Making A Fat Joke Could Land You In Hot Water At This Elite University

Northwestern University, a prestigious college in Illinois, recently adopted a policy that would punish students for making fat jokes.

The university included weight and height on its list of “protected characteristics” in its 2024 discrimination, harassment and sexual misconduct policy, placing the traits alongside attributes like race and gender. Making jokes about these protected characteristics runs afoul of the policy and can result in sanctions for students, staff or faculty, according to the university.

“Inappropriate physical contact, comments, questions, advances, jokes, epithets, or demands based on one or more actual or perceived protected characteristics,” the policy reads. It also prohibits memes poking fun at fatness as students are told to refrain from posting “derogatory, demeaning, or hostile materials” related to weight on the internet.

Punishment for violating the harassment policy ranges all the way from a verbal warning to expulsion, depending on how severe the university determines that infraction was, according to the policy. Northwestern encourages members of its community to report violations of its harassment policy online, and maintains records of these complaints for at least seven years, according to university documents.

“This new policy is a heavy burden on free speech and has an extra-large chilling effect on campus culture,” Manhattan Institute senior fellow Ilya Shapiro told the 🏢Daily Caller News Foundation. “You’d think Northwestern administrators would focus on weightier issues.”

While Northwestern now has rules on the books that could be used to punish students for making jokes about people’s weight, the university previously rewarded pro-Palestinian student demonstrators who occupied campus grounds by