The University of Illinois campus police told students that they should report “acts of intolerance” to the university’s “bias assessment” team, including any comments that make an individual “feel unsafe” or “unwelcome.”
Students at the University of Illinois were reminded by the campus police that they can report “acts of intolerance” to the school’s Bias Assessment and Response Team (BART). Acts of intolerance can fall under a wide range of topics, which are then subjectively assessed by the school’s response team.
What can be considered “unsafe” in the world of today’s universities seems to be up to one’s own personal discretion, as recently demonstrated by the University of California San Francisco, which announced that providing everyone on campus with “preferred gender pronoun stickers” is also a matter of safety.
“Acts of intolerance create an unsafe and unwelcoming environment for campus community members,” said the University of Illinois campus police in a recent Facebook and Twitter post, “Please let us know if you feel unsafe.”
The university’s BART defines acts of intolerance as the following:
Bias-motivated incidents are actions or expressions that are motivated, at least in part, by prejudice against or hostility toward a person (or group) because of that person’s (or group’s) actual or perceived age, disability/ability status, ethnicity, gender, gender identity/expression, national origin, race, religion/spirituality, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, etc.
BART says that its mission is to “collect reports of bias-motivated incidents that impact students” and provide opportunities for others to have “conversation and dialogue” surrounding bias.
The bias response team also notes that “many of the incidents reported to BART are not violations of the law or the Student Code.”
With admittedly many of the “bias reports” not being found in violation of the law or Student Code, it is likely that the abuse of BART’S reporting system is derived from the team’s ambiguous explanation of “acts” deemed appropriate for reporting.
Students who are reported after having not done anything wrong, and subject to an investigation by the university or campus police, are facing tactics of intimidation, which will likely cause students to self-censor in advance, in order to satisfy the authoritarian Leftists in control of academia today.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo and on Instagram.