With Harvard leading the way, as Harvey Silverglate observes, academic administrators have pulled the plug on parody:
[By 1990,] the strictures of political correctness had seeped into all levels of American higher education and had utterly destroyed the sense of humor of so many college and university students … this atmosphere stifled them from admitting … that they even got a joke involving matters of gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, or any other hot-button issue at the center of the nation’s culture wars … the intellectual rot … spread to the “real world” within a single generation. All of this displaced outrage, by Obama and many of his supporters, suddenly made sense.Interestingly, it was Harvard Law School … that early grappled with the appropriateness of punishing students for engaging in satire and parody. With the eyes of the higher-education elite watching, the fabled law school established, in the early ’90s, that a written parody poking fun at a female member of the academic community is no different than punishable “sexual harassment.”