About the ADF Center for Academic Freedom
The Alliance Defense Fund
The Alliance Defense Fund is a legal alliance defending the right to hear and speak the Truth through strategy, training, funding and litigation. ADF strives to see an America whose laws affirm religious liberty, protect life from conception to natural death, defend the family, and preserve marriage as being between one man and one woman. Since its launch in 1994, ADF and its allies has attained a win ratio of over 75%...achieving victory in hundreds of critical, precedent-setting cases at both state and federal levels.
The ADF Center for Academic Freedom
The Alliance Defense Fund launched the ADF Center for Academic Freedom in January 2006, and appointed David French Senior Counsel and Director to spearhead its efforts. The ADF Center for Academic Freedom defends the constitutional rights of students, student groups, faculty, and staff who wish to engage in free speech, expression, and association, as well as the free exercise of religion on campus. Its team of experienced constitutional litigators works to ensure that Christian students, faculty, and staff have the same rights as other individuals.
One of the greatest threats to America’s future comes from a politically correct agenda in universities, where students and faculty are often told not to reason on their own, but to conform to campus orthodoxy or risk punishment. The ADF Center for Academic Freedom does not seek to replace one form of indoctrination with another, but instead strives to restore the open exchange of ideas at America’s public universities.
Faith has a voice, and the ADF Center for Academic Freedom exists to protect it.
About David French, Esq.
David French serves as senior counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund and as the director of the ADF Center for Academic Freedom, located in Columbia, Tennessee.
Since joining ADF in 2006, French has led the ADF Center for Academic Freedom’s efforts to restore the marketplace of ideas to university campuses, concentrating his litigation on religious freedom issues. He has litigated numerous high-profile university cases, including challenges to speech codes and coerced indoctrination on campus. Under French, ADF attorneys have won numerous groundbreaking victories in federal court, including significant victories over the California State University System, Temple University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Wisconsin. He is also a captain in the United States Army Reserve. During 2007 and 2008, French served a one-year tour of duty in Iraq’s Diyala Province, where he was the Squadron Judge Advocate for the 2d Squadron, 3d Armored Cavalry Regiment. He was awarded the Bronze Star for meritorious service in combat operations at the conclusion of his tour. French returned from Iraq in late 2008 and resumed his active role as director of CAF.
Practicing law since 1994, French is admitted to the bar in Tennessee and Kentucky. He graduated with honors from Harvard Law School, where he earned a J.D. in 1994. French taught at Cornell Law School and was a partner in the Kentucky law firm of Greenebaum, Doll & McDonald. Prior to joining ADF, he served as president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). French received a B.A. in Political Science from Lipscomb University in 1991.
French is the author of A Season for Justice: Defending the Rights of the Christian Home, Church, and School (2002); FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus (2004); FIRE’s Guide to Religious Liberty on Campus (2002); and the novel South Pacific Journal (1999). He has written numerous op-ed pieces and other articles for publications including the New York Post, New York Daily News, and Philadelphia Daily News. He has also been a guest on numerous radio programs and has appeared on ABC World News Tonight, The Fox Report with Shepard Smith, Special Report with Brit Hume, The O’Reilly Factor with Bill O’Reilly, and many other cable and broadcast news shows. French is a regular contributor to National Review Online’s Phi Beta Cons blog.
To defend students’ and professors’ most basic liberties, ADF’s Center for Academic Freedom combines a substantial and distinguished team of in-house attorneys with ADF’s 1200 member allied attorney network to allow it to defend liberty at every university in every jurisdiction in the country. Center for Academic Freedom attorneys bring unmatched expertise to the task, with attorneys who have argued before the Supreme Court, authored books endorsed across the political spectrum, won precedent-setting cases in federal courts across the country, and defended liberty in the court of public opinion with countless appearances on television, radio, and in print. From the O’Reilly Factor, to ABC World News Tonight, to Newsweek, the New York Times, and NPR, Center for Academic Freedom attorneys have been informing America about the plight of Christians on campus and advocating the return of a true “marketplace of ideas.”
