20th anniversary: This July in FIRE history

FIRE is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2019! You can now purchase tickets and sponsorships for our October gala at the Mandarin Oriental, New York  — featuring a keynote address by Salman Rushdie! 

Until then, we’re keeping the party going all year long here on Newsdesk, with a monthly walk down memory lane to highlight notable moments in FIRE history that are still relevant today.

This month we’re celebrating FIRE’s indispensable Guides to Student Rights on Campus!

Back in July 2008, FIRE announced the second edition to our “Guide to Free Speech on Campus.” It’s one of 5 comprehensive Guides to Student Rights on Campus, including: 

• FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus
• FIRE’s Guide to Due Process and Campus Justice
• FIRE’s Guide to Student Fees, Funding, and Legal Equality on Campus
• FIRE’s Guide to Religious Liberty on Campus
• FIRE’s Guide to First-Year Orientation and Thought Reform on Campus

We launched our Guides series to educate college students — our nation’s future leaders — about the central tenets of a free society, including the benefits of debating and resolving peaceful differences without resorting to coercion and repression. These handy guides, authored by experts in the field, help students know their rights and what to do when those rights have been violated. They have served as a resource for students for more than a decade. As we have noted previously:

The Guides are an innovative, widely respected, and well-received vehicle for changing the culture on college and university campuses. They do so by emphasizing 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.

A distinguished group of legal scholars from across the political and ideological spectrum serves as Board of Editors to this series. The diversity of the members of this Board proves that liberty on campus is not a question of partisan politics, but of the rights and responsibilities of free individuals in a society governed by the rule of law.

Head to our Guides landing page to download any, or all, of the guides free of charge, or order a copy.

If you have questions about your rights — or think they may have been violated — contact us at fire@thefire.org or submit a case.