Jeffrey Sachs: Everyone’s Wrong About FIRE: The organization to defend campus free speech has its problems, but they’re not what critics think.
Jeffrey Sachs wrote an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is blessed with terrible critics. As its public profile has risen sharply in recent years, so has the volume of criticism against it. Unfortunately, those critiques are almost uniformly bad.
With limited exceptions, critics of FIRE tend to rehearse the same tired arguments: that it receives right-wing money (so what?), often attacks the campus left (can you blame them?), and is uncharitable to college administrators (rightly so). If this was the best that FIRE’s critics could offer, the group would deserve our unqualified support.
But better criticisms do exist. Here are just a few, listed in order of least concerning to most.
Read the full article here.