A professor at the University of Mississippi is calling for stronger punishment for students that commit microaggressions on campus. The professor, Kirk Johnson, even suggested that students reported to the school’s “bias incident” report system should face criminal penalties.
According to a report by The College Fix, Ole Miss Professor Kirk Johnson thinks that students should face harsher consequences for making politically incorrect remarks on campus. Johnson argued that students would be less likely to make offensive remarks if such remarks could get them suspended from school or punished under federal hate crime laws. Johnson later qualified his statement, claiming that students should only face prosecution if they break state or federal hate crime laws.
Students around the country are often reported to “bias incident report” systems that are designed to catalog politically incorrect remarks made on campus. Students reported to the system are often investigated by university officials and subjected to sensitivity training as a punishment.
Johnson is primarily focused on punishing students that are reported to the Ole Miss “bias incident report” system. If students “faced the possibility of being suspended from school, or being arrested under federal or state hate-crime statutes, I suspect they would police themselves more vigorously,” Johnson said in a conversation with The College Fix.
“Our BIRT system is toothless to the extent that students who violate the University of Mississippi creed face no punishment,” Johnson, who published a recent paper in 2018 on the negative impact of “microaggressions,” Johnson argued. “As a result, there is little incentive for students to take responsibility for their actions.”
Breitbart News reported in October that the University of Michigan was forced to shut down its “bias incident report” system after they were sued by legal activist groups that aim to defend First Amendment rights on campus.
Stay tuned to Breitbart News for more updates on this story.