THE NEW REPUBLIC IS WORRIED: The Rise of “Bias Response Teams” on Campus: Colleges across America are creating shadowy groups to handle complaints. Will they end up muzzling students instead? “Instead?” That’s the whole point:

Bias incident reporting is not unique to Emory. More than 100 colleges and universities have Bias Response Teams, which aim to foster “a safe and inclusive environment” by providing “advocacy and support to anyone on campus who has experienced, or been a witness of, an incident of bias or discrimination.” These teams have multiple missions, including educational “prevention,” investigating alleged bias incidents, disciplining offenders, and organizing “coping events” after such incidents. Depending on the campus, these teams are known as BRTs, BARTs, BERTs or BIRTs. Students and faculty occasionally serve on BRTs, but they are largely composed of administrators, with sizable representation from Residential Life and Dean of Students offices. As committees with unelected members that meet behind closed doors, they lack both transparency and accountability.

Lacking transparency and accountability is also the point. So is providing self-important roles for all those administrators who are driving up college costs.