Our Campus Rights Advocacy team provides free assistance to students and faculty facing civil liberties violations on America’s college and university campuses.
With a focus on free expression and academic freedom, our advocates routinely support students and faculty investigated or punished for actions such as saying, teaching, or researching something unpopular or controversial; violating vague or overbroad policies that contradict the institution’s other free speech promises; or inviting a controversial speaker to deliver a talk on campus.
FIRE has helped thousands of college students and faculty when their rights were threatened. Learn more about our advocacy.
FIRE is now my favorite organization in America. Its advice and support in those critical first 24-72 hours of the cancellation campaign against me were crucial in the pushback that ultimately allowed me to survive and thrive.
When Georgetown Law suspended faculty member Ilya Shapiro and launched an investigation into a controversial tweet, FIRE stepped in to defend his free speech and academic freedom rights. Georgetown finally reinstated him on after a 122-day investigation, determining that the law school couldn’t punish him for a tweet he posted before the start of his employment.
FIRE helps people whose expressive rights have been violated — and those violations take a lot of forms. If you think your rights have been violated, tell us about it. Our team will review your case to see how we can help. It’s totally confidential and there’s never a cost to you.
Access decades of FIRE’s nonpartisan resources, case archives, and more.
Polling over 44,000 students at 208 top American colleges and universities, FIRE’s Free Speech Rankings is the largest survey of campus free expression ever performed.
Due process and fundamental fairness are in crisis on America’s college and university campuses. FIRE analyzes disciplinary procedures at 53 top-ranked institutions nationwide and rates them based on 10 fundamental elements of due process.
Over the past seven years, there have been more than 500 incidents in which scholars were targeted for some form of professional sanction over constitutionally protected speech.
We review hundreds of potential rights violations each year and seek justice for those we help. How? By using our authority and reputation to directly demand that those in power respect the Constitution or uphold their own stated commitments to civil liberties.
Concerned that your rights may be at risk? If you are in trouble for something you said, contact FIRE confidentially.
For faculty at public colleges and universities, call FIRE’s Faculty Legal Defense Fund Hotline: 254-500-FLDF (3533).
If you’re a college journalist facing censorship or a media law question, call the Student Press Freedom Initiative 24-hour hotline at 717-734-SPFI (7734).
FIRE Guides emphasize the critical importance of legal equality over the selective assignment of rights and responsibilities, of self-governance over coercion, and of the rule of law and fair procedure over the ad hoc and arbitrary imposition of partisan and repressive rules.
FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus focuses on the threat to freedom of expression posed by the imposition of restrictive speech codes on campuses across the country.
FIRE’s Guide to Due Process and Campus Justice provides information about appropriate and inappropriate methods by which university administrators and student judicial panels address issues of academic misdeeds and behavioral misconduct.
FIRE’s Guide to Religious Liberty on Campus provides a history of the struggle for religious liberty and explains how the legal and moral arguments for religious liberty apply differently on public and private college campuses.
FIRE’s Guide to First-Year Orientation and Thought Reform on Campus contrasts the legitimate purposes and intentions of college campus orientation sessions with current practices and effects, revealing how these sessions have evolved in frightening fashion in the hands of college administrators.
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