Alan Charles Kors

Alan Charles Kors (Ph.D., Harvard University) has been teaching European intellectual history since 1968 at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is professor of history. He has been named a Phi Beta Kappa Scholar for 2003-2004 and will be traveling to a variety of campuses in that capacity.

Kors was confirmed by the United States Senate in 1992 to the Council of the National Endowment of the Humanities, serving in that capacity for six years. He is currently on the Board of Governors of The Historical Society. He has published extensively on the conceptual revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and he was editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (four volumes, 2002). In addition, he has recorded two courses for The Teaching Company, one on "The Birth of the Modern Mind" and one on "Voltaire: The Mind of the Enlightenment."

Kors has actively defended academic freedom since his arrival at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1993, Kors defended Eden Jacobowitz in the infamous "water buffalo case," which led to the writing of The Shadow University (1998) and to the foundation of FIRE. Kors has been recognized for his commitment to liberty and fairness by his colleagues, who have elected him four times to University and School Committees on Academic Freedom and Responsibility. He has also received two awards—the Lindback Foundation Award and the Ira Abrams Memorial Award—for distinguished college teaching and numerous awards for his defense of academic freedom. Kors is a contributing editor of Reason magazine, and he has written and lectured widely on the assault upon liberty and freedom of conscience on America’s campuses.

Kors coauthored The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses with Harvey Silverglate in 1998. He and Silverglate cofounded FIRE in the following year. Kors has overseen the direction and expansion of FIRE’s efforts at colleges and universities nationwide.

Harvey A. Silverglate

Harvey A. Silverglate was born in Brooklyn, NY, on Mother's Day -- May 10, 1942. He was educated at Bogota (NJ) High School (Class of 1960), Princeton University (Class of 1964, cum laude in History), and Harvard Law School (Class of 1967).

Silverglate, counsel to the Boston law firm of Good & Cormier, specializes in criminal defense, civil liberties, and academic freedom and student rights law, and has represented students in trouble since he served as trial counsel for the students charged with taking over University Hall at Harvard during an anti-war demonstration in 1969. He has taught at Cambridge Rindge & Latin School (a public secondary school in Massachusetts), University of Massachusetts College III (in Boston), and Harvard Law school. He is a long-time member of the American Civil Liberties Union and has served the Massachusetts state affiliate as a member of its Board of Directors for some three decades, serving two terms as its Board president. During his presidency, he initiated the Bill of Rights Education Project focusing on secondary schools, and a Campus Chapters project resulting in the formation of ACLU-related student groups on college campuses around the state. He is a long-time affiliate of Dunster House at Harvard College, where he conducts "law tables" with undergraduates. His law practice has ranged widely and has included drug prosecutions, draft and riot cases in the 60s and 70s, bank and securities fraud, bribery and extortion, espionage, tax evasion, police misconduct, murder and manslaughter, habeas corpus proceedings, money laundering, and desertion (tried at a court martial).

Silverglate has for nearly three decades been the criminal law and civil liberties columnist for The Boston Phoenix, a weekly, and, more recently, did a stint as the regular bi-monthly civil liberties columnist for The National Law Journal, where he still occasionally contributes commentaries. His column appeared as well in Inc. Technology magazine. His op-ed pieces have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and elsewhere. His articles and book reviews have been published in the Harvard Law Review, The New York Times Book Review, Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, The Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, Media Studies Journal, Cato Journal, The Wilson Quarterly, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the now defunct Civil Liberties Review, a number of other professional journals, Reason magazine, and elsewhere. He has contributed to books on political repression (1970) and the criminalization of drugs (1978). The Shadow University (with Alan Charles Kors) is his first full-length published book; published by The Free Press in October 1998, it is now available in paperback under the Harper/Perennial imprint from HarperCollins (published October 1999).

In addition, Silverglate is co-founder (with Prof. Kors) of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Inc. (F.I.R.E.), a non-profit, tax-exempt (under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code) foundation dedicated to preserving and enlarging academic freedom, due process, freedom of speech, and freedom of conscience on American college campuses. FIRE, which commenced operations in September 1999 with a main office in Philadelphia and a satellite office in Boston, has a paid staff, although its founders/directors serve pro bono. It fills an important role as a hands-on organization willing and able to give practical advice and other assistance to students and faculty members who find their liberties and consciences under attack by administrators wielding the fashionable politically-acceptable and officially-imposed ideologies of the day, from whatever end of the political spectrum those ideologies derive.

Further, Silverglate was appointed in the Spring of 2000 as Chair of the independent Privacy Board of Predictive Networks, Inc., of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in which position he served until the end of 2002. Earlier, he served as the first litigation counsel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (“EFF”), a leading civil liberties organization fighting for freedom in cyberspace.

Silverglate lives with his wife, the portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their son, Isaac, a recent graduate of Columbia University (Class of 2000), lives and works in Manhattan.