Students can continue to anonymously report on one another and their professors in order to rectify ‘bias.’
Students can continue to anonymously report on one another and their professors in order to rectify ‘bias.’
I n April 2019, two Arizona State University students in an undergraduate acting class began their final exam. The students, a male and a female, had rehearsed the scene they would be performing, but under the glare of the instructor, the male student decided to give his most intense performance to date.
“His physicality was more aggressive and there was a weird look in his eyes that I can’t really explain, but I felt threatened by it,” the female student said after the exam.
“I noticed a difference, but I thought it was a mutual agreement between the actors to take the scene in that direction,” said the professor, adding, “there was more tension, which made sense.”
Despite observing that it made sense, and acknowledging that “being uncomfortable at times is part of the normal acting process,” the faculty member noted that “feeling threatened is inexcusable.” Thus the teacher was “required to report it.” A complaint was filed against the male student to the campus “misconduct reporting system” for acting too intensely.
The Arizona State reporting system mirrored the “Bias Response Team” (BRT) framework now prevalent at hundreds of colleges and universities around the country. Under such systems, students are able — and often encouraged — to anonymously report each other to the university for any transgression that may make someone else on campus uncomfortable for any reason.
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court set aside a case brought by Speech First, a pro–First Amendment group that had challenged the “Bias Intervention and Response Team” at Virginia Tech. The Court dodged the challenge on the basis of mootness (with a dissent by Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel Alito), deciding that since Virginia Tech had made changes to the policy, the lawsuit was no longer applicable.
But the Court missed an opportunity to address the caustic BRT system that remains entrenched in colleges and universities around America, silencing students and professors who know they will pay a penalty if they say the wrong thing — “wrong” meaning going against or departing from campus orthodoxy. Campus community members are now aware that any utterance, either in a class or in a private conversation, that smacks of even the mildest dissent to someone who overhears it can get them hauled before a diversity panel or, in the case of professors, prompt a letter to be placed in their file. In some cases, these panels include members of the campus police force, quite literally making them, as Speech First argued, a “speech police.”
For three years, I investigated the Kafkaesque complaints students had filed against professors, students had filed against other students, and professors had filed against students. For instance, at the University of Utah, a female student filed a complaint against a professor who assigned too many economics books written by men, thus creating a “hostile learning environment.” When a University of Wisconsin-Madison sociology professor used the term “sacred cow” in class, he was hit by a complaint from an irony-deficient student claiming he was “condescending and racist” because, “in some cultures, cows are deemed to be sacred.”
“I would not feel safe around him, and feel that his confident lack of awareness perpetuates the unsafe white-centric and white-supremacist environment of UW-Madison,” the student added.
When students at Northern Iowa University held a “Peanut Appreciation Day” in the school’s dining hall, a bias complaint was filed because the event unfairly “targeted” peanut-allergy sufferers.
But perhaps the crowning achievement of the entire campus-offense industrial complex occurred when Oregon State University investigated its own Bias Response Team for bias, and found — you guessed it — bias. According to investigators, the school’s bias-reporting software was replete with “built-in biases, often against women and minorities,” adding that “such biases can impact how easily users can find critical information, perform work tasks, or even navigate web sites.”
But the real-world implications of BRTs are no laughing matter. They have turned campuses into surveillance states in which students anonymously inform on each other based on vague notions of offensive conduct or speech. At Virginia Tech, a “bias incident” includes “expressions against a person or group” based on “age, color, disability, gender, gender identity, gender expression, genetic information, national origin, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other basis protected by law.”
Such an incident was said to occur when a group of male students, after a midnight snowball fight on campus, were heard commenting on how unathletic some of the females throwing snowballs at them were. Another incident involved a student who created a meme suggesting that heterosexuals have poor taste in interior design.
And it included a Virginia Tech literary professor who failed to give a trigger warning to students before discussing a passage from a work of fiction describing a rape. A student reported the professor, saying she “couldn’t move” while experiencing “45 minutes of flashbacks and terror” — flashbacks to the nomination hearings of Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
The whole idea of BRTs cropped up after campus speech codes were struck down in the 1990s. Courts told universities that they could not enforce top-down speech codes, so they began outsourcing code enforcement to students, handing them the tools to shame each other into compliance. But the new system of having students narc on one another is even worse than the old speech-code system, as the potential violations aren’t codified or transparent. Nobody actually knows what the rules are: The violations live only in the hearts of the perpetually aggrieved who have access to a keyboard and an internet connection.
The schools argue that these systems are First Amendment–compliant because students aren’t actually punished for their speech. But of course, the process is the punishment. For public universities, the records of bias reports are available through Freedom of Information Act requests, and it is often easy to identify the students involved. Further, no student wants to get hauled in front of a diversity panel that can assess actual sanctions if a student refuses to comply with their reeducation plan. No professor wants to have to sit in front of an equity adviser and explain why he accidentally “misgendered” a student or allowed a student to say “only women have abortions.”
As Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson noted in dissenting from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals’ opinion upholding the Virginia Tech framework, if the Bias Intervention and Response Team (BIRT) “does not formally impose the particular penalty, its referrals to other offices nonetheless set the process in motion.”
“Once the full [BIRT] policy is exposed, stripped of fig-leaf assurances, its oppressive nature has nowhere to hide,” wrote Wilkinson, a Ronald Reagan appointee to the federal bench.
An alleged violation doesn’t even have to happen on university property or using school resources. At Iowa State University, a school alumnus called to report a car he had seen on a highway that had an Iowa State vanity license plate that said “BEARCST.” The former Cyclone thought that could only translate to “Be a Racist,” and felt “highly offended.”
It goes without saying that almost every one of the reports filed reflects a progressive position. At the University of Oregon, a professor was reported for defending Kavanaugh against claims of sexual assault during the future justice’s nomination hearings. (Kavanaugh did not join Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito in expressing a desire for the Court to take up the Virginia Tech case, so Brett Kavanaugh’s position may well be that a professor can be sanctioned for supporting Brett Kavanaugh.)
Most importantly, under these new techno-snooping regimes, students are taught that it is up to the university to protect them from hearing anything that might upset them. In the pre-internet era, speech was met with more speech; if a student heard something she didn’t like, she could confront the speaker and explain the error of that person’s ways. Now they are taught to cower anonymously behind a keyboard and pass their discomfort off to a diversity administrator.
Some argue that surveillance of students’ speech — in their dorm rooms, classrooms, and social-media feeds — doesn’t amount to “censorship.” That is abject nonsense. If a Bias Response Team isn’t meant to intimidate students into clamming up, for what purpose does it even exist? A BRT whose goal isn’t shutting down speech is like a sandwich shop that only serves soup. It isn’t delivering on its stated mission.
The silver lining of the Supreme Court’s decision to pass on the Virginia Tech case is that it forced the school to dismantle its Bias Response Team rather than defend its efforts to chill First Amendment–protected speech in court. But the issue remains at schools across the country, and the justices will likely have to tame the malignant diversity bureaucracy at some point.
So beware of federal judges like those on the Fourth Circuit who claim that Bias Response Teams “legitimately strive to promote civility and a sense of belonging among the student body.” For judges to say something so intensely bad actually does warrant a formal complaint.