“Trump 2016.” After this message was scrawled in chalk across the Emory University campus earlier this month, some 40 students met with President James Wagner to express their “fear” and “frustration,” insisting that “Trump’s platform and his values undermine Emory’s values [of] diversity and inclusivity.” Wagner reassured the students that the university would review the footage from security cameras to identify the culprit. “If they’re students,” he said, “they will go through the conduct violation process.” In a subsequent campus-wide email, Wagner declared that Emory’s “commitment to respect, civility, and inclusion calls us to provide a safe environment.” He also emphasized that the school would make “immediate refinements” to the “procedural deficiencies” of its “bias incident and response process.”

Bias incident reporting is not unique to Emory. More than 100 colleges and universities have Bias Response Teams, which aim to foster “a safe and inclusive environment” by providing “advocacy and support to anyone on campus who has experienced, or been a witness of, an incident of bias or discrimination.” These teams have multiple missions, including educational “prevention,” investigating alleged bias incidents, disciplining offenders, and organizing “coping events” after such incidents. Depending on the campus, these teams are known as BRTs, BARTs, BERTs or BIRTs. Students and faculty occasionally serve on BRTs, but they are largely composed of administrators, with sizable representation from Residential Life and Dean of Students offices. As committees with unelected members that meet behind closed doors, they lack both transparency and accountability.

BRTs are rapidly becoming part of the institutional machinery of higher education, but have yet to face any real scrutiny.

BRTs are rapidly becoming part of the institutional machinery of higher education, but have yet to face any real scrutiny. As Carleton College faculty members committed to “rigorous studies in the liberal arts disciplines” and the vitality of diverse campus communities, we believe that the proliferation of BRTs is a grave mistake. They degrade education by encouraging silence instead of dialogue, the fragmentation of campuses into groups of like-minded people, and the deliberate avoidance of many of the most important—and controversial—topics across all academic disciplines. They are inherently anti-intellectual enterprises, fundamentally at odds with the mission of higher education. And ultimately they will undermine a bedrock principle of the modern university: that more diversity leads to better learning.

The dramatic diversification of the student body is one of the most significant trends in higher education over the past half-century. Circa 1965, about 94 percent of the nation’s college students were white and 61 percent were men; today, those figures have fallen to 59 percent and 43 percent, respectively.



That shift was encouraged by the pivotal 1978 Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, a 5-4 ruling that banned racial quotas for college admissions but deemed it permissible to include race as one of a broad “array of qualifications and characteristics” in a “highly individualized, holistic review of each applicant’s file.” (This is the policy under consideration in Fisher v. University of Texas.) In his majority opinion, Justice Lewis Powell rejected the social justice rationale for affirmative action but endorsed the diversity rationale, asserting that an otherwise qualified student “with a particular background—whether it be ethnic, geographic, culturally advantaged or disadvantaged” may bring “outlooks and ideas” that enrich “the atmosphere of speculation, experiment and creation” on campus.