FIRE
The Eternally Radical Idea
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part 12 of a multi-part series updating developments since the publication of “
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When I talk to people about FIRE’s work they’re often surprised when I say that a lot of FIRE’s cases involving students are not your stereotypical examples of right-on-left or left-on-right censorship of political or “politically incorrect” speech. While those kinds of cases certainly do exist, it’s extremely common for a case to involve speech with little political valence so common that I call this the “big middle” of FIRE cases.
This dovetails directly from what I discussed in my tenth CUWC installment on the “Strong Corporatism Theory:” that “[h]igher education is harmed any time universities choose concerns like ranking, donations, staff morale, tuition dollars, federal grants, fear of liability, etc, over teaching and research goals.” In the following examples from FIRE’s case history and