(LifeSiteNews) – Missouri State University agreed to shutter its so-called Bias Response Team and never revive it as part of settlement of a lawsuit brought by free speech in education watchdogs.
In April, Defending Education filed a complaint alleging that Missouri State abused the team to “police speech that someone believe(s) demonstrates ‘bias’” against “’persons or groups because of ability, race, color, gender identity, ethnicity, religion, faith, national origin, political orientation, or sexual orientation.” Its reach extended to on and off campus speech as well as social media postings, effectively “chill(ing) the open and unfettered discourse that should be central to higher education” with nowhere their speech can be truly free.
Missouri State’s “procedures for tackling disfavored speech — and the vague, overbroad, and viewpoint-based definition of bias that triggers those procedures — violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments,” maintained the group, representing students who “credibly fear(ed) that the expression of their deeply held views” on life, family, and immigration issues would be penalized.
The university announced in May that it would begin shutting down the Bias Response Team, a decision they claim predated receiving litigation, and now The College Fix reported that Defending Education has secured a settlement in which Missouri State attests it has ended the team and “associated practices,” and commits to neither reinstating it nor creating a similar body to police so-called “bias incidents.”
“Bias response policies are, by their very nature, odious to the Constitution and the free exchange of ideas,” Defending Education vice president Sarah Parshall Perry responded. “We are gratified that the University has seen fit to terminate its bias policy and dismantle its bias response team – something that should have happened long ago and without the need for federal litigation. We hope other universities with similarly unconstitutional policies take note.”
American institutions of higher education have long been recognized as heavily dominated by left-wing bias and historical revisionism, conditioning students to reject religion, traditional morality, and free markets, and to view America as a uniquely malignant force in the world, a society systemically rigged against the poor and minority groups, with identity-based grievances forming the foundation of so-called “social justice” and “intersectional” approaches to education.
LGBT groups arguably enjoy the highest standing in the current social justice hierarchy. The indoctrination of children with left-wing ideology on sexuality, race, and other agenda items has long been a major concern in American schools and libraries from book shelves to drag events to classroom materials to even “transitioning” troubled children without parental input. Many schools have also displayed hostility to the rights and employment of individual teachers who refuse to go along with such agendas. Across the nation, controversy has also erupted in recent years over schools and libraries adopting books that attempt to expose sexual themes and activity to children, often in graphic detail and with pornographic imagery depicting specific sex acts.
The toll of such an activist bent often extends well beyond politics. In 2024, insiders from the University of California-Los Angeles’ (UCLA’s) prestigious David Geffen School of Medicine warned that the school’s diversity fixation had led to a crisis in which more than half of students in various cohorts admitted since 2020 fail standardized tests for basic medical knowledge of subjects ranging from emergency medicine and family medicine to internal medicine and pediatrics.
In response, the Trump administration has issued executive orders to deny federal funds to educational entities that indoctrinate students through DEI programs among other executive actions to combat so-called “woke ideology” in education.