Under these statutes, the bar for what counts as harassment is high: a pattern of severe behavior that “effectively denies access to an educational opportunity or benefit.”48 The pattern of behavior must also be discriminatory—that is, directed at someone who belongs to a protected class named in the statute, such as gender, race, or religion.49 In practice, however, the bar has been lowered; many universities use the concept of harassment to justify punishing one-time utterances that could be construed as offensive but don’t really look anything like harassment—and some don’t have anything to
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