By Tobias Hoonhout
Friday, November 01, 2019
The University of Michigan will disband its “Bias
Response Team” as part of a settlement reached with a campus free-speech
nonprofit that sued the university over the First Amendment violations inherent
in the team’s mandate.
The settlement was reached after the Sixth Circuit Court
of Appeals ruled last month that the Bias Response Team “acts by way of
implicit threat of punishment and intimidation to quell speech.”
The administrative bias team has been tasked with
investigating campus incidents that could be deemed racist, sexist, hostile to
LGBTQ students, or offensive to certain groups of people. Speech First, the
free-speech advocacy group, filed a lawsuit challenging the procedures on
First-Amendment grounds.
In June of 2018, the Justice Department issued a
statement of interest for the Speech First, Inc., v. Schlissel case and
found that Michigan’s anti-harassment policy was “unconstitutional because it
offers no clear, objective definitions of the violations.”
“Our nation’s public universities and colleges were
established to promote diversity of thought and robust debate, so we must not
accept when they instead use their authority to stifle these principles on
their campuses,” Justice Department spokesman Devin O’Malley said in a
statement at the time. “Attorney General Jeff Sessions is committed to
promoting free speech on college campuses, and the Department is proud to have
played a role in the numerous campus free speech victories this year.”
Under the settlement, Michigan agreed never to revive its
old definitions of bullying and harassment. University administrators had
replaced the bias response team earlier this year with a “campus climate
support team” that aims to “support students, faculty or staff” but has no
disciplinary function. Speech First also reserves the right “to challenge the
Campus Climate Support staff, should that program turn out to be no different
than the Bias Response Team in practice.”
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