A group of Stanford University professors are pushing to end a system that allows students to anonymously report their peers for discrimination or bias.
The inciting incident was a “Protected Identity Harm” report filed to Stanford last month against a student who was photographed reading Mein Kampf. This reporting mechanism is Stanford’s system to address incidents where a student or community member feels attacked due to their identity.
Faculty members didn’t even know the system existed until a report was published by Stanford’s student newspaper, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“I was stunned,” explained Russell Berman, a professor of comparative literature, to the Journal. “It reminds me of McCarthyism.”
More than 75 professors have signed a petition to investigate freedom of speech and academic freedom at Stanford, with a view to ending the bias-reporting system.
When a report is filed, an inquiry is triggered within 48 hours. Both parties are contacted, and though participation in the inquiry is voluntary, professors argued it might not feel that way to accused students.
Though Stanford has responded that the student has not been punished, critics have argued that’s not good enough.
“We continue to call on Stanford to avoid launching a formal process that students could construe as some sort of investigation into protected speech, or that effectively requires them to admit their protected expression was problematic. Instead, Stanford can support students who are sensitive to speech without involving the speaker,” read a statement from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
The group added that not only does Stanford protect expressive rights, but it is also bound by California’s Leonard Law, which bars secular, private colleges from making or enforcing any rule that would subject a student to discipline for speech that would otherwise be protected off campus.
About half of campuses around the country have a bias-reporting system. As revealed by a 2022 report from Speech First, this is more than twice as many as five years ago. The new effort by Stanford professors is part of broader pushback that has seen several of these systems challenged in court.
The reports are stored in a platform operated by a third party called Maxient, an American company that has contracts with 1,300 schools. Most are institutions of higher education.
According to the company’s website, “Maxient is the software of choice for managing behavior records at colleges and universities across North America. Our centralized reporting and record keeping helps institutions connect the dots and prevent students from falling through the cracks.”
Stanford Business School professor Ivan Marinovic said the bias-reporting system reminded him of the way people would inform on one another in countries like the Soviet Union and East Germany.
“You’re basically going to be reporting people who you find offensive, right? According to your own ideology,” he told the Journal.