FIRE is the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a campus free speech watchdog group.
From the Fox News web site:
Also, DePaul University prevents its on-campus group College Republicans from posting fliers protesting a visit by controversial professor Ward Churchill. Can they really do that? We’ll debate it.
Related to that story, is a press release from FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
From that release:
Under pressure from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), DePaul University has lifted a vague ban on “propaganda” that it used last fall to silence student protest of a campus appearance by controversial University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill.
“The revocation of the ‘propaganda’ ban is a step in the right direction for DePaul,” said FIRE Interim President Greg Lukianoff. “Yet DePaul’s disregard for freedom of expression reaches far beyond this one policy. The true test will be how DePaul reacts the next time students attempt to express dissenting opinions.”
DePaul’s College Republicans (CRs) suffered censorship last October after they opposed the university’s invitation to Churchill to lecture and lead a student workshop. To protest the events, the CRs produced flyers recounting some of Churchill’s controversial remarks. When the CRs submitted the flyers for approval, administrators responded first by misleading the CRs into thinking that the event was cancelled, then by invoking a policy that stated, “We do not approve propaganda.” The students, who did not believe that quoting a person’s own remarks was “propaganda,” posted the flyers anyway, leading to a formal warning from DePaul and a surreptitious addition to the policy saying that posters could be used only to promote events, not to protest them.
The CRs contacted FIRE, and on November 23, 2005, FIRE wrote a letter to DePaul President Dennis Holtschneider, pointing out that the vague and constantly shifting ban on "propaganda" gave administrators the unfettered power to censor student speech at will. Holtschneider replied on December 12, incorrectly asserting that no DePaul policies mentioned the word “propaganda” and stating that the policy prohibits the denunciation of any speaker appearing at DePaul. Yet FIRE’s research shows that not only did the “propaganda” ban exist, but the stipulation that flyers may only “promote events” appeared in the policy after the College Republicans’ flyers were denied approval.
FIRE views the above move as an encouraging sign, but this does not leave Chicago's DePaul University with a clean bill of health. It is deeply troubled by DePaul's conduct in the suspension of Thomas Klocek.
For more information on the Klocek case, click here.
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