FIRE's Founders

  • Alan Charles Kors
    Co-founder and Chairman Emeritus

    Alan Charles Kors (Ph.D., Harvard University) teaches European intellectual history at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is professor of history and holds the George H. Walker Endowed Term Chair.

    Kors has fought for academic freedom since his arrival at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1993, he defended Eden Jacobowitz in the infamous “water buffalo case,” which led to the writing of The Shadow University (1998) and to the founding of FIRE, both with Harvey Silverglate. Kors has been elected four times to the University and School Committees on Academic Freedom and Responsibility by his colleagues. He has received two awards for distinguished college teaching and numerous awards for his defense of academic freedom. He has also written and lectured widely on the assault upon liberty and freedom of conscience on America’s campuses. In 2005, he was awarded a National Humanities Medal.

    Kors has published extensively on the conceptual revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries, and produced three taped series on the period for The Teaching Company. He was editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (four volumes, 2002). He is married with two children and lives in suburban Philadelphia.


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  • Harvey Silverglate
    Co-founder and Chairman

    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, Rodriguez, Lunt & Duncan 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 regular columnist for The Boston Phoenix, Silverglate 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, Wilson Quarterly, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Reason magazine, and elsewhere. The Shadow University (with Alan Charles Kors) is his first full-length book (1998).

    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.

    Silverglate lives with his wife, portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman, in Cambridge. Their son, Isaac, lives in Manhattan.


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