W&M’s bias report form.

Posted byWaldo Jaquith 5 Comments on W&M’s bias report form.

William & Mary offer a form where people can file a secret report if they think somebody has oppressed them on the basis of a protected trait. Some students are upset. I notice that the school has a paragraph up pointing out that while “the expression of an idea or point of view may be offensive or inflammatory to some, it is not necessarily a bias-related incident.” It’s probably not a good sign that they have to call that up.

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Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Char­lottes­­ville, VA, USA. more »

5 replies on “W&M’s bias report form.”

  1. STAN: I want to be a woman. From now on, I want you all to call me ‘Loretta’.

    REG: What?!

    LORETTA: It’s my right as a man.

    JUDITH: Well, why do you want to be Loretta, Stan?

    LORETTA: I want to have babies.

    REG: You want to have babies?!

    LORETTA: It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them.

    REG: But… you can’t have babies.

    LORETTA: Don’t you oppress me.

  2. Wow. This is such an amazingly bad idea.

    Actually, if I were a student there, I’d just use this system to protest the rule they have against male students kissing in public (I forget if it’s disorderly conduct or what, but I have at least two friends who got in trouble in this manner). If you could get enough students submitting bias reports, they’d hopefully repeal the rule or close the bias report system.

  4. Nearly 20 years ago, UVA put in a policy where students could be “written up,” so to speak, for saying mean things to other students. I witnessed one student librarian with a chip on his shoulder file a report against another student who had been very rude to him and happened to call him a couple unsavory names. I doubt very much that the policy has changed. It was very much a leading edge P.C. policy at the time, and if anything, UVA has only become more P.C. over the years.

    This trend toward regulating speech on college campuses is discouraging. We should be teaching our best and brightest that the way to combat “bad” speech is not to silence it, but to counter with “good” speech.

  5. UVA is overly P.C., eh? Are you excluding the student body from this generalization, or should I recount some of my experiences of experiences of overt racism and people calling others “fags” and such?

    I’m certainly not suggesting that most students are like this, but it’s certainly still alive and well there.

    This trend toward regulating speech on college campuses is discouraging. We should be teaching our best and brightest that the way to combat “bad” speech is not to silence it, but to counter with “good” speech.

    We certainly agree on this point.

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