FIRE’s Guides to Student Rights on Campus has been one of FIRE’s most successful programs to date. The program was founded on the belief that liberty is essential to human dignity and that to sustain that liberty, citizens of a free society must be educated in their freedom and be able to debate and resolve their differences peacefully, without resorting to repression. The Guides, little “seeds of liberty” in the words of FIRE co-founder Alan Charles Kors, are intended to challenge the institutional censorship that pervades the university establishment, the greatest present threat to the preservation of liberty.
The Guides Program consists of a series of five slim volumes covering a broad range of essential constitutional freedoms:
- FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus
- FIRE’s Guide to First-Year Orientation and Thought Reform on Campus
- FIRE’s Guide to Religious Liberty on Campus
- FIRE’s Guide to Due Process and Fair Procedure on Campus
- FIRE’s Guide to Student Fees, Funding, and Legal Equality on Campus
All of the Guides are available for free download on FIRE’s website. Thousands of students and faculty have already taken advantage of this service. From January to October of 2006 there were 9480 downloads of the Free Speech Guide, 1435 downloads of the Religious Liberty Guide, 3866 downloads of the Due Process Guide, 1540 downloads of the Student Fees Guide, and 5421 downloads of the Thought Reform Guide. That does not include downloads of only particular sections and chapters of the Guides.
Hard copies of the Guides are also available free to students upon request. From January to October of 2006, FIRE distributed a total of 10,021 hard copies of the Guides: 4120 copies of the Free Speech Guide, 1997 copies of the Religious Liberty Guide, 1566 copies of the Due Process Guide, 928 copies of the Student Fees Guide, and 1410 copies of the Thought Reform Guide.
We encourage students and faculty to take advantage of this resource and continue to spread the “seeds of liberty.”