Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)

NameInstitution

The FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) is a non-profit making organization that was founded by 1999 in the United States. The organization focused on the civil liberties mainly in academic and learning institutions in the United States. The primary goal of FIRE is “to sustain and defend individual rights and freedoms at America’s universities and colleges,” including individual rights to “legal equality, religious liberty, sanctity of one’s conscience- an essential individual dignity and liberty quality, freedom to speech, and due process” ( HYPERLINK “http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/123.html” Columbia University Unable to Defend Policy in Public, 2001). America’s universities and colleges are theoretically described as the institutions that are essential in developing critical and intellectual minds and furthering of core liberty values, legal equality, and protection of individual rights and freedoms. Unfortunately, these learning institutions have become the barriers to these fundamental pursuits and qualities by denying the faculty and students their voices, individual humanity, and their fundamental rights and freedoms as constitutionally granted. The universities and colleges therefore advocate for legal inequality, political indoctrination, and assaults to moral reality orthodoxies ( HYPERLINK “http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/123.html” Columbia University Unable to Defend Policy in Public, 2001). The illiberal universities and colleges’ practices and policies must therefore be abolished and exposed to the public scrutiny and criticism in order to create awareness among the public on the violations of students’ basic rights and freedoms that have become common practices in these institutions of higher learning in the United States. After receiving a number of pleas for help and communications from students who were victims of illiberal institutional policies and practices that violated the students’ rights and intruded on their private consciences, Harvey Silverglate (civil-liberties legal expert at Cambridge) and Alan Charles Kros (University of Pennsylvania professor) founded FIRE to respond to these violations and to help in cultural transformation (Sarabyn, 2008).

FIRE decisively and effectively defends the American liberties particularly on behalf of the faculty members and university students who are often oppressed with the rigid institutional policies that limit their freedoms and basic rights. FIRE therefore comes in a legal body that fights against these institutional policies that infringe on the rights of its members. FIRE is responsible for bringing about favorable and desired resolutions for these groups of students and university teaching staff who are challenged by institutions, universities and colleges’ policies that deny them their liberties and fundamental rights ( HYPERLINK “http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/123.html” Columbia University Unable to Defend Policy in Public, 2001). Besides working for individuals, this non-profit making organization, FIRE, nationally works to create public awareness on the liberty fates in the higher learning institutions in the U.S. FIRE primary responsibility is the protection of fundamental rights of students and teaching staff both at the university and college institutions (Sarabyn, 2008). In so doing, FIRE focuses on four main areas: freedom of association and religious liberty, freedom of expression and speech, legal equality and due process on campus, and freedom of conscience. Therefore, FIRE primary goal is to bring to an end debilitating fatalism in the institutions of higher education that paralyzes the faculty and the student body through the provision of legal protection to the helpless victims of such abuses and by exposing to the public these issues surrounding violations of fundamental rights of the faculty staff and students (Sarabyn, 2008). This has been achieved by criticizing the university and college administrators whose activities and principles, in the view of FIRE, constitutes violation of due process rights and freedoms or free speech of the university and college students and the faculty team as outlined under the HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution” o “Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution” Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

References

” HYPERLINK “http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/123.html” Columbia University Unable to Defend Policy in Public”, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Press Release, March 13, 2001. Accessed October 31, 2013.

Sarabyn, K. (2008). HYPERLINK “http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/9041.html” “Yale Caves into Its Women’s Center’s Speech-Repressing Demands”. Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Retrieved 2008-03-25.