Book Review: FIRE's "Student Guides"
Foundation for Individial Rights in Education's Student Guides
Brian Sopp
2006-06-20
At UNC there are two kinds of Leftist bias. The first kind of bias is rare but dangerous. It is called discrimination. And UNC has been a perpetrator of discrimination against conservatives and Christians on numerous occasions. The second kind is frequent but more subtle. It is called thought control. Professors will try to disguise their opinions as fact. And if a student tries to disagree, they will use their position, their arrogance, and peer pressure to not only silence the student, but to force the student to accept a falsehood.
Luckily, there are places one can turn to fight both types of bias. One of those places is the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a nonprofit organization on a mission to “defend and sustain individual rights at America’s increasingly repressive and partisan colleges and universities.” According to their Web site, “these rights include freedom of speech, legal equality, due process, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience.”
FIRE fights the first type of bias by applying public pressure through the media and with litigation. In 2002, UNC threatened to derecognize InterVarsity Christian Fellowship because the group required student leaders to be Christians. After FIRE applied public pressure, UNC backed down. In 2004, when UNC denied Alpha Iota Omega, a Christian fraternity, university recognition, FIRE applied pressure by writing a letter to Chancellor Moeser in which they asserted: “UNC’s ideological objections to Christian organizations choosing Christian members cannot withstand the First Amendment.” The courts later found UNC in violation of the students’ right of association.
However, FIRE cannot respond to every act of discrimination in American academe. Students must be prepared to defend their rights. For this reason FIRE has published five Guides to Student Rights on Campus. FIRE publishes the Guide to Free Speech on Campus, the Guide to Due Process and Fair Procedure on Campus, the Guide to Student Fees, Funding, and Legal Equality on Campus, and the Guide to Religious Liberty on Campus to ensure that students know how to protect their freedom of speech and religion against discrimination.
Fighting the second type of bias is in some ways more difficult than fighting the first. Efforts by professors and university administrations to control student thought can be very subtle or can be instituted in such a way that makes them difficult to combat.
To help students resist thought reform, FIRE recently released its Guide to First-Year Orientation and Thought Reform on Campus, the fifth and final FIRE Guide to Student Rights on Campus.
Co-authored by Jordan Lorence, a First Amendment litigator and senior counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, and Harvey A. Silverglate, a Boston civil rights attorney and member of FIRE’s Board of Directors, the Guide emphasizes that students have the right not only to speak freely, but also to believe according to the dictates of their consciences.
“Censoring speech is bad enough,” the authors write in the introduction to the Guide, “but requiring people to adhere to, and even to believe…in an official, orthodox ideology is completely incompatible with a free society and is the hallmark of totalitarian social control.”
Unfortunately, according to Lorence and Silverglate, colleges and universities today often deprive students and professors of their freedom of conscience by imposing policies such as mandatory diversity “training,” speech codes, the use of nondiscrimination policies to suppress certain student groups, and mandatory psychological counseling as punishment for campus offenses.
Students and professors must be prepared to recognize attempts at thought reform and be ready to respond. That is where the Guide to First-Year Orientation and Thought Reform on Campus comes in. It offers judicial history that explains what student’s rights are, and it offers examples of how student’s rights have been violated in the past and how students and professors can counter such violations in the future.
Lorence and Silverglate understand that universities are not simply politically biased. As the preface of the Guide highlights by quoting Orwell’s 1984, universities do not simply want students to accept a certain political policy. They want students to believe in that policy.
“We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission,” O’Brien tells Winston in 1984. “When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic…We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him.”
With a little preparation students can be ready to combat thought reform. With the help of FIRE they can learn to think for themselves regardless of outside pressure and intimidating professors.
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Publisher: Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
Pages: N/A
Purchase: FIRE Student Guides.