In the fall of 2006, students living in Ohio State University’s dormitories received letters espousing racist ideas, including the belief that African-Americans are intellectually inferior to white people. Around the same time, about 100 miles away, students at the university’s Agricultural Technical Institute in Wooster created a Facebook group that promoted racist views about Oprah Winfrey.
The two incidents made Ohio State officials realize they needed a proactive means to prevent occurrences of offensive speech, said Todd Suddeth, director of the university’s multicultural center. So they created a bias assessment and response team, commonly known in the world of student affairs as a BART, to help monitor and confront issues of bias on the campus.
Such teams are becoming more common — the University of Iowa recently became the latest major university to say it would create one. And in an era when social-media platforms are abundant (Facebook, after all, was not yet a household name in 2006), the teams can give universities a way to stay ahead of the curve in handling hateful speech that violates university rules.
Kevin Kruger, president of the student-affairs group Naspa, said the bias teams had become an even greater asset to campuses amid protests of racist symbols and speech on campuses.
“If we’ve learned something this last year,” Mr. Kruger said, “it’s the importance of campuses being both proactive and appropriately reactive” so that students understand that people are paying attention and are prepared to act when needed.
What do bias-response teams do?
The teams serve two major functions: offering students a simple reporting tool when either they’re victims of bias or they notice it, and tracking reports so officials can spot problems that may be unfolding on a campus.
“We want to know the pulse of the campus,” said Jeff Knapp, who works in the counseling center and leads the BART at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. “We want an all-encompassing view of how we can make sure our students and anyone that steps on the UNO campus feel welcome.”
At larger universities like Ohio State, it would be easy for reports of bias to get lost in the shuffle, said Mr. Suddeth, who also serves as a first responder on the BART. The bias team can prevent that by centralizing the reports and making sure that all are investigated.
At Ohio State, team members monitor their email for any bias reports and deal with them as they arrive — first by following up with the sender, then by forwarding the report to the relevant department, and making sure the problem, if it needs action, is resolved. Meanwhile, the group records its reports, discerning whether they indicate larger trends that should be pursued.
When troubling trends appear, team members — who might be student-affairs officers or professors — offer suggestions to administrators about possible training that could help prevent issues from getting out of hand.
Do the teams dole out discipline?
The teams are designed to react to reports of bias, not to decide punishment. If an incident violates a university’s code of conduct, the team refers the case to the campus judicial process.
Instead, the teams focus on prevention. For example, at the University of Oregon, volunteers armed with cards and information attend events — protests, for instance — that are deemed potentially upsetting and tell offended students what they can do and where they can go for help.
The blanket encouragement to report incidents has some free-speech advocates worried.
“Having a culture where students are encouraged to report any instances of offensive speech to the administration, it’s just not necessarily conducive for having real free and open debates,” said Samantha Harris, director of policy research at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free-speech advocacy group.
Ms. Harris added that FIRE doesn’t oppose the bias teams, but rather any policy that has the effect of chilling speech perceived as biased.
Maure Smith-Benanti, director of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Education and Support Services at Oregon, coordinates the university’s bias-response team. She said the aim of the volunteers is not to hamper offensive speech but to counter it.
“We believe the best way to combat offensive free speech,” she said, “is with more speech.”