The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is a non-profit group founded in 1999 and focused 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".
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.
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. Silverglate remains the chairman of FIRE's board, while Kors is Chairman Emeritus. Since March 23, 2006, FIRE's President has been Greg Lukianoff, who previously served as interim president.
FIRE has no stated political affiliation, and has represented the causes of parties with varied political viewpoints, ranging from conservative, liberal, and religious student groups to other activists such as members of PETA and Professor Ward Churchill.
Read more about Foundation For Individual Rights In Education: Issues, Leadership, Memberships
Famous quotes containing the words foundation for, foundation, individual, rights and/or education:
“But in every constitution some large degree of animal vigor is necessary as material foundation for the higher qualities of the art.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The ability to secure an independent livelihood and honorable employ suited to her education and capacities is the only true foundation of the social elevation of woman, even in the very highest classes of society. While she continues to be educated only to be somebody’s wife, and is left without any aim in life till that somebody either in love, or in pity, or in selfish regard at last grants her the opportunity, she can never be truly independent.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)
“The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives.”
—Georges Bataille (1897–1962)
“The government of the United States is a device for maintaining in perpetuity the rights of the people, with the ultimate extinction of all privileged classes.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“... many of the things which we deplore, the prevalence of tuberculosis, the mounting record of crime in certain sections of the country, are not due just to lack of education and to physical differences, but are due in great part to the basic fact of segregation which we have set up in this country and which warps and twists the lives not only of our Negro population, but sometimes of foreign born or even of religious groups.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)