The New Republic
By Jeffrey Aaron Snyder and Amna Khalid
March 30, 2018
“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, includingeducational “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.
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