Academic Fascism: Bias Incident Reporting

From the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education:

The University of Northern Colorado (UNC) appears to have investigated two professors for asking students to simply consider all sides of the debate over today’s most controversial political and social issues. The investigations were prompted by student complaints made through UNC’s “Bias Response” system, which encourages students to file online reports of any “offensive classroom environment” to administrators, who may then intervene with the theoretically offending faculty.

The Bias Response Team’s reports are troubling—both in sheer quantity, and substance.

According to UNC documents obtained by Heat Street under Colorado’s Open Records Act, a professor asked his students to read The Atlantic’s “The Coddling of the American Mind” (co-authored by FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff). The piece warns that the growing institutionalization of aversion to presenting views that students may find offensive or disagreeable deprives students of the opportunity to confront views they disagree with. The professor engaged students in a discussion about opposing viewpoints on, among other things, transgender issues, prompting one student to file a Bias Incident Report with university administrators. As characterized in the student’s complaint, the professor argued that “transgender is not a real thing, and no one can truly feel like they are born in the wrong body.”

The Bias Response Team contacted the professor, who responded that he was simply playing devil’s advocate to encourage a discussion amongst his students. University administrators encouraged him to avoid doing so:

A member of the Bias Response Team met with the professor, the report says, and “advised him not to revisit transgender issues in his classroom if possible to avoid the students expressed concerns.” The Bias Response Team also “told him to avoid stating opinions (his or theirs) on the topic as he had previously when working from the Atlantic article.”

This is a stunning violation of academic freedom. Campus bureaucrats telling a professor what he or she may say in class is outrageous. It would be out of bounds if a biased professor was told be more balanced. Telling a professor engaged in a balanced discussion to stifle discussion because somebody might hear something they dislike goes beyond outrageous.

The article goes on:

In another incident report, the Bias Response Team noted a “conversation” with a professor who encouraged students to question rhetoric about gay rights, assigning students to take a position and debate it in class. Heat Street summarized the encounter using the Bias Response Team’s notes:

“Specifically there were two topics of debate that triggered them and personally felt like an attack on their identity (GodHatesFags.com: is this harmful? Is this acceptable? Is this Christianity? And Gay Marriage: should it be legal? Is homosexuality immoral as Christians suggest?)”

The student, whose name is redacted and who is referred to as “they” in the report, complained that “other students are required to watch the in-class debate and hear both arguments presented.”

“I do not believe that students should be required to listen to their own rights and personhood debated,” the student wrote. “[This professor] should remove these topics from the list of debate topics. Debating the personhood of an entire minority demographic should not be a classroom exercise, as the classroom should not be an actively hostile space for people with underprivileged identities.

This is pure, distilled politically correct intolerance. A gay student claims he has an “underprivileged identity” and therefore should be protected from hearing arguments he does not like. He claims that his “personhood” is being challenged if he merely hears people disputing one of his favored public policies.

In the first place, gays are not an “underprivileged identity” on a modern university campus. They are a petted and pandered to minority, even at a supposed Catholic university like Marquette. But protecting the supposedly tender sensibilities of gays (or any other politically correct victim group) is to educate them poorly. It implies they will never learn to intellectually engage arguments they disagree with, but only whine and complain and demean the people who make those arguments.

This mentality is common at Marquette. It was shown when a Philosophy instructor told a student he could not disagree with gay marriage because that would be “homophobic” and would “offend” any gay students in class. When the student complained to Marquette, he was greeted with hostility. The instructor, one Cheryl Abbate, not only was not admonished or reprimanded for her behavior, she was told that the student was the problem. When we reported this misconduct on this blog, Marquette began trying to fire us.

And when an alumnus named Aaron Ledesma chimed in with an essay insisting that opposition to gay marriage ought to be banned at Marquette, the university “liked” the Tweet.

Marquette’s Policy

It won’t surprise readers to know that Marquette has a Bias Incident Reporting system. Marquette has everything that politically correct universities have these days. Marquette defines a “bias incident” as follows:

A bias incident is any discriminatory or hurtful act that appears to be motivated or is perceived by the victim or victims to be motivated by race, ethnicity, religion, age, national origin, sex, disability, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, veteran or socioeconomic status. To be considered a bias incident, the act is not required to be a crime under any federal, state or local statutes. [emphasis added]

In the first place, an “act” can be a mere expression of opinion, and the mere “perception” that it is motivated by race, ethnicity, etc. is enough to make it a “bias incident.”

The Marquette statement is a bit vague about what happens when such a “bias incident” is reported, but it makes it clear that anybody who is reported could be in trouble.

Of course, real incidents of discrimination and harassment (but not mere differences of opinion) have always been something that could be reported to authorities at Marquette (and at any other university). But the current system resembles nothing so much as totalitarian political systems where authorities encourage citizens to rat out thoughts and ideas contrary to the orthodoxy of the regime.

And no, that is not hyperbole.

Chicago Tribune on Marquette Attempt to Fire Warrior Blogger

Another column in a major media outlet, The Chicago Tribune. The author, Diana Sroka Rickert, outlines the facts of the case, and then draws some larger conclusions.

So a student disagreed with an instructor’s views on a polarizing issue. The instructor silenced the student. McAdams blogged about the incident, and after his blog post gained regional and national attention, Marquette silenced him too.

The fact that the university would revoke tenure from McAdams has sent shock waves through academia. Tenure is a treasured tenet of higher education, and revoking tenure usually is reserved for the most egregious of offenses.

. . .

“It’s left us with a lot of concern,” said Peter Bonilla of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. “If Marquette will do this to someone like McAdams, there’s no reason to expect they won’t do it to some other faculty member if they became a headache or PR disaster for the university.”

This isn’t just a campus problem. It’s exemplary of a dangerous societal movement underway: Instead of debating the merits of our ideas, those who hold unpopular opinions are publicly shamed, and then silenced. Their livelihoods are destroyed, often in coordinated, mob-like efforts. Lest anyone else ever think of speaking out or lending support to a cause, be forewarned — the price is steep.

Remember Brendan Eich? He resigned as CEO of Mozilla after just 10 days on the job because it was revealed that he donated to a California Proposition 8 campaign.

Just the other week, the Chicago Teachers Union threatened to kick out of the union any teachers who attempted to teach on April 1 instead of joining the union’s citywide walkout. The union intimidated teachers by pledging severe peer pressure: “No CTU member is to cross a picket line, and each school should designate a small crew to record any such activity,” an email to teachers warned. How’s that for congeniality among peers?

We’d like to think reasonable people can disagree on a variety of controversial topics. In reality, the costs associated with sharing or acting on your opinion are quickly beginning to outweigh the benefits.

It’s no wonder people are holding back more than before. Even the sharing of personal stories on Facebook has dropped 21 percent in the past year, according to The Information, a tech news website.

The fact that certain opinions are being suppressed means that somewhere, someone gets to decide what is socially and culturally acceptable and what is not. When does free speech cross the line to hate speech, and who makes that call? Instead of allowing our different views to compete in a marketplace of ideas, some entity — be it a university administrator, a government official or a powerbroker — is calling the shots on whose voice gets heard and who gets shut up.

“Popular views do not need protection,” McAdams wrote in a letter to Marquette. He’s right.

We need to reject this cultural shift, and that’s why the McAdams case matters so much. Every new idea, every major social movement, starts out as a minority opinion. If the majority of people gets to decide which ideas or opinions are acceptable and the consequences of speaking out are too painful, we may someday reach a point in which no minority opinion exists.

But that, of course, is what a lot of people want.

In response to Rickert’s column a certain Aaron Ledesma wrote an article explicitly insisting that any opposition to gay marriage should be silenced and shut up at Marquette.

And proponents of man-made global warming have a long history of trying to punish and stifle dissenting views.

So the idea that someone gets to decide what is socially and culturally acceptable and what is not is attractive to people who think that they and their friends will be the people who get to do the deciding.

Rickert, by the way, is a former student of ours, and part of a cohort of outstanding conservative students who started an alternative campus paper at Marquette, The Warrior. Competing with official campus papers, it bested them in journalistic awards.