The University of Iowa has been one of a very few universities to receive praise from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education for maintaining no written policies that FIRE says infringe on constitutionally protected free speech. But in a post on the organization’s blog, the Torch, FIRE’s director of legal and public advocacy, Samantha Harris, writes that Iowa has lost that imprimatur because it now has two statements on sexual harassment.

The first, she says, conforms to Supreme Court and Department of Education definitions of sexual harassment: “persistent, repetitive, or egregious conduct directed at a specific individual or group of individuals that a reasonable person would interpret, in the full context in which the conduct occurs, as harassment of a sexual nature.” But according to another university Web site, sexual harassment is defined in far broader terms: “when somebody says or does something sexually related that you don’t want them to say or do.”

Harris warns the university that “it needs to get rid of this new definition immediately and inform students that they can only be punished for engaging in actual harassment of the sort described in the university’s original definition.”