Campus-wide conversations about the recent Teach-In have indicated one thing: students are becoming increasingly aware not only of bias incidents on campus, but also of their ability to seek help from the university if they ever feel discriminated against. Not only that, but such conversations have also indicated that many students can readily discuss everyday racism, the notion of “micro-aggression,” and can, in general, explore just what constitutes bias.

But the campus-wide discourse has revealed something perhaps equally important, though not so encouraging: that many students have no real understanding of what happens when a bias incident is reported. And for the most part, research into the issue only goes so far. Although students can easily locate the “Bias Incident Protocol Policy” on the main webpage of GVSU’s Division of Inclusion and Equity and can there discover how the university defines a bias incident, the only summary of what happens following a report is as follows: “All reported bias incidents will be reviewed by the Dean of Students Office staff and appropriate follow-up actions will be initiated.”

It is worth dwelling on the vagueness of this description and why it might be problematic for students. For one, the whole bias incident protocol appears in a haze: students report what they identify as bias, their report goes to “the administration,” and the administration assumedly acts. And because these actions are not defined, we students have little to no understanding of what might happen to those “accused” of perpetrating a bias incident. That is to say, though we can fortunately assume that the individual who reports a bias incident will receive support from the university, we have no answer to questions such as: Will the administration always seek to discipline the accused? Is there an evaluative process by which the Dean’s Office determines whether a reported bias incident merits further investigation? If someone is accused of bias, will he or she necessarily undergo a judiciary process?

We students deserve answers to these questions. Why? Because, for one, many of us operate under the assumption that the university always seeks to identify and, in some sense, try the accused. Based on the vagueness of the Bias Incident Protocol, this is a fair assumption. In fact, it seems to be the same assumption made by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education when it determined that GVSU’s bias incident protocol was, in fact, unconstitutional. In its explanation for this judgment, FIRE claimed that the university inappropriately condemns speech that is protected by the first amendment: namely, speech that, according to the Bias Incident Protocol, causes “alarm, anger, fear or resentment.” The opacity of the Bias Incident Protocol thus forces students to ask a difficult and demoralizing question: Might the university condemn our speech not for being inflammatory or hateful, but merely for causing “alarm?” Might we be disciplined because of a protest or the expression of an unpopular view? Though many students likely assume that the administration would be reasonable in assessing any situation, the vagueness of the Bias Incident Protocol is no cause for peace of mind.

Of course, none of this is to detract from the virtue of the university’s eagerness to help and defend students who report bias incidents. It is to say, however, that the university has not answered a supremely important question: does the Dean’s Office outright condemn as “biased” all speech that merely causes “alarm?” Further, does the university always seek to discipline the accused? The claims of FIRE against the vagueness of the Bias Incident Protocol are strong and unambiguous: if the university treats all speech considered “biased” as unacceptable, and if it always pursues disciplinary action in these cases, then the university acts unconstitutionally.

The issue can easily be cleared up in one way: a clarified Bias Incident Protocol.