thank you (4.00 / 1)

Thank you for posting this fascinating diary. For as often as many of us joke about wingnut welfare, it's useful to get a better understanding of how it actually works.

As Wikipedia has grown to be the site of record, this kind of work is critically important for the progressive movement. Thank you for your efforts.

They call me Clem, Clem Guttata. Come visit wild, wonderful West Virginia Blue

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by: WVaBlue @ Sun Mar 23, 2008 at 01:48:40 AM UTC

FIRE has been involved on my campus (0.00 / 0)

And I have to say that they are doing good work.

They have publicized the case of, and helped out, a liberal professor (who has clashed with the campus administration from the left on a number of issues) who has been threatened with expulsion (even though he has tenure) for allegedly telling a class that a derogatory word for mexican immigrants existed.

It's all very confusing. Long story short: Liberal Professor gets in trouble with an administration who already bears him animosity, since he has clashed with them in the past. The grounds of accusal are pretty thin, and the University is breaking its own policy and tripping over its own feet in order to try and break him. FIRE is helping this man out.

If FIRE is a right-wing organization, please explain this man:

Harvey Silverglate

Co-founder and Chairman

Harvey Silverglate was born in New York (1942) and was educated at Bogota (N.J.) High School (1960), Princeton University (1964), and Harvard Law School (1967).

As Counsel to Boston's Good & Cormier, Silverglate specializes in criminal defense, civil liberties, and academic freedom/student rights law. He has assisted students in trouble since 1969, when he represented student anti-war protesters on trial. He has taught at Cambridge Rindge & Latin School (a public secondary school), the University of Massachusetts College III (in Boston), and Harvard Law School. Silverglate has also served on the Board of the ACLU of Massachusetts for over three decades, including two terms as Board president. He is a long-time affiliate of Harvard College's Dunster House, where he conducts student "law tables."

He came to speak at our campus and I heard him. He is a libertarian for sure, but a definite left-libertarian at that.

So, while I do not have the capacity or time to argue with your "macro" portrayal of them as full of right-wingers, I do wish to say that I, the editor of the campus progressive blog, consider them friends and allies. I was impressed by Mr. Silverglate and in my experience FIRE has been very helpful.

I blog on InnermostParts.org

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by: Sayhar @ Sun Mar 23, 2008 at 08:42:31 AM UTC

yes -- but do perhaps read my article? (0.00 / 0)

FIRE also gets to blog on the Huffington Post from time to time. And I hope I was clear in saying that FIRE itself -- aside from a few missteps -- is not involved directly in right-wing advocacy. As I said, they balance left and right defendants -- at other schools, for example, they defend the rights of student groups to expell students for homosexuality.

FIRE is funded, and staffed, by some of the hardest of the right. All the links in the article above -- to ACTA, to ADF, to the multitude of Horowitz groups -- are quite correct. Just a quick glance at the funding sources would also be helpful.

Silverglate I would call a libertarian, by the way; he certainly had it out for Bill Clinton (who he publically said should have been impeached.) It's true that he and Kors, the other founder, probably didn't plan on hiring from these places, but at some point along the line it turned into astroturf.

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by: sdedeo @ Sun Mar 23, 2008 at 13:41:31 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

I did read the article. (0.00 / 0)

Twice.Once before commenting and once again after you both quite charmingly accused me of not having done so.

sdedeo, I followed your links and I agree, there do seem to be a disproportionate amount of people on the board/senior contributors/advisors connected with the Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institution, Manhattan Institute, AEI, etc.

I also read that Wikipedia article you talked about, looked further into the issue, and so forth.

You're right: there does seem to be some sort of pattern of right-wing funding of the group. It also does seem to be a bit too chummy with conservatives in general.

That said, I think your thesis of FIRE being taken over by the right wing to grant institutional legitimacy to right-wing actors is very interesting but poorly sourced. I'd appreciate it if you could expand on that topic.

I blog on InnermostParts.org

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by: Sayhar @ Sun Mar 23, 2008 at 22:26:24 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

here's why i suggested you read the article (4.00 / 1)

1. you said that FIRE was not right-wing because it was defending a liberal professor. I explicitly discussed this. It's also the most common talking-point of FIRE itself, who have talked about how they're totally non-partisan plenty -- without mentioning all of the links that intrepid googlers (and an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education) have pulled up.

2. you said that FIRE was not right-wing because one of its founders was a member of the ACLU. The point of the article was to show that there are large numbers of people employed by or running FIRE that are members of some pretty extreme right-wing groups.

I am glad you found my suggestion to re-read charming, though!

As for "poorly sourced" -- what are you looking for? All of the information in the post is sourced in the wikipedia article; I'm not sure there are many public-figure members of FIRE left for us to googlevestigate.

You're a progressive blogger; that's great. You do more work than I on these issues. The point of the post is to suggest that you think carefully about FIRE's motivations, and the legitimacy you might give to some pretty scary people in the process.

If you want a take-away message: when you next talk about FIRE on your blog, you might also mention things they are keen not to talk about -- the fact that there is one, or often, zero, degrees of separation between them and groups explicitly dedicated to the destruction of academic freedom-of-speech.

Five, six years ago I was a less suspicious person on these matters. These days, sadly, someone serving on the board of a place like ACTA, or David Horowitz, is enough for me to say I've heard enough.

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by: sdedeo @ Sun Mar 23, 2008 at 23:55:27 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Yes, Friend, Please READ The Article (0.00 / 1)

There is a reason for terms like "astroturf" and "front group."  These sorts of things can mislead people for years, decades even.

The fact that they do some good, somewhere, sometime is not the point.  Rather, this is about the big picture, and what their ultimate role and purpose is.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Sun Mar 23, 2008 at 16:03:31 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Unfair Characterization of FIRE (0.00 / 0)

Dear Simon,

Your characterization of FIRE is unfair.  Please look at the post below and check out this URL (http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/9069.html) for additional links.

Best,

Greg

Wikipedia and Mud-Slinging
by Greg Lukianoff
March 24, 2008

Sadly, once again a critic has popped up accusing FIRE of being nothing more than a right-wing organization.

What makes this case somewhat different and more troubling, however, is that the critic in question is an editor on FIRE's Wikipedia page, and, therefore, has had a disproportionate effect on how FIRE is represented on the Internet. As many have lamented, the problem with Wikipedia is that it empowers the Internet-obsessive, those with personal axes to grind, and the unswervingly ideological to define e-reality.

Simon DeDeo's account of FIRE has many errors. He says that the liberal founder of FIRE is no longer involved with the organization. Untrue. Harvey Silverglate is not only still involved with us, he is the Chairman of our Board. DeDeo also claims we defended Ward Churchill merely for plagiarism. Untrue. We defended Ward Churchill's free speech rights both extensively and aggressively, but also recognized that when he was found guilty of plagiarism, the school was within its rights to terminate him. DeDeo finds it somehow damming that we "cite" FrontPage Mag, when even a quick perusal of our "In The News" page would demonstrate that we try to cite all mentions of FIRE in the media, whatever end of the political spectrum they come from. Further, we are not staffed "entirely by right-wing ideologues." That's laughable. I am very proud of the fact that FIRE is an unusually politically balanced organization. Of our lawyers on staff, one is a Republican, one is a staunch libertarian, one is a committed moderate, and two (including me) are Democrats. As I wrote almost exactly a year ago, in the face of similar accusations: "I have never before worked in an office (or even heard of one) where Democrats, Republicans, libertarians, Greens, atheists, Jews (from liberal to orthodox), agnostics, Muslims, and evangelical Christians pull together for a common cause." I am deeply proud of this fact.

Making it personal, DeDeo also turns his (narrow) sights on me, seemingly incredulous that I have the audacity to count myself as a Democrat just because I do not have an extensive history of donating money to the Democratic Party. This is true: I do tend to spend my charitable contributions on local theater (as my bio indicates, though I live in New York City, I am on the board of Philadelphia's Theater Exile). It should be noted, however, that donor status is a lousy way to gauge someone's politics. DeDeo himself has "only" given $200 (to Howard Dean) in the past 4 years but I am not about to question his political leanings. I'll take him at his word.

Finally, DeDeo accuses FIRE of being a "classic example" of an "astroturf" organization-i.e., a fake grassroots organization, designed to look like something it isn't. This makes no sense. First of all, as a non-profit, non-partisan advocacy group, FIRE does not pretend to be a grassroots organization, working from the bottom up. We are a watchdog organization, founded by a civil rights lawyer and a professor. (If you want to see grassroots, however, check out our ever-growing Campus Freedom Network.) But even more importantly, try telling a decidedly non-right-wing student like Hayden Barnes that FIRE's staff members are "keen to wage a culture war on the leftists they see at every turn." Or try telling all the state and local ACLUs we've worked with that FIRE is little more than some kind of right-wing front group. It may make for a quick way to get your blog entry more views, but that does not make these kind of easy accusations any more true.

Really, DeDeo's whole enterprise is silly. As I wrote before:

If FIRE is a secret right-wing front group, this sinister secret has apparently been hidden from me. When I started as FIRE's first Director of Legal and Public Advocacy back in 2001, my very first letter defended the rights of University of New Mexico Professor Richard Berthold, under attack for the following statement: "Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon has my vote." My first TV appearance was to defend the free speech and due process rights of then-University of South Florida Professor Sami Al-Arian. I have appeared on Fox News defending the rights of Ward Churchill (who called the World Trade Center victims "little Eichmanns") and Nicholas DeGenova ("I pray for a million Mogadishus"), and debated Pat Buchanan about tiny and isolated "free speech zones" at Texas Tech. As for my background, before graduating law school I worked for such crazy right-wing outfits as the ACLU of Northern California, the EnvironMentors Project in Washington, D.C., the Organization for Aid to Refugees in Prague, and the Fulbright program.

Has DeDeo noticed that FIRE has been front and center through some of the least popular cases involving protecting liberal speech? Most recently, no one-right, left or center-was a fan of our case at Colorado State University, where we defended an editorial that read in its entirety: "TASER THIS: FUCK BUSH."

But this is not about proving some kind of liberal credentials for myself or FIRE. I have said it before and I will say it again: FIRE is a non-partisan group, hard as that can be to understand.

Really, all I would ask of DeDeo is that he follow our cases more carefully. I have been deeply frustrated by the liberal blogosphere's failure to take note of cases like our recent fight at Valdosta State University-where an environmentally-minded liberal student was expelled for a collage protesting a parking garage-or at Brandeis-where a liberal professor is in trouble for explaining and criticizing the use of the word "wetback." It is as if the country has become so hopelessly polarized that bloggers like DeDeo won't even pay attention when groups he clearly dislikes take up causes he apparently deeply believes in.

And even if DeDeo is only interested in helping bring attention to the liberal or progressive FIRE cases, that is just fine. He can be as partisan as he likes.

Meanwhile, FIRE will continue to defend people across the political spectrum, just as we have throughout our entire existence.

Which brings me to DeDeo's emphasis on the fact that FIRE has worked with the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian litigation group, which he cites as an example of our right-wing ties. It is true; we have happily worked with the ADF to successfully challenge unconstitutional speech codes at schools like San Francisco State University. We have also worked with the ACLUs of Nevada, Eastern Missouri, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Southern California, and we work on a regular basis with the Student Press Law Center. We are proud to have written amicus briefs that have brought together these groups in common cause with Co-Star, CampusFreedom.Org, David Horowitz's Students for Academic Freedom, the Christian Legal Society and Feminists for Free Expression. We think that our ability to unite such an ideologically diverse coalition of groups is proof not only that FIRE is a truly non-partisan group, but of the fact that the First Amendment's protections are crucial for all Americans, regardless of belief or ideology. Defending free speech is bigger than "left" or "right."

The most important thing I need to say to people like Simon DeDeo is simply this: No matter how much you want to wish it away, there is a serious problem on campus, far worse than what you choose to characterize as an "occasional college administration free-speech misstep." The rights of students and faculty members are abused on a regular basis. FIRE can point to hundreds of cases; indeed, our case archive is just the tip of the iceberg. Most colleges maintain unconstitutional speech codes. FIRE's experience has been that you are more likely to get in trouble on campus if you are socially conservative, make un-PC jokes, or do or say something deemed "insensitive." Liberals also run afoul of campus bureaucrats, and when they do, they too are punished utilizing the language of "tolerance" and "diversity." You can disagree with this assessment, you can do your best to disprove it, but if after reviewing case after case every year, you aren't convinced that there is a problem on campus, you should ask yourself if you are honestly looking at the facts, or if you are blinded by your own ideology.

And if you are so utterly convinced that FIRE harbors pernicious motivations that you simply cannot be objective, do you really think you should be editing FIRE's Wikipedia page?

I'd be happy to talk to you, Simon DeDeo. I can be reached at greg@thefire.org at any time. Meanwhile, please take another look at our cases and seriously consider the possibility that there might be a real and on-going problem on campus-and that students and faculty members from all points on the ideological spectrum need a group like FIRE to help them.

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by: glukianoff @ Mon Mar 24, 2008 at 23:28:43 PM UTC