The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education on Monday announced a $75 million expansion into off-campus free-speech advocacy and defense that will include litigation, public education and opinion research.
The organization, which has worked for more than 20 years to defend free expression on college campuses, is rebranding to the “Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression” as part of the shift.
“America needs a new nonpartisan defender of free speech that will advocate unapologetically for this fundamental human right in both the court of law and the court of public opinion,” FIRE president and CEO Greg Lukianoff said in a statement. “FIRE has a proven track record of defeating censorship on campus. We are excited to now bring that same tireless advocacy to fighting censorship off campus.”
FIRE’s next chapter will kick off with $10 million in planned national cable and billboard advertising that highlights activists on both sides of the political spectrum discussing the importance of free speech, Politico reported.
One TV advertisement features a former Emerson College student who was vice president of the school’s Turning Point USA chapter when it was suspended last year for distributing stickers with the phrase “China kinda sus” — “sus” meaning “suspicious” — alongside a hammer and sickle image.
“Freedom of speech is our right as Americans and we must do everything we can to protect it,” Lynum says in the ad, Politico reported, as images of Martin Luther King Jr. and a young pro-life activist play.
A separate ad features Stefan Klaer, a Montana State University student who was told to remove a Black Lives Matter banner from his dorm room window.
Lukianoff said FIRE’s defense of free speech on campuses “will remain core to what we do and will grow in the coming years.”
“But we have come to realize that defending the First Amendment and a culture of free speech off-campus is essential to protecting those values on-campus, just as much as fighting for those values on-campus is essential for preserving them off-campus,” he said in a statement.
He added: “We need to remind older Americans that freedom of speech is still a value worth fighting for, and we need to teach younger Americans that everything from scientific progress, to artistic expression, to social justice, peace, and living authentic lives requires the staunch protection of freedom of speech for all.”
FIRE says it has won more than 500 direct advocacy victories on behalf of college students and faculty members and secured 425 campus policy changes impacting 5 million students in its 23 years of advocacy.
FIRE’s new initiative comes one year after the head of the ACLU’s free speech, privacy, and technology project excused the ACLU’s shift toward advocating for progressive causes over free speech by saying that the First Amendment is just one of the group’s “12 or 15 different values.”
The comments by the ACLU’s Ben Wizner came during an interview with the New York Times, in which he noted that the FIRE had taken a strong lead in defending free speech on college campuses.
“FIRE does not have the same tensions,” Wizner said. “At the ACLU, free speech is one of 12 or 15 different values.”
The report recounted incidents in which the ACLU seemingly took the side of progressive values over free speech on campus, including in 2015 when activists and a journalism professor physically blocked a student journalist at the University of Missouri from taking photos and talking to demonstrators at a protest against racism on campus.
Two national ACLU officials applauded the “courageous” leadership of student activists and faculty members but made no mention of First Amendment rights.
The ACLU responded similarly after an incident at the University of Connecticut in 2019 in which two white students, walking home late at night, loudly repeated a racial slur and were arrested by university police and charged with ridicule on account of race. The ACLU of Connecticut demanded that the university hire ten black faculty and staff members and require a freshman course on ending racism on campus.
However, the group did not mention the First Amendment implications of arresting students for speech and instead asserted only that the police force is “an inherently white supremacist institution.”
Ira Glasser, who served as the director of the ACLU from 1978 to 2001 and now serves on a FIRE advisory board, told Politico he “strongly encouraged” FIRE to broaden its free-speech work as the ACLU increasingly leans into causes outside of protecting the First Amendment.
“Once the ACLU backs off its traditional role, who else is there?” Glasser asked. “It’s great to have the ACLU fighting for racial and reproductive justice and gay rights. …The notion that you have to reduce your vigor with which you defend First Amendment rights or you will damage the strength of your advocacy for equal rights for women, gays, and Blacks, et cetera is just demonstrably not true and, yet, they’ve done that. It has created a vacuum in the viewpoint-neutral defense of free speech, which FIRE has filled.”