Foundation offers alums a way to support education without funding leftist ideologies

A specialty foundation, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, unabashedly supports, free speech, academic freedom, religious liberty, due process, press freedom, freedom of assembly, freedom of conscience and more, mostly in the campus community.

You know, those items that are listed as being protected mostly by the First Amendment.

And it acknowledges there are many individuals who are grateful for a college education and are willing to support academia financially.

But the problem is that many major universities these days impose wildly extreme speech codes, from campuses where “free speech” is restricted to small plots of out-of-the-way grass to sites where expressing an opinion will get you in trouble if it’s not what administrators believe.

So it is offering those education supporters a novel way to do that: support education. And yet not fund censorship of students or faculty.

By donating to the foundation.

The organization explained online, “When you donate to FIRE in lieu of your alma mater, we’ll let campus leadership know it’s their speech climate that cost them.”

The foundation continued, “It’s no secret that America’s colleges and universities struggle to uphold a foundational constitutional right: Freedom of expression. FIRE’s 2025 College Free Speech Rankings show that roughly a quarter of students think it is not clear that their administration protects free speech on campus. And if a free speech controversy were to erupt? More than a quarter believe their administration would be unlikely to defend a speaker’s right to express their views.”

Explaining institutions of higher education should be “bastions of free speech,” the report notes they are not.

Now it is those alums, “frequent recipients of university solicitation mailers with return envelopes postmarked for donations,” who are in a “unique position to speak with their wallets.”

“If you currently donate to a university that violates free speech … consider making a contribution to FIRE instead. When you do, we will notify the school that until it fully protects individual rights on campus, it will no longer earn your charitable support. Your identity and contribution will, of course, be kept strictly anonymous.”

It also is offering to assist schools where officials want to come into alignment with First Amendment principles.

The report cited a comment from an American University student, “Conservatives are slammed on this campus for simply just having opposing views. Disgraceful. A professor of mine nearly got fired for just expressing how he felt about topics but wasn’t being offensive.”

The foundation promised if the Constitution protects it, it will defend it.

“We defend speech based on principle, not viewpoint, because we don’t have an ideological axe to grind.”