A Balancing Act: Whose Interests Response Teams Do Bias Serve?

Beyond Legal Constraints: Understanding Barriers to Humanizing Responses in the Aftermath of Hate Speech at Private Universities

“…Despite pressures from the legal environment and tendencies towards absolutist interpretations of free speech, administrators can help create inclusive environments where hate speech is not tolerated [47], through both reactive and proactive strategies that address campus hate speech. In the aftermath of incidents, administrative action should involve engaging the campus community to allow for healing and restore trust and safety, especially for targeted student groups [35].…”

Racial conflict in a higher education policy vacuum

“…The Black Lives Matter movement has increased attention to specific ways postsecondary institutions have embedded Anti-Blackness in their practices and policies, thereby affecting enrollment and retention (Dancy et al, 2018). As a result of these movements, HESA professionals have engaged in various ways to address racial inequities on their campuses such as increasing compositional diversity (Chang, 2002;Garces & Jayakumar, 2014;Milem et al, 2005;Stotzer & Hosellman, 2012); hiring diversity professionals (Griffin et al, 2019); implementing diversity training (Kruse et al, 2018;Petrov & Garcia, 2021); and forming bias incident response teams (BIRT) (Garces et al, 2022;Miller et al, 2018). Among these practices, BIRT can provide some guidance to managing various forms of racial conflict.…”

Legal Challenges to Bias Response Teams on College Campuses

“…They began to proliferate across postsecondary institutions in the late 2000s in response to increased awareness of incidents of hate against minoritized students, particularly as student diversity on campuses increased (LePeau et al, 2016;Miller et al, 2018). While the specific functions of bias response teams vary across institutions, they generally represent an institutionalized process whereby campus members can report bias incidents to administrative bodies composed primarily of student affairs administrators as well as faculty members and sometimes members of law enforcement (e.g., Miller et al, 2017Miller et al, , 2018Yockey, 2019). After a report is filed, bias response team members may follow up with the individual who reported the incident to discuss what happened and to offer support.…”

“…The proliferation of bias response teams on college campuses has not been without criticism—by external groups that would dismantle them on the grounds that they violate free speech (Wermund, 2018) and by those who argue that they do not go far enough to effect widespread change toward inclusion (Chesler et al, 2005; Hughes, 2013; LePeau et al, 2016; LePeau et al, 2018; Miller et al, 2018; Watt, 2015). Certainly, more research is needed to better understand how these teams navigate the legal boundaries of the First Amendment and to examine how effective they are, including in their educative role, in promoting goals of inclusion.…”