There is good news today for students living in the residence halls at San Jose State University (SJSU). The housing department has revised several restrictive policies, including a previous FIRE Speech Code of the Month, thanks to the efforts of administrators seeking to protect the free speech rights of SJSU students.
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Today, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court. FIRE is asking the Court to defend the First Amendment right to freedom of association by overturning the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' decision in Christian Legal Society v. Kane, which allowed University of California Hastings College of the Law to forbid its chapter of the Christian Legal Society to organize around shared religious and cultural beliefs. FIRE's brief, which was joined by the national student organization Students For Liberty, also pointed out that the Ninth Circuit's decision let Hastings demand that all groups accept "all comers" as voting members, which leaves groups with minority viewpoints subject to hostile takeovers by students in the majority. Read Full Article
FIRE announces its Speech Code of the Month for February 2010: Westfield State College in Massachusetts. Westfield's Student Handbook prohibits "discrimination," which it defines to include "making disparaging remarks that insult or stigmatize a student's cultural background or race" as well as "making insensitive remarks that reflect a student's disability." Westfield State College is a public university, bound to protect its students' First Amendment right to free speech. Unfortunately, this policy prohibits large amounts of protected speech and could easily be applied to punish the kind of controversial expression about important political and social issues that is at the very heart of what the First Amendment exists to protect. Read Full Article
FIRE's newest campaign, Give Half for Liberty, will help colleges reform their policies so that students and professors can enjoy freedom of expression, while also helping FIRE raise the funds necessary to continue our vital mission. The campaign encourages supporters of higher education to donate half of what they usually would donate to a college or university to FIRE instead, so that we can help restore those schools to the true "marketplace of ideas" they were meant to be. If you care about the success of your alma mater, the college your child attends, or the school with your favorite college sports team—but you also are aware of the sad state of liberty on college campuses today—you can make money talk and target your donation to positive change on campus. If you agree that the colleges you love have strayed far from their core purpose as centers of free thought and open debate, through the Give Half for Liberty campaign, you can help. Read Full Article
Thanks to our donors, FIRE has fulfilled a generous $25,000 matching grant from Raymie Stata and Kimberly Sweidy and is now able to hire FIRE's very first Video Fellow. We are seeking one energetic full-time employee to play an integral role in forwarding FIRE's mission using the canvas of video and the paintbrush of cutting edge technology. The Sweidy Stata Video Fellow will be charged with the duty to create several different, high quality documentary-style films about FIRE's cases and mission and will play a key role in FIRE's outreach and publicity efforts. To accomplish the task of making dynamic and gripping video content for both online and traditional distribution, the Sweidy Stata Video Fellow will have to work with a broad cross-section of FIRE's staff who work on many varying programs. This is a great opportunity for someone looking to expand their documentary portfolio and get involved with important issues effecting our country's colleges and universities. For a full description of what the job will entail, visit FIRE's job page. Read Full Article
After FIRE notified Michigan State University (MSU) President Lou Anna K. Simon that MSU remains on FIRE's Red Alert list because of its extremely restrictive new "spam" policy, President Simon responded by defending the policy. "The University's email services are not intended as a public forum for the expression and dissemination of personal opinions," Simon wrote in a letter to FIRE. "Rather, other means exist within the University community for the expression and dissemination of personal opinions." MSU used a similar policy last year to find a student government member guilty of "spamming" for e-mailing professors about controversial policy changes at MSU.
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