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 agreeing to many of their demands. Northwestern President Michael Schill testified before Congress in May that no students had been expelled or suspended for participating in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, including an encampment on university grounds.

Universities across the nation are providing students with courses in the emerging field of “fat studies.”

Northwestern, for instance, is holding a course titled “Critical Fat Studies” in its gender studies department this year that will expose students to “explorations of the construction [of] the body through gender, race, class, size, sexuality, ability and/or culture.” Princeton University previously offered a course titled “FAT: The F-Word and the Public Body” while Brown University held a week-long summer course called “Politics of Fatness” which had students examine “fatness” through “feminist-gender” and racial lenses.

“Protected characteristics have long been limited to constitutionally protected categories, like race and religion, and immutable characteristics, like sex or disability,” Manhattan Institute legal fellow Tim Rosenberger told the DCNF. “Excessive body fat falls into neither category and, as explored in my recent piece in the New York Post, is something to be remedied rather than embraced. Prospective students, and tuition-paying parents alike, should question the value of ‘elite’ universities that panic over fat jokes while larding students with unmanageable debt in exchange for meager education.”

Northwestern University did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

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