The University of Colorado Boulder has proudly launched an on-campus spying campaign that encourages students to report incidents of “bias” to government officials at the school.
The school’s new and very extensive online “bias” reporting mechanism solicits nearly two dozen pieces of information about perpetrators of “bias” including their names, addresses, ages, phone numbers and student ID numbers, The College Fix reports.
Users of the reporting scheme can also provide a detailed narrative explanation of the “bias incident” they believe they have witnessed or experienced.
The point of the new, potentially massive “Bias Incident Reporting” scheme is to make the University of Colorado campus “an inclusive and welcoming community” by encouraging students to report “demeaning and hurtful statements” to the taxpayer-funded administration, the CU website explains.
Also, CU Boulder students who witness what they believe are “bias-motivated incidents” to report those incidents immediately can fill out a “student of concern” report.
The Students of Concern Team — capitalized — seeks to provide “consultation and intervention when students exhibit aggressive, concerning or disruptive behaviors.”
Examples of “bias” for which government officials might interfere in the lives of students include calling people names or talking about a particular culture or subculture in ways some student finds offensive.
A widespread “Bias Motivated Incident” poster campaign currently in effect on the CU Boulder campus manages to denigrate various cultures and ethnic groups in an effort to provide examples of such denigration.
“Go back to Africa, you don’t belong here,” one school-funded poster reads. “Your mom must be the janitor ’cause that’s the only job for dirty Mexicans,” declares another.
Except for the school officials behind the “Bias Motivated Incident” poster campaign, there appears to be no evidence that anyone on the CU Boulder campus has ever said these things.
School officials say they believe that collecting and recording the statements of individual students and possibly using the power of the state to intervene in students’ lives does not run afoul of the First Amendment.
“CU Boulder values freedom of expression as guaranteed to all individuals in the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States; encouraging and supporting debate and open discussion and disagreement on our campus remains important to us,” the public school states on its website.
However, CU Boulder spokesman Ryan Huff suggested that the taxpayer-funded state school will not look kindly on speech administrators don’t like.
“We support the First Amendment and want our students to challenge one another in academic ways,” Huff told the Fix. “We don’t support, however, the use of racial slurs and other demeaning bias-motivated acts.”
UC Boulder chancellor Philip DeStefano also weighed in.
“What ought to offend here is not the language on the posters, but the language that is used in perpetuating acts of racism, ethnic intimidation, homophobia and other acts of bias in our campus community,” DeStefano proclaimed, according to the Fix.
Bias reports on the CU website are not treated as confidential, the website notes. Presumably, then, they will be subject to Freedom of Information Act requests.
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