In defense of FIRE (opinion)

In an essay for Inside Higher Ed, Joan W. Scott defends the American Association of University Professors from attacks by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. While I agree with many of Scott’s defenses of the AAUP, I don’t think her counterattacks on FIRE are accurate or fair.

Scott is correct to criticize FIRE vice president of campus advocacy Alex Morey, who was wrong to denounce the AAUP by tweeting this: “If you’re a faculty member with anything other than ultra-progressive views, don’t count on the @AAUP to defend you like it once would have. Trading almost a century of principle and the org’s good name for political expediency is a damn shame.” Morey’s comments were made in response to AAUP president Todd Wolfson’s declaration that the election of Trump and Vance was “disappointing” because of their promised “attacks on academic freedom.”

It’s awful to argue that if any leader of an organization denounces a Democratic or Republican candidate for their promised attacks on academic freedom, then the organization can be presumed to no longer defend professors who supported that candidate. It’s particularly awful because FIRE has itself criticized government policies, and no one should accuse FIRE of refusing to help faculty who disagree with FIRE’s ideology.

But Scott effectively does that in her counterattack. Scott claims that “FIRE’s favorite groups to represent are on the political right” and they only “cover themselves by litigating on behalf of the occasional liberal or even leftist.” Scott is correct to point out that FIRE’s origins and funding are largely conservative and libertarian. But while other conservative groups during the Trump era have shifted to the right and embraced repression, FIRE has doubled down on its commitment to the principles of free expression and defended the rights of everyone, even when this might endanger money from some of its donors.

Scott and Morey are both wrong. FIRE and the AAUP should have their positions and opinions questioned. But we can do that without dismissing either of them as our enemies in the fight against censorship. We’re facing unprecedented threats to both academic freedom and free speech. We need all the supporters we can get. We should reject the habit of presuming bad motives when there’s no evidence that either FIRE or the AAUP has abandoned their principles in defending scholars of all views.

I should make my biases clear: I have been paid by FIRE to speak at a few of their conferences, and to serve as an expert witness on academic freedom in the case of Stephen Kershnar at the State University of New York at Fredonia. I’ve also been paid by the Illinois AAUP as their newspaper editor in the past; I have been a national AAUP member for decades and volunteered to help start its “Academe” blog, which I co-edited for many years. I have criticized FIRE in the past for many things, including flaws in its Scholars Under Fire database, problems with its disinvitations database, biases in its free speech rankings, errors in its ratings of speech codes and its mistake in urging censorship of activities by student affairs administrators. I would add Morey’s attacks on the AAUP (and FIRE president Greg Lukianoff’s just-published declaration “The Fall of the AAUP”) to that list of mistakes.

I understand the desire to denounce others, since I do it regularly. I’ve written entire books attacking Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump and all the opponents of academic freedom, and I’ve issued a seemingly endless series of tirades against views that I think endanger free expression. But I also try to recognize that one flawed idea (or several) does not mean we should put some person or organization on a list of evil groups. We should criticize people for their specific wrongheaded views and actions without banishing them from our realm of engagement or presuming that they have bad motives.

Scott claims that FIRE’s “initial motivating force was the endorsement of the right of racist expression on the University of Pennsylvania campus. This is a telling choice of where their political affiliations lie.” This ad hominem smear based on ancient history is particularly strange considering the AAUP’s origins in the defense of Edward Ross’s racist expression at Stanford University. FIRE’s founders were correct to argue that yelling “water buffalo” at a loud group of Black women on the Penn campus should not be punishable speech, and both FIRE and the AAUP should embrace their long history of defending free speech and academic freedom even when scholars and students are accused of bigotry.

Scott complains that after the University of Kentucky dissolved its University Senate, “FIRE has issued no criticism of this attack on academic freedom.” Let’s not play this game where an organization’s failure to publicly criticize an attack on academic freedom is seen as an endorsement of repression. There are so many attacks on free inquiry that all of us (including FIRE and the AAUP) can be found guilty of failing to speak out against every single one of them.

Scott argues too simplistically that the fact that right-wing money has funded FIRE proves that it serves a right-wing agenda of campus repression. But we shouldn’t be deluded into thinking that money doesn’t matter. FIRE now has 120 staffers, meaning that its numerous conservative donors are able to sustain an organization nearly five times the size of the AAUP, which has more than 40,000 dues-paying members and lists 25 people on its staff directory. The fact that money has poured into the coffers of groups such as FIRE that largely promote a narrative of conservative victimhood and left-wing oppressors should not be disregarded. The public debate about campus free speech (including some of FIRE’s proclamations) has been shaped, and distorted, by right-wing funding. But that doesn’t mean we should dismiss all the good work FIRE does by attacking them as part of a right-wing conspiracy to destroy academia.

I agree with Scott that FIRE’s support for free speech legislation may endanger campus liberty by encouraging further legislative intrusions in academia. But FIRE has also worked to stop legislative abuses and sued Florida over the Stop WOKE Act, which endangers academic freedom.

I have defended the AAUP’s statement on academic boycotts (even though I oppose boycotts), and I think Scott is correct to emphasize the statement’s protection of individual rights in the face of FIRE’s sometimes extreme attacks. But we shouldn’t judge FIRE as an entire organization based on a few misguided responses (just as we shouldn’t dismiss all of the good work done by the AAUP because of some statements that people might question).

We’re all ideologues here, and we can remain deeply committed to free expression even when we might make errors in our tactics and goals, or expose our hypocrisy when we fail to live up to our best principles. We don’t need to choose between FIRE and the AAUP, or between free speech and academic freedom. We can argue about the best principles and statements and tactics and passionately defend our preferred approach while we simultaneously recognize that we’re all in this together against a common foe of censorship.