The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a favorite civil liberties group of many conservatives--which I agree has done some good work in the past--has released a year in review for 2007. This item is listed under "successes":

• Ending Brown University’s semester-long suspension of an evangelical student group, which was imposed on dubious grounds and without any explanation from Brown

Reading FIRE's reports on this episode, you come away with a narrative of Brown administrators, implicitly representing the rigid, intolerant liberal orthodoxy, squashing the religious freedom of the Reformed University Fellowship (RUF), a student evangelical group:

“Over the years FIRE has seen too many examples of administrators treating religious groups in an unjust manner. All students—religious or otherwise—deserve fair treatment,” FIRE Director of Legal and Public Advocacy Samantha Harris said. “We hope that Brown will take seriously its promise to revisit the suspension and reach a decision that shows respect for students of faith.”

Well, unlike the folks from FIRE, I was on campus when the RUF controversy went down; and I helped direct and edit the student paper's coverage of the incident. Without getting into the minutiae of this now year-old incident, I'll just note that the university's suspension of RUF was neither "imposed on dubious grounds" nor was it "without any explanation from Brown." This would be plain to anyone who read the Brown Daily Herald's roundup of the matter:

Associate Protestant University Chaplain Allen Callahan wrote in another Sept. 13 e-mail that RUF had not been a fully recognized student group since Fall 2005 due to its sponsor's failure to submit the required application for renewed Religious Life Affiliate status on time.

RUF's status was revoked on account of "irresponsibility," its "leadership's repeated and willful failure to be respectful and transparent in its dealings with OCRL" and "a leadership culture of contempt and dishonesty that has rendered all colleagial (sic) relations with (OCRL) impossible," Callahan wrote.

[RUF President Ethan] Wingfield ['07] requested further explanation of the group's suspension in a Sept. 15 e-mail to Callahan. Though Wingfield wrote that Callahan's concerns were not entirely "inaccurate," he said his attempts to rectify the situation in the past had been met with little response from OCRL. Wingfield acknowledged late paperwork, personal insults to Callahan for which he had apologized and an unintentional lack of transparency in dealings with OCRL that Wingfield wrote he had since attempted to correct. ...

Michael Chapman, vice president for public affairs and University relations, released a statement on Friday afternoon explaining that the group was suspended "due to its failure to abide by guidelines established for all religious groups on campus."

There were certainly missteps--among them a lack of clarity--by administrators in dealing with RUF, but to depict this as a grave civil libertarian issue in need of attention from an external national organization was and is absurd. It was a localized campus dispute in which the leaders of a student group were rude to administrators and didn't jump through the necessary hoops to meet on campus. As an outside group lacking familiarity with Brown's campus and without access to a range of student and administrative sources, FIRE probably couldn't have gotten the full story, even if it had tried. No matter; FIRE's distorted version of the story garnered coverage in the city newspaper, on the O'Reilly Factor, and around the Web. Best of all, FIRE got to add another bullet point to its growing register of (usually liberal) intolerance on campus. Makes one wonder, though, about the veracity of the rest of FIRE's work.