"Academics Aren't Laughing Anymore"

"With a few notable exceptions, the genre largely vanished around the turn of the century. What happened? One answer is that academe's devastation since the late 1990s has rendered it too grim and vulnerable a target for satirists. The gutting of public universities by right-wing politicians, the brute transformation of colleges into exploitative institutions that run on adjunct and graduate-student labor—these changes have resulted in a landscape so desolate it hardly seems worth mocking."

Andrew Kay at The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses the decline of academic satire.