EXCLUSIVE: UConn student bias complaints show students will report just about anything

Like many universities across the country, the University of Connecticut uses a bias reporting tool to collect information on bias related incidents from students, professors, and resident assistants.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, Campus Reform obtained all 230 submitted bias reports to the university from January 2018 to August 2021. 

The reports contained a handful of incidents of anti-conservative bias, anti-white bias, and anti-Semitism. However, the majority of the reports were apparent incidents of students tattling on their peers for insignificant infractions. 

In February 2020, one African American student reported his professor for talking about White privilege and racism in class. 

“I don’t know why my Caucasian professors take it upon themselves to explain what racism or white privilege is,” the student said in the report. “As an African American student, it makes me feel so uncomfortable when, for example, one of my professors calls out the African American or all black students in general to imply that just because of our race, we’ve automatically had it hard.”

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The report also mentions an incident where one professor called out the three black students in the class and said, “white privilege does exist!”

“I am a PERSON and I prefer if my professors, of all people, don’t objectify me and intentionally separate me from my peers,” the student wrote in the report. 

In an example of anti-conservative bias, one Ph.D. student filed a complaint in 2020 about the existence of Turning Point USA on campus. He called the group’s presence “counter-intuitive.”

“Differences of opinion will always exist, and universities provide a safe space for that dialogue to exist; however, when we work in an environment where we feel like our security is at risk because of organizations like Turning Point USA, everyone loses,” the students said in the report. 

In another report filed in 2021, a student called attention to one Undergraduate Student Government senator who, in a USG Senate meeting, said “that he was ‘tired’ of all the ‘white folk’ on the call.”

The student who filed the report questioned, “I just have to wonder why this was thought to be acceptable but a similar statement about any other racial group would be clearly wrong.”

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In 2019, a report was filed to complain about a worker at the university’s mail warehouse.

The student says in the report that she uses a “preferred name,” and never received a notification that her package had arrived. When she went to the mail warehouse to look for a missing package, the worker explained that “the package had been sent to the real” student’s name, and “since [student’s preferred name] is not the name on her id or license,” the package was not delivered to her.

The student who filed the report claims that this interaction “was insensitive and non-inclusive of students who have preferred names.”

Although the report does not include any indication that the worker showed bias towards one ethnicity, the student also reported that the worker was non-inclusive of “particularly Asian students.”

And in 2019, a UConn resident assistant reported a student for a writing “[i]f being gay is happy than I’m f*****g straight man,” on a dorm whiteboard. 

The RA took a picture of the phrase, erased it from the whiteboard, and submitted the incident to the Bias Response team as a conduct violation.

UCONN did not respond to Campus Reform’s requests for a comment.