Codes Litigation Project

FIRE supports precedent-setting litigation in defense of the First Amendment, in an effort to end the scourge of unconstitutional speech codes on public campuses and to ensure truth-in-advertising and informed consent on private campuses. Cooperating attorneys from FIRE's Legal Network have secured victories at Shippensburg University, Texas Tech University, Citrus College, and the State University of New York College at Brockport, and have begun to pursue litigation against other public universities, including a recently filed suit against San Francisco State University.

Religious Liberty on Campus Project

The purpose of this project is to come to the aid of parties who are helpless in the face of anti-religious double standards. The campus remains one of the only places in America where the rights of people of faith—in particular, their right to associate freely around matters of conscience and belief—are routinely denied, and where students are punished for exercising these foundational freedoms. Most students lack the means and resources to expose such denials as fundamentally unjust or unlawful.

Students and faculty suffering infringements on their religious freedom may submit cases through FIRE’s website. FIRE vets these cases for accuracy and context in order to determine how best to assist the individual student, faculty member, or student group. FIRE then writes letters to college administrators on behalf of the victim, explaining why a policy or punishment is unjust. If the administrators fail to protect the victims’ rights, FIRE uses its extensive Media Network to publicize the story in the belief that colleges and universities often cannot justify in public the actions they have taken in private. Where necessary, FIRE links individuals to appropriate legal aid through its Legal Network, providing individuals and their attorneys with legal memoranda and other assistance.

Freedom of Conscience on Campus Project

This project helps individual students fight infringements upon their rights of conscience. Individuals have the right to define or not to define themselves by their race, sex, ethnicity, religion, moral code, politics, or any other chosen quality. It is every individual’s right to join, or not to join, others who have made the same voluntary choices. It is no one’s right, however, to impose those intimate and private choices upon a free man or woman.

This project carefully monitors the issue of thought reform on campus. Increasingly, college orientation sessions have become vehicles for ideological indoctrination as freshmen are herded into mandatory diversity seminars, put through embarrassing orientation exercises, and forced to submit to administrative dogma on matters of private conscience. Through this project, FIRE demonstrates the danger of imposing official viewpoints and the importance of the individual’s right to decline attending such programs.

Students and faculty whose rights of conscience have been violated may submit cases through FIRE’s website. FIRE vets these cases for accuracy and context in order to determine how best to assist the individual student, faculty member, or student group. FIRE then writes letters to college administrators on behalf of the victim, explaining why a policy or punishment is unjust. If the administrators fail to protect the victim’s rights, FIRE uses its extensive Media Network to publicize the story in the belief that colleges and universities often cannot justify in public the actions they have taken in private. Where necessary, FIRE links individuals to appropriate legal aid through its Legal Network, providing individuals and their attorneys with legal memoranda and other assistance.

Due Process and Legal Equality on Campus Project

This project defends individual students whose rights of due process and legal equality have been violated. Although students have the same right to decency and fundamental fairness on a college campus as they do elsewhere, meaningful due process is absent from most student judicial proceedings. Cases that America’s courts would not even pursue are routinely prosecuted in campus courts, without regard for rules of evidence or fair procedure.

Moreover, all students are also entitled to the same legal rights regardless of their social stature, religion, or political opinions. On many campuses today, however, disparate funding of student organizations thwarts this notion of free expression and equality. By denying funding to organizations whose viewpoints are controversial or currently out of fashion, administrators create a campus that lacks meaningful, substantive debate and that unfairly restricts speech.

Students whose rights of due process and legal equality have been violated may submit cases through FIRE’s website. FIRE vets these cases for accuracy and context in order to determine how best to assist the individual student or student group. FIRE then writes letters to college administrators on behalf of the victim, explaining why a policy or punishment is unjust. If the administrators fail to protect the victim’s rights, FIRE uses its extensive Media Network to publicize the story in the belief that colleges and universities often cannot justify in public the actions they have taken in private. Where necessary, FIRE links individuals to appropriate legal aid through its Legal Network, providing individuals and their attorneys with legal memoranda and other assistance.

Freedom of Association on Campus Project

Through this project, FIRE advocates the right of student organizations to define their identities according to their beliefs and to form groups and associations as they choose. FIRE’s immediate concern is to come to the aid of parties whose rights are subjugated to the ideological impulses of the campus administration. For example, religious groups are often told that maintaining their religious beliefs constitutes unlawful “discrimination.” In other cases, student groups are saddled with invasive and onerous requirements that make a mockery of freedom of association. The core value of freedom of association needs efficacious defense at our colleges and universities, which serve as the social models in which tomorrow’s leaders learn the values that they carry with them into the larger society.

Student organizations may submit cases through FIRE’s website. FIRE vets these cases for accuracy and context in order to determine how best to assist the student group. FIRE then writes letters to college administrators on behalf of the victims, explaining why a policy or punishment is unjust. If the administrators fail to protect the victims’ rights, FIRE uses its extensive Media Network to publicize the story in the belief that colleges and universities often cannot justify in public the actions they have taken in private. Where necessary, FIRE links students to appropriate legal aid through its Legal Network, providing student groups and their attorneys with legal memoranda and other assistance.

Individual Rights Education Program

FIRE’s Individual Rights Education Program works nationally to inform the public about the fate of liberty on our campuses. Through FIRE’s Guides to Student Rights on Campus project, FIRE educates students, faculty and administrators regarding the true extent of liberty on campus. FIRE’s Spotlight: The Campus Freedom Resource is a section of FIRE’s main website containing comprehensive information on the state of liberty on America’s campuses. Students and parents can search FIRE’s Spotlight to find individual academic institutions, which have pages with relevant links to our speech codes database, case materials from FIRE’s Individual Rights Defense Program, media coverage of FIRE’s work, and entries from FIRE’s blog, The Torch. FIRE is transforming the culture of higher education in this country through the following educational efforts:

FIRE’s Guides to Student Rights on Campus

The Guides are an innovative, widely respected, and well-received vehicle for changing the culture on college and university campuses. They do so by emphasizing the critical importance of legal equality over the selective assignment of rights and responsibilities, of self-governance over coercion, and of the rule of law and fair procedure over the ad hoc and arbitrary imposition of partisan and repressive rules.

The general public may download the Guides free of charge from FIRE’s website. Students may order hard copies at no cost through the website; non-students may purchase them through Amazon.com. FIRE has launched a formal advertising, distribution, and outreach campaign to make the Guides known and available to students, parents, and university administrators.

In addition to offering a complete set of Guides online, FIRE will encourage parents to take a more active role in the defense of liberty on campus by offering an Individual Rights “Student Kit” for their sons and daughters. A contribution of $35 will secure enrollment for the academic year. Participating students will receive a “Student Kit” from FIRE containing an affinity identification card, a FIRE brochure, a box set of FIRE’s Guides to Student Rights on Campus, and a poster advertising FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus. Enrollment also includes a one-year subscription to The FIRE Quarterly and to FIRE’s e-mail list.

FIRE is also developing a dedicated website—campusrights.org—for the Individual Rights “Student Kit.” This website, linked to FIRE’s existing website—thefire.org, which includes FIRE’s Guides and FIRE’s Spotlight—will allow parents and students to enroll in the program with a user-friendly form using a secure server for credit card payments. Parents and students will also be able to learn more about the program and view the “Student Kit,” including images of the affinity identification card, FIRE’s Guides, and the poster.

FIRE will make students and parents aware of the existence of the “Student Kit” by advertising it through Internet media sources and in college newspapers and other print publications.

Public Awareness Project

FIRE’s main website serves as an educational resource for students, faculty, parents, administrators, journalists, and lawyers. The site informs visitors of the current state of liberty on American campuses through archived cases, news reports, publications, event listings, and more. It also offers more interactive features, such as a confidential venue for the submission of cases and direct links to FIRE’s Guides to Student Rights on Campus Project and Spotlight: The Campus Freedom Resource (which contains comprehensive information on the state of liberty on hundreds of America’s campuses). In 2005, FIRE launched its own weblog (or “blog”), The Torch, which is a forum for FIRE staff contributors to comment on administrative abuse, campus trends, misunderstandings of the law, and other issues.

In addition to the websites, the Public Awareness Project employs a variety of other methods to educate the public about the threats to individual rights on our nation’s campuses and demonstrate the methods of preserving those rights. FIRE’s leadership appears frequently on national and local television and radio programs. FIRE also places advertisements about student rights in campus publications and conducts public information campaigns on college campuses. Additionally, FIRE uses its Media Network to expose abuses to the press and uses its website and e-mail network to inform interested parties about current and ongoing cases.

FIRE’s Spotlight: The Campus Freedom Resource

FIRE’s Spotlight: The Campus Freedom Resource is a section of FIRE’s website containing comprehensive information on the state of liberty on America’s campuses. Visitors to FIRE’s Spotlight can click on the college or university of their choice and instantly see a more complete picture of that campus’ restrictions on liberty—everything from speech codes and actual cases of repression to media coverage and entries from FIRE’s weblog, The Torch.

FIRE’s Spotlight currently contains information on over 345 colleges and universities. No other website or organization has ever even attempted to present such a wealth of information on the state of liberty on our nation’s campuses. The site is essentially one-stop shopping for students, parents, professors, and journalists who want to research a college or university’s repressive policies and practices.

Each school’s page in FIRE’s Spotlight collects all the information on FIRE’s website associated with that school—including FIRE cases and the documents associated with them. Each school’s page also displays FIRE’s “red light,” “yellow light,” or “green light” speech code rating and links to the latest campus policies restricting individual rights, as well as that campus’ advertised commitments to freedom of expression. In this way, the database—the result of thousands of hours of research—exposes repressive policies on a given campus and links those policies to actual instances of campus censorship.

FIRE’s Campus Freedom Network

Through its recently launched Campus Freedom Network, FIRE seeks to combat the sustained assault on the individual rights of students and faculty by harnessing support on targeted campuses and directing it into networks that will lobby their administrations. FIRE identifies schools that have repeatedly violated the individual rights of students and faculty as target campuses and then builds student–faculty networks on those campuses. The networks’ purpose is to maintain long-term pressure on their respective administrations to change immoral and unconstitutional policies. Dedicated FIRE program officers advise each network and use FIRE’s Media Network to generate national media coverage of the networks’ efforts to transform the culture of higher education on their campuses. The ultimate goal of this project is transform the free speech and academic freedom climate on targeted campuses by supporting student–faculty networks.

FIRE Internships

Educating students about the betrayal of liberty at America’s colleges and universities is central to FIRE’s mission. FIRE Internships provide current college students, recent graduates, law students, and high school seniors with direct experience in the defense of civil liberties.

FIRE offers its interns numerous opportunities for meaningful participation in the organization’s varied activities. Interns participate in research, fundraising, individual cases, and day-to-day operations. In addition, FIRE provides interns with many educational opportunities, such as attending conferences and participating in academic seminars with FIRE’s leadership on a wide range of topics related to civil liberties on campus. FIRE Internships provide a well-rounded experience that familiarizes students not only with FIRE’s activities, but also with the moral and intellectual grounds that underlie FIRE’s efforts.

In many cases, FIRE interns return to their colleges and universities and educate students about intrusions upon their rights and consciences on campus, thereby attracting a wide coalition of support, changing the campus culture, and gaining national attention.

FIRE Events

State University System Research Project

FIRE, in partnership with state-level organizations and supporters, conducts comprehensive studies and evaluations of potential First Amendment violations within state university systems. FIRE researches free speech policies, nondiscrimination policies, and mandatory diversity training policies and analyzes these policies for constitutionality and compliance with statutory requirements. FIRE then creates a report containing the results of the research and proposed legislative, judicial, or policy remedies for any discovered constitutional violations or deficiencies. The result is a professional and comprehensive evaluation of fundamental First Amendment values within a state public university system. In conjunction with this project, FIRE plans to add every four-year state university in the United States to FIRE’s Spotlight and develop for each state a “State Report Card” that summarizes the results of FIRE’s policy analysis.

FIRE, together with the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, released its first state report in January 2006. The report, entitled The State of the First Amendment in the University of North Carolina System, analyzed policies restricting freedom of speech and association at each of the 16 schools that make up the UNC System and made recommendations for remedying these violations either through the legislative or the judicial system. Within days of the report’s release, it had not only attracted the attention of numerous local media outlets, but the University of North Carolina at Greensboro dropped charges against two students who led a peaceful protest against the university’s policy of quarantining free speech to small areas of campus.