Ryan Ansloan of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) says administrators asked an outside firm to investigate the university's past failures to deal with Title IX complaints.
The resulting "Other Conduct of Concern" policy would reportedly oversee discrimination and harassment complaints that do not violate CSU policies or local, state, or federal laws. It requires employees at all 23 campuses to address any and all reports of "verbal abuse," "intimidating behavior," "microaggressions that are not pervasive," "bullying," "hostile language," and "acts of bias."
"This very broad policy would address not just items that are unlawful, but it would specifically address things that don't even violate CSU policy, the things that are impossible to define," says Ansloan.
He describes it as a reporting system in which any word or action someone finds offensive can be reported and investigated.
"When you solicit reports of anything that might cause one person offense, you're going to find a lot of offended individuals," the FIRE spokesman warns.
He says this poorly constructed policy could open CSU up to a lot of litigation.
It is still in a draft form, set to be finalized this month and submitted to the California Auditor in early January. But Ansloan hopes it will undergo serious revisions before its implementation.
However, trustees who spoke at a Nov. 21 board meeting when the draft policy was presented had nothing but praise for it, arguing it was needed to help fix the CSU "culture."
