I wanted to say a few words here in defense of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE.

In a brutal environment they're trying their hardest to stick up for speech principles, irrespective of politics. It’s a thankless job. I’d hope people would remember how much they’ve done over the years to stand up for academic freedom and the First Amendment.

Way back in December of 2000, before there was any public conception of “wokeness” or any idea about a problem with civil liberties on the liberal left, they took a stand against "diversity statements” at Bucks County Community College in Pennsylvania. They did this not because they were against diversity, but because these statements – which became epidemic – are compulsory speech. Asking academic applicants to submit essays explaining their “commitment to diversity,” they said, was as objectionable as a 1950s question asking for a statement from an applicant about his or her "commitment to patriotism.”

Conversely, the ACLU’s failure to stand up against “diversity statements” was a major early red flag. In the early 2000s the ACLU was singularly focused on George W. Bush and the civil liberties problems that arose after 9/11 in connection with his War on Terror, which on one hand was fine because those problems were very real (illegal surveillance, blacklisting, torture, and on and on). Unfortunately, they missed a major anti-speech movement brewing on campuses. FIRE did not. It argued early for more due process in sexual harassment cases, repeatedly stood up for students were disciplined for insufficiently progressive views (amazingly they had to back a student who was effectively suspended after taking America’s side in a post-9/11 discussion in Arabic), and they took up the cases of a lot of teachers being squeezed on the academic freedom side.

When a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign was disciplined for explaining Catholic views on homosexuality in an “Introduction to Catholicism” class, FIRE stood up for that professor. They went after Yale University for censoring the key cartoons in Jytte Clausen’s “The Cartoons that Shook the World,” i.e. the ones of Mohammed. That took courage. In a case that has relevance today, they went after a school with a professor who compelled undergrads to write letters opposing the Iraq War (the problem of schools mixing political activism with scholarship has since grown exponentially). In a case that unfortunately previewed practices by both political parties, they opposed Texas Tech University’s policy of creating a “free speech gazebo” where activities like pamphleteering were allowed, but only after a six-day review period. Free Speech Zones!

I could go on and on. FIRE has decades of cases showing they'll defend plaintiffs or complainants with the full range of controversial views. When they committed resources to taking on campus speech codes and compelled thought and cancel culture, no one else was doing this. They were a crucial resource for reporters like me when no one else in the legal community seemed to care about digital censorship. I won’t talk about what its founders and leaders are like personally, except to say I never felt they were anything other than totally committed to free expression.

Since Trump took office last year, they’ve been in a tough spot. This president often openly thumbs his nose at legal niceties. Some of his policymakers seem not to know or care what the law is. Even when Trump is ostensibly trying to fix civil liberties problems – the elimination of DEI litmus tests is one example – he ends up creating ranges of new problems by doing it in ways that are themselves not legal. If you read FIRE’s amicus brief in Harvard’s suit against Trump’s HHS, you can see their frustration:

“FIRE’s criticism of Harvard is well-deserved. Among other missteps, Harvard has maintained illiberal speech codes and unfair disciplinary procedures, pressured students to sign a civility pledge, blacklisted members of independent student organizations, and punished faculty for defending unpopular clients9 and making unpopular arguments. Harvard has finished dead last in FIRE’s annual campus free speech rankings for two years running…”

But, they wrote, “exactly none of Harvard’s problems… in any way excuse [the Trump administration’s] unlawful, unconstitutional demands.” They went on to cite a list of Trump policies that just aren't tenable, like “prohibiting the admission of international students who are ‘hostile’ to ‘American values’ or ‘supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism,’” or “mandating viewpoint diversity among students and faculty,” and “ending recognition of pro-Palestinian student groups and disciplining student members of those groups.”

As to the last point, FIRE has occasionally taken heat from so-called liberals for the alleged crime of being insufficiently supportive of the pro-Palestine movement. This is because they've criticized pro-Palestinian student protests that themselves were no-brainer violations of the First Amendment – doing things like blocking pathways on campus or exercising the infamous “heckler’s veto.” (Is a free speech organization supposed to endorse those things?) Yet here they are joining up with Harvard, an organization they’ve criticized relentlessly, to say the Trump administration can’t use the threat of withholding funding to prevent the formation of pro-Palestinian groups, whom they're accused of not supporting.

Again, this is thankless work. It doesn’t win friends among conservatives and doesn’t particularly impress people on the other side.

As was the case with the ACLU in the Ira Glasser days, FIRE is sometimes slammed both for being too political and for not being political enough. That can’t be a fun place to be. I hope people appreciate what the group is trying to do. Civil liberties don’t have many true advocates left.