The University of West Florida realized it had a problem.
It wasn’t the two nooses found hanging on the campus within the span of a week in the spring of 2012, although that certainly was a problem. It was at the forum held to discuss those incidents where Kevin Bailey, now vice president for student affairs, heard students recount other events that administrators knew nothing about.
“We heard from students that they had things happen in the residence halls or in class and didn’t know who to tell,” Mr. Bailey said. “So we created the bias-response team as a mechanism to funnel those complaints to a central source and then to disseminate them out to the appropriate parties.”
Advocates of bias-response teams say it’s important to give students who have experienced a bias incident an avenue for reporting it.
At their best, this is what bias-response teams aim to do, said Kevin Kruger, president of the student-affairs group Naspa. “The intent behind a bias-response team on campus,” he said, “is to create a pathway or an avenue for students who have experienced some kind of act on campus related to race or identity, and to have a way to report that.”
But at their worst, critics say, the teams stifle the free exchange of ideas necessary for a flourishing learning environment. That concern has become more prominent in recent months, and was exemplified by a flap at the University of Northern Colorado, where a complaint to a bias-response team resulted in an instructor’s being asked not to discuss transgender issues in his classroom. That revelation prompted a swirl of criticism, and the university decided to disband the team this month. Elsewhere, the University of Iowa in August announced it was ditching the idea of a bias-response team.
It’s a fine line to tread, said Samantha Harris, but not an impossible one. Ms. Harris is director of policy research at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, an advocacy group that defends free speech on college campuses.
“Our concern from a free-speech standpoint,” she said, “is that if you’re being dragged in for a meeting with college administrators because another student has said that he or she found your speech to be subjectively biased, you’re less likely to speak freely the next time around.”
The organization, known as FIRE, maintains a database that rates more than 400 colleges by their speech policies: a green light means the institution holds no policies that restrict free speech, yellow means that policies restrict a limited amount of free speech or have overly broad wording, and red means that at least one university policy substantially restricts speech.
There are universities with bias teams that earn a green-light rating, Ms. Harris said, “because they make it absolutely clear that protected speech is not going to form the basis, either for disciplinary action or official university investigation.”
Last December, in the wave of race-related protests that swept through college campuses, the Black Students of Emory issued a list of demands for policy changes they wanted to see at the university. Emory decided to address those demands one by one.
One of the grievances was that the bias-response team was failing to respond to student concerns swiftly and sufficiently, and a plea that complaints submitted to it “not be regarded for the sole purpose of data collection.” Instead, the students wrote, the team should work quickly to punish the person responsible for the bias incident.
Michael Shutt, the community director for Emory’s campus-life division, was put in charge of overhauling the team’s operation in order to help meet the students’ demands. He and members of the team began by improving the team’s response time, visibility on the campus, and transparency about who exactly handles bias reports.
Free-speech advocates worry that students who are hauled in for questioning on the basis of a bias complaint will be ‘less likely to speak freely the next time around.’
Freedom of speech is a serious concern at Emory, Mr. Shutt said. He is also charged with helping carry out the university’s open-expression policy. “As a private institution, we don’t need to have that commitment,” he said. “But we believe because of how we conceive higher education and the fact that we need to engage in contested conversation, open expression is critical for us to achieve our mission and our vision.”
Conflict is inevitable, he said, but that’s what the bias-response team is for. When it receives bias reports that are cases of open expression, team members discuss that openly with the reporting students.
Mr. Shutt and Mr. Bailey, of West Florida, both agreed that their institutions’ bias teams don’t discipline students; they just filter reports and offer support to students and faculty members.
Four years on from the forum that spurred the University of West Florida to form a bias-response team, Mr. Bailey said administrators are now reconsidering the team’s place at the university — in particular, whether the team is necessary at all.
That isn’t a response to the recent backlash against such teams, Mr. Bailey said. But West Florida’s team was created so students would know where to go when they were a victim of bias, he said, and now they do.
“There are other mechanisms in place now over the last four years that we didn’t have back in 2012,” Mr. Bailey said. The university now has a Title IX office and chief diversity officer. “We as a community have been much more intentional about getting the word out about how you report these sort of things,” he said, “and so that is a current conversation that we’re having on our campus.”
Clarification (9/30/2016, 1:36 p.m.): This article originally described imprecisely Mr. Shutt’s role. He helps carry out Emory’s open-expression policy but does not oversee it. The article has been updated to clarify this point.
