Our core mission here at Heat Street is to protect and defend free speech from social justice warriors who want to silence it.
So I’m particularly proud to be able to report that, after a series of stories and FOIA requests by Heat Street political editor Jillian Melchior, the University of Northern Colorado has closed its ‘Bias Response Team’—for good.
University President Kay Norton, in her ‘State of the Union’ college address, announced she was throwing in the towel:
“We will no longer have a separate process for bias-related concerns,” Norton said in her prepared remarks.
Jillian’s reports on the free-speech disaster at UNC caused by its Bias Response Team caused a sensation in the state of Colorado—and beyond. She recounted how one professor was threatened with a Title IX investigation if he even discussed ‘uncomfortable’ topics for students in the classroom. This was a direct attack on faculty freedom of speech, and the First Amendment at a publicly funded college. Jillian’s report contained a recording of a session the educator was forced to undergo with a UNC Bias Response Team staffer wherein he was threatened with a federal investigation and told not to discuss transgender issues or give his view as part of academic discussions. The professor was not invited to teach at UNC the following year.
Another Melchior story recounted how the Bias Response Team had threatened free speech and freedom of expression on campus with over 600 posters warning students against using basic, everyday terms like “hey guys” and “that’s crazy.”
Students at UNC rebelled against this, writing “all lives do matter” and “free speech matters” over Bias Response Team posters ordering them not to say “all lives matter” because it had been deemed to be offensive to the racist, anti-cop movement Black Lives Matter. Jillian exposed the UNC Bias Response Team’s disgraceful, Orwellian warnings against the phrases “illegal immigrant,” “poor,” “did you lose weight,” “ghetto” and “skinny.”
That was unfortunate, as Jillian certainly did have the skinny on UNC, President Kay Norton and the BRT. She mercilessly followed up with further FOIA requests on the backlash against this anti-academic ethos among staff, lawmakers, students and parents. Colorado lawmakers warned Norton that UNC was in breach of the First Amendment, and said they were watching. UNC admitted getting it wrong in the case of the professor and have now shut their Bias Response Team down altogether.
From her vacation in Italy, Jillian noted that the local paper, the Greeley Tribune, reported that complaints by students would still be ‘dealt with’ but within a general program. It was worrying, she said, that the same staffers used on the failed Bias Response Team would be looking at those complaints.
If the University of Northern Colorado thinks it can violate the First Amendment and academic and student freedom of speech by hiding an ersatz Bias Response Team in the middle of a regular disciplinary environment, it is totally mistaken. Jillian will report on any and all freedom of speech violations by the same faculty members within the University of Northern Colorado, and we at Heat Street encourage any student, staffer or faculty member who feels their free speech rights are being trampled on by SJWs to get in touch with us to report them. We will investigate.
Jillian Kay Melchior was named as a Red Alert Politics ‘Thirty Under Thirty’ Award Winner for her outstanding reporting on free speech issues and other pieces of investigative journalism.
