Religious-Freedom Center Set Up to Focus on Discrimination on Campuses By ELIZABETH F. FARRELL
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which has quickly built a reputation for defending students and professors who feel they've been wronged by their colleges, is establishing a new center that focuses on charges of religious discrimination on campuses.
Officials at the nonprofit foundation in Philadelphia, which was established 20 months ago and has represented faculty members and students on a range of free-speech and other issues, said the Center for Religious Freedom on Campus will work to ensure that students and professors have an independent resource to turn to when they feel their universities are discriminating against their religious practices or organizations.
According to Thor L. Halvorssen, FIRE's executive director, the center, which is financed largely with funds from the John Marks Templeton Foundation and Mr. Templeton himself, was established because of an increasing number of religion-based complaints from students and professors.
"Colleges are the only places where the right to associate freely is regularly curtailed," said Mr. Halvorssen. "The hardest thing to be on a campus today is a devoutly religious person. ... It's viewed as morally right to violate the rights of these individuals."
Among the cases that FIRE has taken on already was a defense of the Tufts Christian Fellowship, which was denied campus financial support after it refused to appoint one of its members to a leadership position because she did not believe that homosexuality was a sin. (See an article from The Chronicle, November 3, 2000.)
FIRE officials say the new center will amount to a "rapid response network" consisting of a hot line for students and professors to register their complaints and a growing network of lawyers who can advise students and professors on the best way to approach their administration with their concerns.
"We aim to have a quick turnaround in most cases," said Mr. Halvorssen. "We aren't aiming to bring litigation, but rather to help the administrators understand what they can do to rectify these situations."
FIRE has also hired an additional staff member, Laura Kulp, to serve as director of the center. Ms. Kulp said the center's first major project this year will be to publish and widely distribute a guide that informs students and professors of their rights at both public and private universities.
The guide will explain constitutional principles such as the establishment clause of the First Amendment and how they pertain to religious rights at universities.
Mr. Halvorssen attributed what FIRE sees as a hostility to religion on campuses to thephilosophy of the many college administrators who came of age in the 1960s.
"The generation that believed in freedom for everybody, but didn't like established religion, is now the powers-that-be on campus," said Mr. Halvorssen. "They have a knee-jerk reaction to these groups. We're talking about a generational swindle of epic proportions."