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.’”

The University of Colorado, for example, asks people to report “offensive” comments at its website — and the “offender” doesn’t even have to be a student or affiliated with the university. Here is a screenshot of how U of C encourages reporting of these crimes against humanity.

The University of Oregon has a handy-dandy pdf at its website which lists a compilation of all the incidents in which some fragile crybabies reported being butthurt by a fellow student.

These Red Guard wannabes have so infected the hallowed halls of higher education that even comedians — most notably Jerry Seinfeld — are refusing to play college campuses anymore. In an interview last year, Seinfeld told a reporter, “I don’t play colleges, but I hear a lot of people tell me, ‘Don’t go near colleges. They’re so PC.’” They just want to use these words: ‘That’s racist;’ ‘That’s sexist;’ ‘That’s prejudice,’” he said. “They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.”

Seinfeld is not alone.

Thankfully, not all students are infected by the bias bug.

My son-in-law is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. He and my daughter were high school sweethearts whose relationship survived the distance between their respective schools and the rigors of a service academy. Often she would share with me reports from USNA in his letters to her.

She told me that during ‘plebe summer’ her boyfriend’s roommates spared no expense in mocking his Latino background. Words like ‘wetback’ were directed at him, even though his background is not Mexican. I winced at what I thought were bad manners, but found that the remarks were merely young males bonding during what was a most challenging time in their 18-year-old lives.

He survived the lampoons of his friends, as well as Annapolis, and upon graduation that band of brothers became each other’s groomsmen at their weddings, and even godfathers to eventual children.

What would’ve been the result if the very incorrect humor exhibited by these midshipmen — not to mention the constant hazing by upperclassmen — was curtailed by a thought police brigade at Annapolis? Would they have turned out to be the tough and resilient officers that USNA produces? I think not.

Students at liberal arts colleges and universities certainly do not undergo the rigors of a service academy, nor should it be required that they do so. However, these institutions should expect their students to act like the young adults they supposedly are, and that means to stop enabling the kindergarten level crybaby and tattle-tale antics of their special snowflake students through inane groups like “Bias Report Teams.”