A car drives down Agate Street as two students walk from the residence halls to class. The car slows down, pulls over near two students of color and the driver shouts a derogatory slur.
A female student cries for help from the depths of her residence hall room as she’s being sexually assaulted by a male student.
A young man comes out from his residence hall room to find homophobic slurs written across the white board on his door.
These are all hypothetical situations based on real acts of bias that have occurred on campus within the last three years. The above incidents come from the 2006-07 Bias Response Team annual report submitted primarily by University students.
The BRT serves to provide a safe space on campus for targets of bias to let their voices be heard. The group seeks to promote respect and affect change around issues of bias and intolerance.
University Counseling and Testing Center staff member Gwendolyn Jansen said the incidents she hears about most frequently include sexual harassment in the classroom, inappropriate behavior toward ethnic students, racism during the struggle for employment, misinformation about a certain community given out in the classroom, and sizism – discrimination against people of different sizes and weights – in the residence halls.
“We have a group of advocates that we’ve trained to help students when they’ve experienced an act of bias,” Jansen said. “So then we try to match up a person who can best help the student, whether it’s because they are representative of the student’s community or can feel a connection to them.”
Office of Multicultural Academic Support (OMAS) interim assistant director Consuela Perez-Jefferis said she’s constantly floored by what people get out of the facilitation sessions. In the situations involving faculty members and students feeling uncomfortable, Perez-Jefferis, who is also the BRT co-advocate leader, said they are often an eye-opening experience for the other person.
“Faculty members were not realizing the position they were putting students in,” Perez-Jefferis said. “I don’t think people are malicious. I think they just don’t know some things are considered bias. We don’t ever see ourselves as perpetuating anything. But a lot of times if you get people in a room, you get them talking, you’d be surprised what kind of learning comes from it,” Perez-Jefferis said.
The Bias Response Team comprises three groups, the BRT council, case management and the advocacy team. Once a student decides to report an incident of bias, two options are available.
Filing a “For Action” report allows the BRT to contact the reporter in hopes of proceeding through a resolution process. In this case, the BRT can offer advice and counseling by assigning an advocate to help the student.
On the other side, a “For Information Only” report simply allows the BRT to stay informed about campus climate. In this situation, the BRT enters the report’s information into its database. Because this type of report works to gather information, students have the option of remaining anonymous.
Jansen said the BRT’s advocate team currently includes 14 faculty and staff members from OMAS, Academic Advising, the Women’s Center and the Office of Student Life, among others.
The BRT formed in 1999 after a passionate group of students protested at Johnson Hall, calling upon the University to take responsibility for the acts of bias occurring on campus. The group of young activists held sit-ins until the University agreed to organize a group of administrators willing to facilitate bias
response incidents.
Lindsey Adkisson, the graduate teaching fellow for the BRT in the Office of Student Life, said the student-initiated organization exists for anyone at the University seeking a change in campus climate.
“I think this is such a unique opportunity for students so they can have some place they can come confidentially,” Adkisson said. “It’s so important for students to have a safe place. We’ve all experienced some bias at one point, so it’s great to have a University-supported organization that can respond to these acts.”
Associate Dean of Student Life Laura Blake Jones said what the University experiences and what gets reported may be two very different numbers. She encouraged students to report acts of bias or intolerance, regardless of whether they choose to attach their names to the report form, which can be found on the BRT’s Web site.
Adkisson added that she hopes to draw more undergraduate involvement with the BRT this year. She also emphasized the importance of reporting intolerance acts of bias, even when it’s the hard thing to do.
“You might think it’s trivial, like ‘this is just something written in the bathroom; it happens,’ but it doesn’t have to,” Adkisson said. “No act is too small to deal with.”
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