I was in college during the tumultuous Vietnam years. Arguments about the war, Nixon, American foreign policy, and so on swirled about. The arguments were often heated — but it never occurred to any student that a good approach would be to go the administration and whine about “biased” speech.
Things are much different today. Many students have been conditioned to believe that the proper response to actions or ideas they don’t like is to report them to campus authorities for investigation. And numerous colleges and universities encourage such childishness by setting up “bias response teams” (BRT) and telling students to make use of them.
That great watchdog organization the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE — the organization Betsy DeVos has been criticized for supporting) has recently released a report on the disturbing BRT phenomenon. I devote my latest Martin Center article to it.
FIRE has found that 232 American colleges and universities have set up BRTs, and it appears that this foul idea is spreading. I find that easy to believe, since many college administrators are eager to appease their vociferous cohort of “progressive” students and this helps.
Predictably, speech that is protected by the First Amendment often winds up being reported as “bias” and then “investigated” by panels that usually are composed only of students. No adult supervision here. We find that it isn’t just leftist students who decide to file “bias reports,” but that conservative ones have also been known to do that. For example, during last year’s presidential campaign, anti-Trump students reported as “hate speech” pro-trump messages, while pro-Trump students filed complaints against “Trump is a Racist” signs.
BRTs probably have some “chilling” effect on free speech, especially on campuses where it comes to be known that talk someone finds offensive is apt to land you in front of the inquisition. Students and professors will start avoiding controversial topics, or treading on eggshells if they can’t. Worse than that, in my view, they engender a childish mindset among the students — one that says it’s better to gripe about speech you don’t like than to marshal arguments against it.
One sign that “progressivism” is receding will be when our colleges and universities begin to abolish their Bias Response Teams.