Pennsylvania’s Human Relations Commission is reviewing a series of discrimination complaints by faculty and staff members against the Penn State campuses to see if, taken together, they warrant an official investigation into bias in the system, which serves 80,000 students on two dozen campuses. According to the Centre Daily Times, a newspaper in State College, Pa., the commission’s staff will evaluate the complaints and issue a report by March recommending whether the panel should undertake an official inquiry.

The commission’s chairman, Stephen Glassman, could not provide specifics on the nature of the complaints, but he told the newspaper that there were quite a few of them from multiple campuses and that many involve members of minority groups. A Penn State spokesman said the commission had received about 100 complaints involving the university over the last five years, and only three of them had resulted in a finding against Penn State.

There’s no indication that the Human Relations Commission’s review is connected with a recent inquiry by a state legislative committee into allegations of political bias against conservative students in public-college classrooms and indoctrination by left-wing professors. The committee, which held hearings in 2005 and 2006, concluded that such campus bias is rare.