The Case Against Free Speech by P. E. Moskowitz

Author:P. E. Moskowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2019-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

Israel may be one of the most extreme cases of conservative funders and governments working in tandem to discourage speech and dissent on campuses, but the practice of using nonprofits with right-wing ties has become increasingly popular. Colleges are often seen as political bubbles, immune from the forces that affect politics everywhere else, but today college life and national politics are inextricable, largely thanks to the work of a few conservative billionaires.

The offices for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education are tucked away on the twelfth floor of a glass-and-concrete skyscraper across from the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. The organization has a relatively small national profile (for comparison, the ACLU is googled at an average rate roughly six times that of FIRE) and a relatively modest budget of $11 million, which supports about forty staffers.40 Yet it is one of the biggest influencers over speech on college campuses.

FIRE’s stated mission is to ensure that everyone on college campuses gets to speak their mind, regardless of their political background. And its employees do take on and publicize cases from across the political spectrum—for example, they’ve represented Students for Justice in Palestine. But a very large portion of FIRE’s money (representatives wouldn’t tell me exactly how much) comes from just a few donors: the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the giving arm of ultraconservative billionaire Charles Koch; the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, another conservative megadonor group; the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation (the charity of the family of the US Secretary of Education under Donald Trump); the Sarah Scaife Foundation (another big conservative donor); and two organizations called DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, which pool money from conservative donors and anonymize them—though several investigations have linked the two organizations back to many of the above donors, most prominently the Kochs.41

I interviewed two employees of FIRE in 2018: Samantha Harris, vice president for procedural advocacy, and Will Creeley, senior vice president of legal and public advocacy. Both told me that the money from their largely conservative donors in no way affected their work.

“I just think an objective look at our casework speaks for itself,” Creeley said. “We have nothing to hide.”

Both pointed to the wide variety of cases they’d taken on, from supporting radical rapper and moviemaker Boots Riley’s trips to college campuses to advocating for Students for Bernie at Georgetown Law, as proof of their apolitical nature.

“But when it’s Milo Yiannopoulos coming to Berkeley, that’s what generates all the headlines,” Creeley said. “I started a joke like, ‘Campus free speech is a full employment plan for pundits.’”

FIRE does get a lot of flak from progressives over its funders. It gets even more over its stance against parts of Title IX, the US law that is meant to protect women and minorities on college campuses from harassment, sexual and otherwise, which FIRE sees as a way to skirt legal due process.42

In fairness, I believed Creeley and Harris when they told me their donors don’t influence their cases. If FIRE was

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.