
On May 27, a staff member at the University of Colorado Boulder filed a bias report. The offense? A colleague had written the phrase "just get it done" in an email. The report classified this as "hostile and aggressive language" requiring institutional follow-up.
The person who filed the complaint didn't even witness the alleged hostility firsthand. The report states plainly: "I have not personally witnessed these incidents, but I have been informed this staff member feels this has occurred." So someone heard that someone else felt that an email telling them to complete a task was aggressive, and that was enough to trigger the university's bias reporting machinery.
Another report, filed May 8, escalated the complaint further: "I'm reporting this meeting in case the assertions of aggressive and hostile language needs follow up." Not because anything happened in the meeting. Just in case the assertions need follow-up. Preemptive bias reporting — for the file.
CU Boulder's bias report system processes complaints across categories. Roughly 10 percent of cases involve race or ethnicity discrimination. About 5 percent involve gender pronoun issues. And apparently some percentage now involves managers who use direct language in professional emails.
Dominic Coletti, a program officer at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — FIRE — noted that universities should "do an initial review to determine whether the conduct would violate university policy if the facts alleged are assumed to be true" before pursuing a report. He also warned that "the university should not contact the subject of the report during this review to avoid chilling potentially protected speech." In other words, even a free-speech organization has to remind a public university that telling someone to finish their work isn't a civil rights violation.
Coletti went further: "In general, policies that simply blacklist specific phrases do not allow for the kind of analysis the First Amendment requires universities undertake before punishing expression." That's a polite way of saying what the rest of us are thinking — you can't ban phrases at a public university because they hurt someone's feelings.
CU Boulder spokesperson Jade Young-Tucker was given the opportunity to respond. The university's defense, to the extent it offered one, didn't address the central absurdity: that a system designed to catch genuine discrimination is being used to flag workplace emails with the emotional intensity of a Post-it note.
Other reports in the same batch included complaints about employees being "repeatedly called 'dumb [f-word] Americans'" and told "they didn't count as diverse or POC." Those are real bias complaints. Actual slurs, actual exclusion. And they're sitting in the same system — weighted with the same institutional seriousness — as someone who got upset about a four-word email.
That's the real damage. When everything is hostile language, nothing is. When "just get it done" sits in the same complaint queue as a racial slur, the system isn't protecting anyone. It's just generating paperwork.


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