Six words appear at the bottom of nearly every page of Bowling Green State University’s website: See it. Hear it. Report it.
The phrase lives underneath a map showing that the university’s roughly 20,000 total students hail from nearly every state in the country, though the vast majority come from Ohio. It is tucked under an announcement celebrating the university’s recent high scores on a student satisfaction survey and again on a page offering directions to its picturesque campus in the northwest corner of the state.
Those words ultimately lead to an online portal where members of the university community can report “concerns or information of alleged misconduct,” including complaints about BGSU’s so-called “campus climate.”
“Campus climate concerns can include actions that impact anyone in the community based on their identity (such as race, color, ethnicity, national origin, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, age, or religion),” officials wrote.
The university received 40 of those complaints in 2025, a year when higher education found itself under a microscope from both state and federal lawmakers, including for what some Ohio Republicans repeatedly described as a too-liberal culture.
These allegations, received by Signal Statewide via a public records request, depict issues ranging from reports of racial slurs and anti-LGBTQ+ messages to faculty microaggressions and anonymous cyberbullying.
While the reports show a slice of campus life at Bowling Green, the themes and patterns they reveal aren’t necessarily unique to one specific university.
Similar incidents happened at colleges nationwide last year. A student attending a small private college in California reported hearing his peers chant racial slurs outside his dorm room in April. Racist and anti-LGBTQ+ remarks were left on a whiteboard at Syracuse University in October. And Jewish college students across the country are reporting more antisemitic incidents, according to one estimate.
Yet these reports from BGSU, when viewed together, illustrate how broader national tensions are unfolding at college campuses during a politically charged time.
A look at Bowling Green’s campus climate complaints
The selected reports below are presented exactly how students, staff and others originally filed them. Identifying details were redacted by Bowling Green to comply with federal privacy laws. Signal Statewide redacted slurs and other language based on style and editorial standards.
Click the small arrow next to the word to expand the category and view the complaints.
What happens when a student files a complaint?
Bowling Green, along with its public university and community college peers, must abide by the Enact Campus Accountability and Modernization to Protect University Students (or CAMPUS) Act.
The state law passed in 2024. It required institutions to review procedures around dealing with student safety and campus culture, including by giving an online option where complaints could be filed anonymously.
But BGSU encouraged its community to raise concerns even before the law took effect, according to Katie Stygles, the university’s chief state and federal compliance officer and deputy chief community and well-being officer. She said they spend time educating students and others about how to file these grievances – and what happens when they do.
“We want people to make those reports,” she said.
While Stygles acknowledges the university is “certainly not in a vacuum that is separate from what’s happening in the world around us,” she said the number of campus culture complaints filed in 2025 aligns with previous years.
Forty-five submissions were made in 2024. The last seven months of 2023 saw 21 reports, according to data provided by BGSU.
Stygles said all complaints submitted online are viewed by an employee and rerouted to a different department if necessary. Each submission is followed up with “some contact made and support offered,” she said.
An investigation is launched if officials believe university policy was violated. Out of the 40 complaints filed in 2025, BGSU officials said seven rose to that level.
