Bias response teams keep folding to pressure from sensitive students, and they do it by stifling college discussion and debate as incidents from the University of Northern Colorado show.
Heat Street received some of the complaints made to UNC’s Bias Response Team and highlighted a professor who asked his students to read Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s “The Coddling of the American Mind” for The Atlantic.
He asked his students to come up with difficult topics and outlined competing positions on them. Despite not expressing any personal views, a student still complained that the professor referenced the opinion that “transgender is not a real thing, and no one can truly feel like they are born in the wrong body.”
The student, “who truly identifies as a transwomen [sic]… was very offended and hurt by this.”
The BRT met with the professor and “advised him not to revisit transgender issues in his classroom if possible to avoid the students expressed concerns.” The team also “told him to avoid stating opinions (his or theirs) on the topic as he had previously when working from the Atlantic article.”
Another professor chose positions on homosexuality and religion to debate. “Specifically there were two topics of debate that triggered them and personally felt like an attack on their identity,” the BRT said.
A student complained that “other students are required to watch the in-class debate and hear both arguments presented” and wrote that:
The team found that the incident “did not reach a level of discrimination,” but had the professor meet with the student to “have a conversation… [and] listen to his perspective, share the impact created for the student and dialogue about options to strengthen his teaching.”
Someone with the team wanted to know “the outcome of your time together … so I can document and share with the student that outreach was completed.”
“If even challenging a student’s views with a hypothetical opposing opinion is now off-limits, then truly nothing is sacred,” FIRE’s Ari Cohn wrote in an email to Heat Street, with original emphasis. “If professors are forced to modify their teaching styles to avoid such exercises, not only does it infringe on their academic freedom rights, but it does a tremendous disservice to students’ intellectual development.”
UNC is not the only school to have its BRT exposed for operating as the campus speech police. It’s likely that so many ridiculous incidents occur because UNC describes bias as “any behavior.”
