Issues & Views:Winning free speech rights on campus

June 30, 2003

Fighting the good fight

Winning free speech rights on campus

On this website, we have reported many times on the valuable work of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). See March 2002, September 23, 2002, and April 21, 2003, just for openers.

Now, in FIRE's first hard copy newsletter, come the words of Michael Meyers, director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition and a member of FIRE's Advisory Board, who does an excellent job of summing up the essential role that FIRE now plays in our society:

I recently engaged in a feisty TV debate that probably could not happen on some college campuses nowadays. I opposed a white newspaper executive on the explosive topic of reparations for the descendants of African-American slaves; he favored them, and I, a black civil rights advocate, opposed them. That debate was an exercise in free speech, unrestrained by notions of political correctness or concerns about "exploitative "or "insensitive "viewpoints that now inhibit the free exchange of ideas about race in higher education circles.

On the campus, someone in the audience might have shouted at me, "Foul!" Indeed, if I were white, opposed so vociferously to racial reparations to the point of invoking mockery and calling such claims on the public purse a form of begging -- as I did in my TV debate -- some student or faculty tribunal might have hauled me before them and accused me of exploitative, insensitive, incorrect views about race: My free speech rights on the subject might have been chilled, if not outright censored.

The demands for free speech are increasing exponentially. Students and faculty of all colors on many campuses are demanding an end to parochialism and censorship. Indeed, as every minority must know intuitively, race relations in particular can't be debated or improved upon until there is candor, truly free speech and inquiry. We must create once again a ferment for individual freedom, in the very places where new leaders are educated. FIRE is so vital and relevant in this struggle to help today 's individualists resist and defeat the freedom-smothering censors and kangaroo courts that exist on too many campuses. FIRE is providing the intellectual leadership, backed up by the club of litigation, to win victories for individual freedom on our campuses. In a uniquely American way, we're fired up and won't take any more incursions on our basic American freedoms and civil liberties.

Learn more about the status of cases currently represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), an organization dedicated to preserving liberty on college campuses.