FW: FIRE sets up new center

[Eugene Volokh]

-----Original Message-----

   Wednesday, August 22, 2001

   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. . . .

   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. . . .
   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. . . .