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 do with race or gender. For example, in 2005, at the University of Central Florida, a student was charged with harassment through “personal abuse” for creating a Facebook group that called a student government candidate a “Jerk and a Fool.”
