Professional comedians are already avoiding college campuses but now, even average students can get into trouble for jokes.

The Daily Beast reports.

On a College Campus? Don’t Try to Tell a Joke

Tell a joke, and you might make someone laugh. But tell a joke on a college campus, and you might make someone report you to the administration’s Bias Response Team (BRT)—an Orwellian bureau that investigates students and faculty members for saying the wrong thing.

The wrong thing could be any remark, gesture, joke, or jape that offends anyone for virtually any reason. If the university’s spies are listening, you could be ratted out to a panel of administrators who keep files on alleged perpetrators, suggest ways for offenders to be more politically correct, and even submit their names to disciplinary committees.

Dispatches from the bias incident case files are illuminating. The University of Oregon’s BRT publishes a yearly review (PDF) of its activities that includes summaries of all 85 bias incidents investigated by the administration last year. They will come as a shock to anyone who mistakenly believes that universities do an adequate job of protecting free expression on campus.

“A student reported that a professor wrote an insulting comment on their online blog,” according to the case files of the BRT at the University of Oregon. “[We] met with the reporter, and a BRT Case Manager held a professional development conversation with the professor.”

In another case, “a student reported that a sign encouraging cleaning up after oneself was sexist. A BRT Manager followed up to ensure the sign was removed.”

A staff member who made a “culturally insensitive remark” was reported to the dean of students.

And when an anonymous student filed a report complaining that the student newspaper didn’t feature enough transgender writers, the BRT met with its editors. The case files called this “an educational conversation.” A more objective chronicler might call it the university trying to intimidate a student-run press into making editorial changes.