In a Charged Climate, Colleges Adopt Bias-Response Teams
In the fall of 2006, students living in Ohio State University’s dormitories received letters espousing racist ideas, including the belief that African-Americans are intellectually inferior to white people. Around the same time, about 100 miles away, students at the university’s Agricultural Technical Institute in Wooster created a Facebook group that promoted racist views about Oprah Winfrey. The two incidents made Ohio State officials realize they needed a proactive means to prevent occurrences of offensive speech, said Todd Suddeth, director of the university’s multicultural center. So they created a bias assessment and response team, commonly known in the world of student affairs as a BART, to help monitor and confront issues of bias on the campus.