Another found the same racial slur scrawled on the cover of a biography of President Barack Obama in a campus library.

A skit put on by three sororities at a fundraiser in which a student mimicked an Asian accent led to another complaint.

And a graduate student wrote to UW officials because he was having a dispute with a professor that he said “appeared racialized.”

The reports are among dozens filed last school year with the UW-Madison Bias Response Team, which investigates acts of discrimination. They depict a range of incidents and encounters that students experienced during a year in which their campus was roiled by high-profile examples of racism and protests over the climate for minorities at the predominantly white university. UW officials provided copies of the reports to the State Journal this week.

The number of incidents reported more than tripled during the school year, from 18 in the second half of 2015 to 66 in the first half of 2016. Officials attributed the increase in part to students knowing more about the bias incident reporting process.

Many of the 84 total reports were prompted by the discovery of racist, sexist, white supremacist or homophobic graffiti on and around campus.

A spate of neo-Nazi graffiti Downtown led to several reports, and police later arrested three people, none of them students, on vandalism charges.

Others concern interactions students had while walking around campus or Downtown Madison.

A Latino student recalled hearing offensive comments about Mexicans from intoxicated people on a street and in an apartment elevator; another said a woman shouted “ISIS is coming!” at her as she walked with a scarf around her head on a cold night.

Some are the types of incidents students have described as micro-aggressions — small slights that accumulate to make people feel unwelcome on campus.

An African-American student was troubled, for instance, when a teaching assistant asked if the student knew about a rap group because the student was the only black person in the room.

Still others involved less overt situations in which people felt their race played a role in how they were treated.

One person recounted being kicked off of a Metro Transit bus along with a group of African-American friends because the group was singing; the student described the incident as “busing while black.”

Joshua Moon Johnson, a UW official who leads the bias response team, said the reports help the university track when and where discriminatory incidents happen, as well as who is being targeted.

Johnson said officials also offer support to students who report experiencing discrimination, which might include counseling or a connection to a support group.

Because encountering discrimination can affect students academically, he said, the team often asks them, “What do you need right now for you to be a successful student?”

The reporting system is also meant to hold people accountable — officials said last month that nine UW students were formally disciplined for their roles in six bias incidents.

‘Goal is to educate people’

In less severe cases, Johnson said other students reported as the perpetrators of bias incidents have taken part in a restorative justice process, with the goal of mediating disputes and showing students how actions they thought were harmless can negatively affect people.

“We don’t try to take a punishment stance,” Johnson said. “Our main goal is to educate people.”

In one case reported in June, an official with UW’s freshman orientation program said two UW football players taking part in an exercise in which students were asked to raise their hands instead did a Nazi salute.

Johnson declined to say what action the university took in response to that incident, and emails seeking comment from Athletic Department officials on Friday were not returned.

The players have not been identified, and UW officials redacted the names of students included in the reports.

Speaking generally, Johnson said incidents such as the one involving the football players are an opportunity to educate students and “help them understand the impact that might have on the community.”

Some reported for speech

Some free speech advocates have questioned whether the bias reporting process could stifle open discussions on campuses such as UW.

Conservatives in particular have raised concerns that left-leaning students could file reports against people they disagree with for expressing their opinions.

After a student protest over UW’s racial climate in April, one student filed a bias report alleging that another student who disagreed with the protest interrupted her and wouldn’t listen to her opinions about why the marchers’ concerns were valid.

The reporting student said the other student “implied that my opinions are invalid which is an indication that I am not as good as her.”

But few of the reports centered on differences of opinion, and conservatives weren’t the only ones reported for their speech.

In April, a student filed a report after seeing a professor’s post on Facebook that expressed support for Denzel McDonald, a UW student arrested that spring for spray-painting political graffiti on several buildings.

The student accused the professor, Karma Chavez, of “encouraging hatred and violence” toward police, adding, “This is incredibly disgusting, and personally offensive.”

Chavez left UW-Madison this summer to join the faculty at the University of Texas-Austin. She said Friday that a reporter’s email was the first she had heard of the report and hadn’t read it.

UW officials did not say how either of the incidents were handled, but Johnson said that disagreements are “not the spirit or the reason behind why the bias reporting system was created.”