fire

fire
 
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
601 Walnut Street, Suite 510
Philadelphia, PA 19106
phone: 215-717-FIRE(3473)
www.thefire.org
 

ABOUT

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 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. More

Learn About Your School
Spotlight: The Campus Freedom Resource, is FIRE’s database of speech codes and information on the state of liberty on America’s campuses. Use FIRE’s Spotlight to find pages for individual academic institutions, which contain relevant links to our research of speech codes, case materials from FIRE’s Individual Rights Defense Program, media coverage of FIRE’s work, and entries from FIRE’s blog, The Torch. You can find information about your institution just by typing your school’s name into the search box. Check it out!


RESOURCES

FIRE's acclaimed Guides to Student Rights on Campus is a series of five handbooks that provide a thorough overview of students' rights and how to protect them from administrative overreach. FIRE's Guides series include:

Hard copies of all the Guides are free to students upon request. PDFs of the Guides are also available for free download at the links above.

Networking
The Campus Freedom Network (CFN) is a loosely-knit coalition of over 3,000 faculty members and students dedicated to advancing individual liberties on their campuses. The CFN provides resources and educational opportunities to students and faculty engaged in advancing individual rights on campus.
To join the CFN, Click here. Every new CFN member will receive a free FIRE t-shirt.

Host a Speaker
Hosting a FIRE speaker is a great way to bring the ideas of liberty directly to students on your campus. These lectures serve as an educational primer to students and faculty about their rights on campus and explain how universities often betray their role as a “marketplace of ideas.” Students will have the opportunity to hear about some of FIRE’s most egregious cases to demonstrate anecdotally the consequences of failing to vigilantly defend campus freedom. Please inquire at cfnevents@thefire.org or through their online form. To see FIRE’s list of speakers and to book a FIRE speaker, click here.

Scholarships - High school seniors graduating in 2010 and attending college in the fall are invited to submit an essay for FIRE's Freedom in Academia essay contest explaining why free speech rights are crucial to higher education.  The first-place winner will receive a $5,000 scholarship, and seven other students will receive smaller awards.  More

EVENTS

October 2, 2009: Lecture at Drexel University. 6:00 p.m. (ET) Mitchell Auditorium, Bossone Center. Topic: Thought Reform. (Kissel)      
October 1, 2009: Lecture at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill. 7:00 p.m. (ET) TBD. Topic: Free Speech. (Lukianoff)

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

To reward students who care about advancing liberty on campus, the Campus Freedom Network has launched the CFN 2009–2010 Incentive Program.

Here's how it works: whenever a CFN member engages in liberty-minded activism including publishing op-eds on FIRE cases and related issues, hosting FIRE speakers, recruiting new members, and even posting FIRE widgets to a website, blog, or Facebook profile—he or she earns points. These points accumulate to earn prizes.