Shutting down BiasIncident.com is a difficult and very personal decision for me. Since its launch in late March of this year, positive and negative feedback has flooded in. With this letter, I hope to respond to this feedback as best as I can and put this chapter of my life behind me.
I thank everyone who successfully identified my intentions in creating this site. I appreciate the kind words, enthusiasm, and continued support of my site's fans. To this day, I am still impressed by the cleverness of the content on the site, centered around capturing faux pas at Tufts.
Other students were not fond of the site, and some of them responded without tact. Should you choose to download and read the archive of incidents, you will identify members of the community who responded to adversity with inelegance, hatred, and ad hominem attacks. These individuals, for the most part, hid behind the anonymity of the Internet to spew their poisonous rhetoric.
Fortunately, those who responded in this style were drowned out by a more thoughtful method of disagreement. Many of those who took offense to the site contacted me via email, seeking to discuss my intentions. In the last two months, I've sat down with students and learned what it is about the site that bothers them.
In these conversations, I heard stories of students who feel that BiasIncident.com attacks legitimate concerns about bias at Tufts. I met students who feel the site attacks them personally. One student challenged my prioritization of one hundred people's laughter over one person's tears. Regardless of how these conversations began, in having them, we grew to understand each other. After telling the truth and listening to what these individuals had to say, I departed with handshakes and promises of friendship.
To these wonderful people who met me with an open mind, I say, "thank you". People like these, who can disagree without being disagreeable, give me hope for a more thoughtful Tufts campus. In the end, it is the kindness and understanding of these considerate individuals that most influenced the lessons and conclusions I take away from this episode.
I believe that objection to and support of BiasIncident.com revolves primality around a difference of vocabulary. To some people, the phrase "bias incident" refers to the KSA incident in April of 2009. To others, it strictly refers to the media circus and administration's response to that incident. To another group, bias incidents are a subtle form of prejudice occurring daily — a hurdle we must overcome as a society.
Clearly, the phrase means all of these things simultaneously. With this fundamental disagreement of terminology, different interpretations of the site surface. Interpreting malicious intent, some students have urged me to take the site down. After learning what I have learned, and understanding how assaulted many of my peers feel, I am complying with their wishes.
That said, I have an obligation to protect the content generated on BiasIncident.com; I believe in the conservation of creativity, the idea that creative works should not be destroyed. BiasIncident.com was an exercise in free speech and humor, and not a mistake. To take the site down is my own decision; no one is forcing me to do so. Students who responded with venomous tongues did not contribute to my decision.
In releasing the content of the site under a Creative Commons license, users are free to keep, share, and remix the content submitted. However, by taking the site down, I am doing what I can to end my contribution to a feeling of subtle, daily prejudice.
In its two month run, BiasIncident.com captured over 550 content items from Tufts students. The content archive, with the exception of removing superfluous instances of "Bias Incident?" from the end of submissions, is unedited. I encourage you to download the archive and compare the incidents I approved with those I did not. Unfortunately, many of the rejected ones are offensive, the precise reason I rejected them. Besides preserving the content, my release of the BiasIncident.com archive should sway anyone who mistakenly thinks I created the site with malicious intent.
I have done my personal best with this decision, and I am comfortable with it. I believe this course of action is the only defensible one to all of aforementioned groups. The creation, maintenance, and shutdown of BiasIncident.com has been a learning experience for me. Now, I hope to walk away from this experience and move on with my life.
As always, If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, I encourage you to get in touch with me. Take care, and have a wonderful summer.
Your friend,
Ricky