The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, FIRE, is celebrating its 10th Anniversary this year. I actually got a chance to get licked by a few of its flames last month, and I promised to respond to the critiques of my representation of the organization. From SFO International Airport, here’s a quick crack at just that.
Here’s how FIRE describes its mission:
The mission of FIRE is to defend and sustain individual rights at America’s colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, legal equality, due process, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience—the essential qualities of individual liberty and dignity. FIRE’s core mission is to protect the unprotected and to educate the public and communities of concerned Americans about the threats to these rights on our campuses and about the means to preserve them.
In my first post about FIRE, I called them conservative, and I also intimated that their attack of Virginia Tech’s invocation of “diversity” in its “promotions and tenure” material might also traffic in reactionary discomfort with the increased number of URM faculty in the academy. I do think that both characterizations were wrong and a little unfair.
I still believe that FIRE’s singular commitment to individual freedom can serve as a formal bulwark for substantive strands of ideological conservativism. This is especially true in the context of ongoing right-wing descriptions of the academy as a haven for left-wing extremists. Even still, FIRE is very careful to specify its project in ways that privilege their investment in the liberties of college students (within the limits of the law). I added one of their YouTube videos above so that readers can get a better sense of how FIRE represents itself.
FIRE argues that any university’s attempt to censor legal speech (due to that speech’s potential offensiveness or ideological commitments) is unconscionable and destroys the vibrancy of academic life. FIRE polices the academy for deployments of political/ideological “litmus tests” that delimit public conversations due to “politically correct” concerns about offending others, especially (but not exclusively) URM and women.
I just published a book, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, which argues for honest cross-racial discussions about race, discussions that shouldn’t be overly euphemized or sanitized into uselessness. I do think that a multiracial America will be better off if more and more people trust their interlocutors and are willing to listen to things that might make them feel uncomfortable. In the short run, it might hurt, but the only way America will ever get to a truly “postracial” place is by going through the fire of such dangerously honest talk.
This talk is dangerous because some positions on race might, for instance, assume the inferiority (even the inhumanity) of people of color. It is hard to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t even think you deserve to talk. But when I teach students about race theory, I make sure to include everyone from, say, Howard Winant and Paul Gilroy to Michael Levin and Richard Herrnstein. Students should see how people make their arguments, and they should have a true sense of the real stakes of these “academic” discussions.
That said, I don’t believe that all legal forms of speech facilitate educational growth and critical thinking, two of my main concerns as an instructor.
