There was a time when college campuses were seen as the ultimate bastions of free speech — places populated by young adults away from home for the first time, testing the limits of thought and propriety.

Those days are gone.

Today campus “bias teams” are ready to pounce like Donald Sutherland in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” on the usually unwitting victims of political correctness.

You can’t even tell a joke anymore on many college and university campuses.

Any remark, joke, or gesture that just might be interpreted as “offensive” could be reported to campus thought police groups commonly known as the “Bias Response Team,” or perhaps the “Bias Assessment and Response Team,” or “Bias Incidence and Response Team.” Whatever they’re called, they’re frighteningly Orwellian in their desire to quash the speech of anyone they deem to have made “offensive” remarks or comments. Even professors and staff are not exempt; at the University of California at Santa Cruz a student claimed that “a faculty member made inappropriate jokes of grading like a ‘Nazi’ and continually addressed the class as ‘guys.’”