If you go to this school, you better be careful when you’re telling Jokes.

Samantha Harris of the FIRE blog reports.

Speech Code of the Month: Southwest Minnesota State University

FIRE announces its Speech Code of the Month for November 2015: Southwest Minnesota State University (SMSU).

SMSU’s Prohibited Code of Conduct for students bans “cultural intolerance,” defined as follows:

Any verbal or physical contact directed at an individual or group such as racial slurs, jokes, or other behaviors that demean or belittle a person’s race, color, gender preference, national origin, culture, history or disability, is prohibited. [Emphasis added.]

SMSU is a public university, which means it cannot lawfully maintain policies—such as this one—that violate students’ First Amendment right to free speech. In cases too numerous to mention, courts across the country have held that the First Amendment does not permit the prohibition of speech simply because someone finds it offensive. In Papish v. Board of Curators of the University of Missouri, 410 U.S. 667, 670 (1973), for example, the Supreme Court ruled that “the mere dissemination of ideas—no matter how offensive to good taste—on a state university campus may not be shut off in the name alone of ‘conventions of decency.’”

See also Saxe v. State College Area School District, 240 F.3d 200, 206 (3d Cir. 2001) (holding that there is “no question that the free speech clause protects a wide variety of speech that listeners may consider deeply offensive … .”); Doe v. University of Michigan, 721 F. Supp. 852, 863 (E.D. Mich. 1989) (“Nor could the University proscribe speech simply because it was found to be offensive, even gravely so, by large numbers of people.”).