The ACRU Blog

John Armor will be talking about the latest ACLU, the Sex workers show on the William and Mary campus. He will be on with Chuck Baker on KKKK-AM in Longmont, CO on February 6, at 4:00pm EST.

UPDATE: John's interview has been cancelled. Hopefully John will be on again soon.

Over the last several years, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has conducted a thorough survey of campus speech codes at over 350 American colleges and universities and compiled the data in one location on FIRE's website, Spotlight: The Campus Freedom Resource. For each of these schools, FIRE provides a rating based on whether and to what extent its policies violate constitutional speech protections. A green-light rating indicates that a university's policies do not impinge on free expression, a yellow-light institution has policies that could excessively regulate or ban protected speech, and a red-light rating is given to institutions with at least one policy that clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the vast majority of colleges and universities receive a red-light rating. Spotlight's speech code ratings have been repeatedly cited in newspapers from the Wall Street Journal and USA Today to local and campus newspapers across the country.

In addition to FIRE's speech codes research, each school's Spotlight page has links to all case documents from FIRE's Individual Rights Defense Program, media coverage of FIRE's work at that school, and entries from FIRE's blog, The Torch, related to speech issues at that institution. It's a one-stop location for all things freedom-related on university campuses.

To help spread awareness of the free speech restrictions in place at many colleges and universities, FIRE has recently introduced the FIRE widget. Each widget is an attractive icon (look at the right side) that bloggers and others can put on their website to link to the Spotlight page of a school of their choice. It's an excellent way to highlight the violations of constitutional protections at your alma mater. If you send FIRE a link to your site with the widget posted on it, along with your mail address, FIRE will send you a free FIRE t-shirt.

To post a widget, follow these easy steps.

1. Visit thefire.org/spotlight and select your school by state, region, or simply by typing its name into the search box.

2. When your school's page comes up, look on the right sidebar to view the widget for that particular school. Below it is a box containing some text--select it all and copy it to the clipboard.

3. Go to your blog or website, and paste in the text wherever you want the widget to appear (it's made for a sidebar, but should work anywhere).

4. Send us a link to your site with the widget posted on it, as well as your mailing address.

Thanks to the American Civil Rights Union for the opportunity to blog about students' rights on American college and university campuses. I am especially pleased to be able to blog this week as we pass the two hundred twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Constitution of the United States. Below I quote a post from yesterday on The Torch, the blog of my employer, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), on Constitution Day, the rise of the Bill of Rights, and its significance to college students.

To secure liberty, the Framers had agreed to structural arrangements in the Constitution including checks and balances, separation of powers, and federalism. Their ideas came from a long and storied Western tradition with high points in four cities: Jerusalem , Athens , Rome , and London . To that esteemed list was now added a fifth: Philadelphia.

The American contribution to freedom was constitutionalism, the idea of, in Samuel Adams's words, a "fixed constitution." Without it, capricious leaders, like those in Parliament, could determine American lives from afar, without their consent and without limit. Liberty was defined as freedom from arbitrary rule. Enshrining such power in written form circumscribed the power of government officials and state actors and eliminated arbitrary decision making by requiring limited, defined, and legitimate methods through which the government could act.

Whatever the new Constitution's strengths, even the Federalists admitted that there were no guarantees for individual rights. Despite Alexander Hamilton's assurances that the structural arrangement was itself a bill of rights, the Framers parted ways in agreement on the Constitution with the understanding that they would later write and ratify what James Madison called a "parchment barrier" against tyranny in the form of the Bill of Rights. The first item in that bill of rights was an unequivocal promise of five freedoms or rights: religion, speech, press, assembly, and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

At risk of growing redundant, we again point out to FIRE readers that the abovementioned rights and protections are violated on a perpetual basis on college campuses. The vast majority of America 's colleges and universities ignore these fundamental rights in speech codes meticulously catalogued on FIRE's Spotlight. Barely a day passes that FIRE does not receive a case submission of yet another student rights violation at an American educational institution--despite higher education institutions being the most rhetorically committed to free expression and free inquiry.

So, on this day, as students across America are taught about the great freedoms they have inherited, raise your glass toward Philadelphia in celebration of the freedoms you enjoy and remember that FIRE is here at the birthplace of American liberty, making sure our country's college students will enjoy those freedoms into the future.