Sue the thought police

Jack Fowler:

Beyond the investigating (duties lustfully performed, at the University of Tennessee, by its “Bias Education and Response Team,” which sounds a smidge less scary than the University of Maryland’s “Hate-Bias Response Team”), there is the intimidating — inherent to the enterprise. Bias-reporting systems, by their existence, are institutional deep freezers that create those “chilling effects” on campus speech. They are the instigators of the cautionary thought Should I risk speaking up in the first place? Which is why the foes of BRS, including admirable organizations such as FIRE (newly reminted as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), charge that it prevents students and professors — from the non-woke to the surely conservatives to the leave-me-aloners — from voicing opinions, or even telling jokes, lest they get caught up in a crypto-Soviet dragnet (anonymous accusers, no due process) with an array of consequences: hostility, reprimands, suspensions, the boot, and finding themselves at the dangerous intersection of Here’s My Opinion and You’re Unhireable after Graduation.

In a paper for the American Enterprise Institute calling for the elimination of BRS from colleges, Cherise Trump, a George Mason University graduate who is Speech First’s impressive executive director, railed against its expansiveness and the consequence of its unsubtle silencing: “The fear of being anonymously reported to authorities and subjected to process-is-punishment investigations, diversity and anti-bias trainings, and public stigmatization is a present and powerful force on campuses nationwide.”

As it chills speech, from political to happenstantial, BRS also suppresses diversity — of thought. Which seems the point, after all: to do away with “on the other hand,” a thing central to academic debate and classroom exploration of thought, yet now intolerable and impermissible on many a campus.