It’s confirmed: “Woke” students are abusing university bias reporting systems. These systems are intended to track genuine hate crimes and bias. But public records requests published by education watchdog the College Fix show that students can find offense in just about anything.
Take the University of Utah’s bias system, for example. In one case, a student complained that her professor was assigning too many texts written by male economists, seeing this as sexism. “[A]t what cost do we continue to plant the seed of sexism in the minds of individuals?” the student wrote in her complaint. She supposedly “began to fear the readings” and “could not even finish one assigned reading due to its clear sexist message.”
Another complaint came from an African American student upset that a student employee greeted him by asking, “Can we help you?” and appeared “visibly taken aback” when he walked into the office.
A third bizarre complaint came from a girl who overheard a student make a “rape joke” to his friend about forcing a computer charger to fit into his computer. Even if it’s distasteful, it’s not a hate crime or an instance of institutional bias.
Other colleges are experiencing the same flood of superfluous complaints.
At the State University of New York at Binghamton, the school’s bias reporting website received a complaint from a motorist who reported a bad driver whose car had a SUNY Binghamton license plate. It’s unknown if the driver was actually a student.
Meanwhile at Virginia Tech, students reported penis drawings that were scrawled across campus.
And as I’ve previously covered, on the campus of Michigan State University a student filed a bias complaint against his roommate because he was watching a YouTube video of conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. Shockingly, administrators granted a room change request for this petty complaint. It’s not surprising that some organizations are sounding the alarm on such hysteria.
This all goes to show how bias reporting systems encourage students to be outraged over just about anything. Even offensive speech is covered by the First Amendment, yet these Orwellian systems encourage students to spy and tattle on each other.
“Inviting students to report a broad range of speech to campus authorities casts a chilling pall over free speech rights,” Adam Steinbaugh, senior program officer at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, once said in regard to bias response teams.
Yet on the other hand, Kevin Kruger, the president of NASPA: Student Affairs Professionals in Higher Education, has said that bias response programs are intended to make “a clear distinction between free speech and actual behavior that causes physical harm or speech that is harassment or threatening.”
However, the nature of these reports shows that students don’t understand the difference between legally protected speech and true instances of bias. These programs only chill speech on campus, and do students a disservice.
Alexander James is a contributor to Red Alert Politics.
