Word has reached the general public about the bias response team at U. Northern Colorado and people are not impressed.

Heat Street reports.

EXCLUSIVE: Emails Show University Scrambling to Contain Damage Amid Backlash Over Censorship

In June, Heat Street wrote a series of stories about the Bias Response Team at the University of Northern Colorado and its efforts to clamp down on debates inside and outside the classroom that it believed could make students feel uncomfortable. The school was trying to shield students from discussions about current issues like transgender people. It was also instructing students, via posters put up around the campus, to avoid seemingly innocuous words and phrases like “crazy” or “hey guys” that it believed could “trigger” other students.

Now, a new batch of emails reviewed exclusively by Heat Street and the Greeley Tribune show that the publication of those stories sparked a backlash from politicians, professors and prospective parents who were concerned about the chilling effect of the Bias Response Team on free speech. The emails also show administrators at the college scrambling to do damage control as that negative reaction snowballed.

In one private email, UNC’s president, Kay Norton, responded to Heat Street’s reportage: “Well. The larger conversation is clearly necessary. It looks like the three articles cover everything they could cover (yeah, I may be naïve). I’m hoping we’ll get a little respite while we get our act together about how we are going to handle this better in the future.”

Meanwhile, Colorado State Sen. John Cooke, a Republican, ripped the university’s censorship in an open letter, which Norton later bemoaned in an email as an “unfortunate escalation of the reaction to the Bias Response Team.” Records from UNC’s lobbyist show that Cooke was also “forwarding the email [he wrote to Norton] to all the Republican senators to discuss what further action can be taken!”

Less publicly, Republican State Sen. Jack Tate also expressed his frustration over the Bias Response Team. “If in fact the University has been engaged in a most cynical, Marxist type of social engineering, then you can count me as someone who feels extremely betrayed.