A state Republican senator fears an effort by the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley to tackle bias on campus went awry and ended up squelching free speech and academic freedoms.
“It appears UNC leadership has decided that so-called ‘tolerance and diversity’ is justification for intolerance and intimidation,” said Sen. John Cooke, R-Greeley, in a letter he e-mailed on Wednesday to UNC President Kay Norton.
In the letter, Cooke objected to actions by the university’s “Bias Response Team,” a recent diversity poster campaign and the creation of a new vice president position at the university to handle diversity issues. He and Norton had a telephone conversation later that day about his concerns.
The letter was then published at , a conservative website. Cooke, whose alma mater is UNC, also has forwarded his to all Republican legislators.
“We might question them a little bit more when it comes to budget time,” Cooke said in an interview, but he said his concerns haven’t risen so much that he plans a coordinated attack on the university’s funding.
Norton, in an interview, acknowledged the university made a few missteps in implementing the Bias Response Team but said there was no intent to form “a thought police.”
“The intent of what was called the Bias Response Team was awareness of conversation and reconciliation and dispute resolution for matters that don’t raise to the level of discrimination or matters that aren’t law-based or rule-based adversarial issues,” Norton said.
Cooke’s letter referenced on UNC’s Bias Response Team. The newspaper reported that documents show a member of the response team advised a professor to refrain from continuing to have his students discuss transgender issues in the classroom — a response that Norton now says was inappropriate.
Cooke also was disappointed with how the university handled an incident in which someone wrote “All Lives Matter” and “Free Speech Matters” on one of the 680 diversity posters the university put up on campus. The university took that poster down and replaced it with another that stated a bias-related incident had occurred at that spot.
“The speech we find most offensive, is the speech we should protect,” Cooke said in his letter. “Why? Because the First Amendment is one of the rights that makes America the greatest nation on earth.”
Norton agreed that incident should not have been labeled as a bias-related incident and said it was improperly lumped in with another incident in which a racial epithet had been scrawled on one of the other posters.
“When we reconvene this fall semester, the faculty, staff and students will have a conversation about what caused our efforts to appear to be inappropriate to some people,” Norton said. “Instead of top down, we’ll reason together, and we will make it better.”
