Lesson 2: Promote and preserve viewpoint diversity

How does FIRE stay nonpartisan? Part 2

The first post in this series, Lesson 1: Be willing to drive the bus into a wall, outperformed my expectations. It originated in response to a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, in which Ryan Enos noted FIRE’s history of principled nonpartisan free speech advocacy and wrote, “We should ask what accounts for their admirable consistency.”

I honestly thought it would be most interesting to FIRE staff and maybe some of our most hardcore supporters, but it ended up reaching a lot more folks than that.

To me this is further evidence that people are starved for trustworthy nonpartisan institutions in this era of dishonest hyperpartisanship — which leads me to the second lesson I want to share with you:

Make sure you have political diversity among your staff.

This principle has been baked into FIRE from the very beginning, and quite intentionally. Our organization was founded in 1999 by a right-leaning libertarian named Alan Charles Kors and a left-leaning libertarian named Harvey Silverglate. Kors is one of the world’s leading experts on the Enlightenment (specifically Voltaire), was a University of Pennsylvania professor, and an early voice against campus speech codes in the 1980s (which we’ll get to in a bit). Silverglate, my mentor, is a defense attorney and journalist who ran in the same circles as Beat Generation giants like Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley — who also happens to be, not totally coincidentally, the father of FIRE’s wonderful (and handsome) legal director Will Creeley — among others.

The early FIRE leadership team consisted of a conservative executive director along with yours truly (who at the time was an almost embarrassingly stereotypical Bay Area lefty) as legal director. The team also included a conservative Catholic, a hardcore Marxist, an Evangelical Christian, and a run-of-the-mill lefty. We were a small team back then. After work we used to go out and drink, smoke cigarettes, dance, and argue about the existence of God. 

And let me tell you something: As a too often self-superior atheist, I was very quickly humbled by the fact that probably the most open-minded person on staff at the time was the Evangelical Christian. She turned out to be the most interested in — and not the least bit offended by — my views on religion, which was a profound wake-up call for me. It disabused me of many of the unfair ideas I had absorbed about Christians during my days living in the Bay Area.

The FIRE team is now about 120 strong, and I often get positive notes from staff about how ideologically and politically diverse we actually are. We’re made up of full-blown anarcho-capitalists, socialists, libertarians, liberals, conservatives, atheists, the devoutly religious, and everything in between. FIRE Senior Writer/Editor and ERI contributor

Angel Eduardo

frequently mentions that he’s never worked in a place where people are so varied in their politics and ideology but can still get along so well. He chalks it up to the fact that to work at FIRE, you only need to agree on one thing: free expression. With that as the uniting principle and primary focus, you can differ on pretty much anything else and still work together.

Still, despite our best efforts — and despite constant aspersions and stereotypes to the contrary — the FIRE staff has always leaned more to the left overall. That’s even more true today. But we also have a great many staff, including myself, who genuinely and loudly express concern if we don't have enough political diversity in the room when we're making decisions. 

This may seem like a no-brainer (and it should be!) but the fact is that it is vanishingly rare for a nonprofit to strive for actual political diversity. A lot of conservative organizations have decided to be explicitly conservative, and a lot of left-leaning organizations claiming to be nonpartisan clearly make no priority whatsoever of having actual political diversity in their staff.

But if an organization wants to avoid ideological drift, political diversity is a habit that simply must be part of its culture. We must always remain uncomfortable with the conclusion that a decision is right without testing it against the strongest counterargument we can find (as John Stuart Mill would recommend). 

FIRE intentionally sits with that discomfort, and that is something that I hope we hold onto forever. Unfortunately, there are far too many organizations out there that once championed and embodied principles like free speech and academic freedom, but now seem fiercely dedicated to undermining them — sometimes, explicitly so.

More on that soon.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

The fine people at Quillette recently put together this fantastic video, narrated by

Iona Italia

, based on my recent post responding to 12 bad anti-free speech arguments. The responses are already good, but they’re even better when you hear them in Iona’s lovely accent.