by Emma Arns
An anonymous person reported a University of Minnesota (UMinn) professor to the bias team for using the phrase “piñata of shame” in an editorial.
It is one of the 175 bias reports filed in the 2023-24 school year and obtained recently by The College Fix through a records request.
“No one has contacted me about it,” philosophy Professor Valerie Tiberius told The Fix in response to an email inquiry regarding her awareness of the claim. It has been a full year since the August 31, 2023 report was filed.
The provided report does not name Tiberius, but the unique phrase in a Washington Post article made it possible to identify her.
She made the comment in an August 28, 2023 essay about her father, who abandoned his study of Spanish after failing to achieve fluency. “He seemed a little melancholy about it but mostly relieved that he no longer had this piñata of shame hanging over his head,” she wrote.
A complaint filed several days later said the phrase constituted a “white person misusing and disrespecting [Hispanic] culture.”
The philosophy professor has previously championed “diversity.”
“I’m proud of the work I did as department chair to encourage my department to value diversity in philosophy,” she stated in a May 2023 interview with a website called “What is it like to be a philosopher.”
Specifically, she shared how the department had hired philosophers who were not white males.
She stated:
The conversations we had as a department led us to think of diversity broadly so that it includes representational diversity and also philosophical diversity – difference philosophical approaches and standards. (Philosophical diversity, to me, requires not asking “Why is this philosophy?”) We have hired a number of philosophers who are not white men, but there’s only so much progress you can make through hiring given the limited resources at a public university. We’ve tried to take DEI goals seriously in all of our endeavors from graduate recruitment to colloquium speaker invitations to undergraduate pedagogy.
Her husband, UMinn researcher J.D. Walker, focuses on “DEI issues in STEM in higher education,” Tiberius said during the interview.
The university told The Fix the Bias Response Referral Network “[does] not take punitive action or conduct investigations. Instead, their role is to connect individuals with the necessary resources to support a campus environment that is welcoming and inclusive.”
Free speech litigation group warns about bias teams
A national free speech group that is currently suing Indiana University-Bloomington over its bias team provided further insights to The Fix about the harms of these systems.
“Policies like the University of Minnesota’s bias reporting system are designed to deter students from engaging in political debates and from questioning or challenging the campuses’ dominant ideology,” Executive Director Cherise Trump told The Fix via email.
“While debate, open inquiry, and challenging assumptions should be core tenets of higher education’s goal in seeking truth, universities increasingly prefer to achieve the opposite,” Trump said.
“These policies solicit anonymous reports from students on their peers for anything that is considered ‘bias,’” she said.
The bias teams “intentionally use vague and over broad language to capture all types of political speech so that someone expressing a view that another person happens to disagree with can easily be reported.”
Other common topics reported in the last school year at the University of Minnesota included criticism of transgender ideology and comments about Israel and Hamas.
“Sticker found on a doorway in Akerman hall with a definition of a woman,” one report states.
There were also several complaints about “TERF” stickers. “TERF” refers to “trans exclusionary radical feminists,” meaning women who oppose allowing men into locker rooms and onto female sports teams, but otherwise support the feminist agenda.
Multiple other reports refer to claims of antisemitism following the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel.
An anonymous reporter claimed that at a gathering of Jewish individuals, someone shouted profanities including “F*ck Israel” and “F*ck the Jews.” Another reporter described an on-campus protest in which a Jewish man was verbally assaulted.
Other students supporting Palestine have also filed bias reports, including a pro-Hamas reporter criticizing a message by university President Rebecca Cunningham because they claimed she favors Israelis.
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College Fix contributor Emma Arns is a student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville where she is studying business and political science.
Photo “Valerie Tiberius” by Valeria Tiberius / Lisa Miller.
