A Critic of Universities Is Rallying to Defend Them in the Trump Era

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an increasingly prominent free-speech organization, has long been known as a fierce opponent of campus political correctness. Since its founding in 1999, it has been celebrated for defending conservatives and other dissidents from the prevailing liberal culture at America’s universities.

So when the group announced a lawsuit this month challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to deport noncitizen students who expressed pro-Palestinian views, some admirers were dismayed.

“In my lifetime,” one X user, Robert McLaws, wrote, “you went from supporting Republicans who were persecuted in colleges to supporting terrorist sympathizers who are guests of this country and whose presence is not constitutionally protected. Shameful.”

These are topsy-turvy times for the cause of free speech. In recent years, the American Civil Liberties Union has faced internal debates over when to take cases that conflict with its increasing progressive advocacy on issues like immigration, racial justice and transgender rights. Now, many conservatives who rallied under the banner of free speech are championing efforts that crack down on it.

Greg Lukianoff, FIRE’s president and chief executive, said that its recent advocacy had cost it support from some former donors. But the organization, he said, is simply sticking to its mission: a staunch, nonpartisan defense of free speech for all, let the political chips fall where they may.

“People care about freedom of speech when it’s their side under the gun,” he said. “They don’t care as much when it’s anyone else.”

Still, some free expression advocates who admire FIRE’s longstanding defense of all comers detect a shift in its broader posture.

“FIRE now sees that, often in the name of countering what it sees as left-wing overreach, the right is resorting to out-and-out censorship in the form of restrictive laws and arrests that flagrantly violate free speech rights,” said Suzanne Nossel, a former president and chief executive of PEN America.

“This has made for some strange bedfellows for FIRE,” Nossel continued, “but they have not flinched.”

Fighting Campus Orthodoxy

In today’s intense debates about free speech and higher education, FIRE can seem ubiquitous. According to its most recent annual report, its views on the controversies that have rocked campuses since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel have appeared in “virtually every major national outlet,” including 538 articles about campus protests relating to the Gaza war.

Its work also extends beyond universities. Late last year, FIRE filed a brief opposing a nationwide ban on TikTok. And it is also defending Ann Selzer, the Iowa pollster being sued by President Trump for publishing a pre-election poll that showed him losing the state.

FIRE, based in Philadelphia, has an annual budget of about $32.3 million and a staff of 120, including a litigation department that will soon number 20 lawyers. But it files relatively few lawsuits, instead often relying on strongly worded letters, campus campaigns and media outreach.

“FIRE’s real innovation was realizing you could fight a lot more cases in public opinion than in court of law,” Lukianoff said in a video interview from its satellite office in Washington. “It’s much cheaper and faster.”

Since its founding, FIRE has played a major role in shaping public perception of a pervasive campus free speech crisis. But if there’s a year zero for FIRE’s current prominence, it was 2015.

That August, Lukianoff and the psychologist Jonathan Haidt published a widely discussed cover story in The Atlantic, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” which argued that a culture of “safe spaces” had left young people fragile, anxious and unprepared for civic life.

Three months later a controversy over insensitive Halloween costumes erupted at Yale. Lukianoff, who was visiting campus, recorded a cellphone video of a student shouting at Nicholas Christakis, a sociology professor and the head of her residential college, accusing him of indifference to minority students’ concerns and calling him “disgusting.”

Lukianoff’s video of the “shrieking girl,” as conservative media outlets dubbed her, became Exhibit A in a growing national debate. It was posted on FIRE’s website, where it amassed 1.8 million views and inspired countless opinion articles about campus snowflakes run amok.

Since then, FIRE’s influence has soared. Donations from individuals and foundations grew from $7.2 million in 2015 to $36.5 million in the fiscal year just ended. But that episode left lingering hard feelings at Yale and other campuses, where some still resent what they see as a willingness to demonize progressive students who, in the end, were exercising free speech.

Jason Stanley, a philosopher who recently left Yale for the University of Toronto, said FIRE helped create a road map for the Trump administration’s current campaign against higher education. “The moral panic about leftism on universities is largely their fault,” he said.

But Stanley also said he respected FIRE’s recent principled defense of pro-Palestinian protesters. Others also see the group’s stock rising among skeptics.

“I increasingly see liberal and left faculty citing FIRE to defend themselves and to articulate critiques of the Trump administration,” said Jeffrey Sachs, a political scientist at Acadia University in Canada who writes frequently about free speech issues. “You would not have seen that a few years ago.”

In 2022, FIRE changed its name to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education as part of a $75 million expansion plan. The group has branched out to take on threats to free expression across American society, but campus advocacy remains its bread and butter.

Lindsie Rank, its director of campus rights advocacy, said the group gets about 1,500 case inquiries a year and ends up helping with about 400 of them in some way. According to FIRE, 60 percent of the cases it intervened in last year involved people threatened by censorship attempts that came from someone to their right politically.

Rank, who describes herself as “a very progressive Democrat,” said she was encountering the perception of FIRE as right wing less and less. In reality, she said, the staff has a wide range of political views.

“It allows us to workshop our positions in a way that keeps us intellectually honest,” she said. “Every position we come out with has come through that gauntlet.”

Told You So?

Will Creeley, FIRE’s legal director, started 20 years ago as an intern. In an interview, he cited two house rules: Never comment on the merits of the speech it is defending, however odious. And never criticize other nonprofits.

But some at FIRE have not been shy about mixing it up with some traditional defenders of faculty rights and academic freedom whom they see as compromised by left-wing bias.

Last November, two days after the presidential election, Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors, a faculty rights group with about 50,000 members across the country, issued a statement calling the results “disappointing.” He urged resolve against what he predicted would be escalating attacks on higher education from the incoming Trump administration.

Alex Morey, who was FIRE’s vice president of campus advocacy at the time, blasted the faculty group in a post on X, accusing the it of primarily defending those with “ultra progressive views.” That escalated into an old-fashioned flame war, with the A.A.U.P. denouncing FIRE as having “aligned itself with far right assaults on higher education.” Lukianoff responded with a 5,300-word Substack post calling the A.A.U.P. lying hypocrites who had “helped plunge academia into crisis.”

In a recent interview, Wolfson, an anthropologist at Rutgers, said he respects FIRE’s strong advocacy for the speech rights of campus protesters. But he rejects the idea that he was wrong to comment on the election.

Lukianoff chuckled at the mention of the dust-up. “Everything I said in that article still stands,” he said. “It’s not FIRE’s institutional position, but it’s certainly mine.”

Far from being a chastening moment for FIRE, Lukianoff said the Trump administration’s current “war” on Harvard and other elite universities has vindicated its critique.

“If they’d listened to us 15 years ago, none of this would be happening,” Lukianoff said.

Defending ‘Abysmal’ Harvard

These days, FIRE is often aligned with the A.A.U.P., which has filed six legal challenges to the Trump administration. Still, it has taken pains to preserve its pugnacious identity.

Before filing its brief supporting Harvard’s suit against the Trump administration, FIRE considered joining one from the A.C.L.U., the libertarian Cato Institute, the conservative Rutherford Institute and other groups across the ideological spectrum.

But FIRE ultimately filed a separate brief, which highlighted its record as a leading critic of Harvard and what it has called the university’s “abysmal” record on free speech.

“We thought a judge might find that interesting, that FIRE, which has ranked Harvard dead last in its speech rankings, is nevertheless defending it,” Creeley said.

FIRE’s college free speech rankings, which it began issuing in 2020, are one of its most attention-grabbing efforts. In 2023, following the congressional antisemitism hearings, Harvard’s last-place finish was cited frequently in news coverage of the disastrous testimony by Claudine Gay, Harvard’s president, and her resignation a month later.

But the rankings have also come under growing criticism for what some say is arbitrary and misleading methodology. Some question what they see as FIRE’s gentle treatment of religious schools. Others have asked why some public universities in Florida get sterling ratings, despite adherence to that state’s Stop WOKE Act — a law FIRE itself has vigorously opposed.

FIRE has stood by its rankings, which have gotten shout-outs from prominent figures like Elon Musk and Bill Maher. Last December, The Wall Street Journal reported that Jay Bhattacharya, then the nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health, was considering using them when evaluating research grant applications. (He was later confirmed for that role.)

Three months after that report, FIRE issued a statement calling Bhattacharya’s reputed interest in the rankings “heartening.” But the organization said the rankings, which are based largely on student surveys, were not appropriate for that use. (Two days later, the Trump administration announced it was canceling $400 million in grants to Columbia, including $250 million from the N.I.H. FIRE criticized the cuts as “unlawful and unconstitutional.”)

Creeley, when asked what criticisms of FIRE he took most seriously, brought up the rankings. He said they were a valid “snapshot” of student experience, but said it had been “galling” to see them weaponized by Republican lawmakers at the 2023 antisemitism hearings.

“Those hearings were disastrous for academic freedom and represented the start of federal intrusion into the academy that continues today,” he said.

Earlier this month, it was reported that Harvard and the Trump administration were nearing a $500 million settlement. But however that case ends, the free speech battles will continue — probably forever.

“People are always going to get mad at people with different views and try to use power to shut them up,” Creeley said. “That’s just the way of it.”