FIRE’s Expanded Mission

FIRE's new billboards:

FIRE is now the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, reflecting its newly expanded mission. Defending free speech in schools is still critically important, but the new mission has been expanded.

June 8, 2022 Statement by Greg Lukianoff, FIRE's President and CEO:

Today, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Educationbecomes the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

America’s leading defender of free speech, due process, and academic freedom in higher education is expanding its free speech mission beyond campus. The $75 million expansion initiative will focus on three main areas of programming: litigation, public education, and research.

“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,” said FIRE President & CEO Greg Lukianoff. “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.”

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Biden’s Department of Education Attempts to Deploy Third-World Title IX Regulations in American Colleges

From FIRE:

Today, the Department of Education proposed new Title IX regulations that, if implemented, would gut essential free speech and due process rights for college students facing sexual misconduct allegations on campus. As required by federal law, the department must now solicit public feedback before the pending rules are finalized.

The draft regulations are a significant departure from current Title IX regulations. Unlike the current regulations, adopted in 2020 after 18 months of review, the new regulations would roll back student rights by:

  • eliminating students’ right to a live hearings
  • eliminating the right to cross-examination;
  • weakening students’ right to active legal representation;
  • allowing a single campus bureaucrat to serve as judge and jury;
  • rejecting the Supreme Court’s definition of sexual harassment in favor of a definition that threatens free speech rights;
  • requiring colleges and universities to use the weak “preponderance of the evidence” standard to determine guilt, unless they use a higher standard for other alleged misconduct.
  • These changes authorize or require institutions to violate fundamental student and faculty civil liberties.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression will submit its formal objections to the proposed changes in the coming weeks. Moreover, FIRE is committed to using all the resources at its disposal to ensure that core American freedoms, such as a student’s rights to free speech and due process, are not abandoned by the federal government.

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How to Respond When a Public School Sues its Students for Not Using Vanity Pronouns of other Students

Fair spoke up for the students who were sued by the Kiel Middle School in Wisconsin. Here's an excerpt for the letter FAIR sent to the school:

By initiating proceedings against students for not using the alternative pronouns of others, Kiel is not simply punishing them for protected speech; it is compelling them to affirm ideological beliefs in violation of their First Amendment rights. Pronoun declarations are not value-neutral statements such as name and age. They are politically loaded and premised on a specific set of ideological beliefs: that pronouns refer to gender and not biological sex, that one can be neither male nor female, and that gender is a matter of personal choice rather than a biological condition.

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