Bias Reporting Systems Are a Growing Threat to Campus Free Speech
It’s no secret that colleges and universities are threatening students’ constitutional speech rights. These violations often start as viewpoint discrimination, leading to canceled speakers and denied club status for political groups. They escalate to the more public approach of “de-platforming” – the use of physical disruption and other forms of in-person intimidation to end or preemptively shut down events.
Today, students are also likely to encounter Bias Reporting Systems (BRSs) – a more covert threat often created under the guise of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” initiatives.
If the name Bias Reporting System strikes you as creepy, even Stalinesque, your intuition is spot on. BRSs are teams and/or procedures that solicit, receive, investigate, and respond to reports of “bias incidents” that can include “bias speech.” The campus community becomes a breeding ground for policing speech, where fearful students look over their shoulders to see who might be listening to their conversations.
BRSs can be so oppressive that Speech First, a nonprofit membership organization, has supported students in lawsuits against their universities to dismantle these systems. Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit handed Speech First a victory against the University of Central Florida, in a unanimous ruling. One judge wrote: “History provides us with ample warning of those times and places when colleges and universities have stopped pursuing truth and have instead turned themselves into cathedrals for the worship of certain dogma. By depriving itself of academic institutions that pursue truth over any other concern, a society risks falling into the abyss of ignorance . . . A university that turns itself into an asylum from controversy has ceased to be a university; it has just become an asylum.”
Yet the campus censor squads are more prevalent than ever. Speech First has released a report revealing that the number of BRSs has doubled in the last five years. These programs intimidate and silence students whose viewpoints do not conform to certain social, political, and cultural narratives. They contribute to an environment of fear that suppresses dialogue between students of diverse beliefs and perspectives, ultimately muzzling expression through self-censorship.
This chilling effect was confirmed by a 2021 joint study conducted by FIRE, College Pulse, and RealClearEducation, which found that more than 80 percent of college students in the United States self-censor. Regrettably, the students themselves often anonymously report their peers – not, as would be appropriate, for criminal acts, but for alleged speech infractions. This creates a shadowy informant culture where students impose agendas on others rather than developing the emotional and intellectual capacities to resolve disagreements themselves.
It’s hard to avoid concluding that BRSs were designed to eliminate unpopular, contrarian, and dissenting views and opinions. The classification of a “bias incident” at most universities is so broad that it encompasses political speech. Indeed, students have reported one another for such constitutionally protected activities as watching political videos, running “disturbing” Google searches, and praying. Rather than provide an environment where students can sharpen their thinking, colleges and universities are proving themselves ground zero for censorship that restricts discourse, whether academic or otherwise. This is fundamentally un-American.
Central to our republican form of government is a spirit of political participation that requires citizens who can think and reason independently and speak freely with one another. Our Founding Fathers understood this, which is why they enshrined freedom of speech in the First Amendment of the Constitution. When Benjamin Franklin was around the age that many head off to college today, he sagely wrote: “Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such thing as Wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without Freedom of Speech.”
As the recent judicial opinion stated, “Colleges and universities serve as the founts of – and the testing grounds for – new ideas. Their chief mission is to equip students to examine arguments critically and, perhaps even more importantly, to prepare young citizens to participate in the civic and political life of our democratic republic.”
This court decision should send a message to colleges and universities that pursuing speech suppression will lead either to ideological uniformity or expensive lawsuits for having violated students’ free speech rights. Both erode the public’s waning confidence in academia’s ability to produce open-minded students ready to enter our democratic society.
What to do? There are many ways to fight back against campus policies that target constitutionally protected speech. Legal action, pressure from alumni donors, and restrictions on federal and state funding are all ways we can stop universities from running roughshod over students’ foundational rights. Let’s not allow Bias Reporting Systems and other measures that suppress free expression to go unchecked at American colleges and universities.
