I'll be at FIRE's tenth anniversary celebration this evening in Philadelphia. The event is both encouraging and depressing at the same time--encouraging, because of all the good work FIRE has done, depressing because the state of the academy is such that an organization like FIRE is still very much needed.

A few of FIRE's recent cases: assisting a lawsuit against Troy University's speech code (which bans, among other items,"gossip"); publicizing a bizarre policy at Wisconsin-Eau Claire that prohibits dorm RA's from leading Bible study sessions in dorms on their free time; and exposing another abuse of dispositions theory, this time at Washington State, where the Dean of Education said that she didn't know if the dispositions criteria would disquality Justice Scalia from becoming a public school teacher because of his views on"diversity"-related issues.

Oscar Chamberlain - 11/8/2005

The UWEC policy about the RA's is too heavy handed. However, according to a colleague of mine, RA's are, technically speaking, never fully off duty within the dorm. If they are on premise and they learn of violations they are bound by their job to report them, whether or not their time clock is running at that moment. And they do actually have enough power to make someone's life uncomfortable.

Having said that, there has to be a better way to deal with the faint possibility of abuse, and hopefully the administration will develop it. {The current acting Chancellor is extremely competent, so I suspect something better will emerge) In any event, the RA's-should't-preach-in-the-dorm rule is not quite the insane thing it seemed (even to me) on first glance.