“My immediate reaction was shock,” said Khallid Love, a senior and the former president of the school’s Black Men’s Awareness Group, describing the performance as a “caricature” mocking African culture. After a friend sent him a video of the performance the night it happened, Love immediately took to Twitter, joining the many other students who voiced their rage online.

“Can we please let Princeton know that this is not okay? Ignorance is no longer an excuse,” one student tweeted, linking to a video of a similar performance by Urban Congo last November. “Primitivism at Princeton,” read another student’s tweet.

Many others, however, thought the performance was innocuous. “If I’d seen it on Saturday Night Live, I would have found it satirical and funny,” said A.J. Ohiwerei, a sophomore who is half-Nigerian. He said he wasn’t personally offended by the performance, and that he only realized how potentially hurtful it was when he saw others taking offense. Some, on the other hand, felt that those who were offended were being oversensitive. In a Facebook post that got more than 400 likes, one sophomore criticized the controversy and called it the work of “butthurt narcissists.” And one post on Yik Yak, the anonymous social media app, read: “If Princeton is so damaging, leave. Good luck finding somewhere that can accommodate your hypersensitivity and neurosis.” It was upvoted—Yik Yak’s version of a “like” on Facebook—more than 70 times.

Regardless, the performance clearly got people to reflect on the propriety of such actions. Even Urban Congo's former president, who declined to comment for this article, issued a public apology on Facebook shortly after the event, essentially acknowledging that it was in poor taste.

This type of controversy isn’t unique to Princeton. The same weekend that the Urban Congo controversy unfolded in Princeton, Harvard University experienced a fiasco of its own: Parody posters that appeared to satirize a new student magazine founded by students of color mysteriously appeared on campus ahead of the publication’s launch. After officials and students behind the magazine deemed the posters offensive and misleading, they were quickly taken down. But that then gave rise to criticisms that free speech was being trampled upon.

As the Princeton and Harvard examples will attest, while the use and misuse of humor and satire—from performances and parodies to party themes and publications—are prevalent across university campuses, the line between good-natured humor and racism is often hard to define. So too is the balance between racial tolerance and freedom of speech.

Last month’s scandal involving the University of Oklahoma’s chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, in which members of the fraternity were seen on video chanting an explicitly racist song, was overtly inappropriate; the university ultimately expelled two students and closed the chapter. But many other incidents aren’t as clear cut. Fraternity party themes often run afoul of political correctness: Tau Kappa Epsilon’s “MLK Black Party” at Arizona State University, for example, or the “Colonial Bros and Nava-Hos” party hosted by several fraternities at California Polytechnic State University. Meanwhile, parody publications like the Koala, the student newspaper at the University of California, San Diego, and the 2012 April Fool’s issue of Boston University’s Daily Free Press have drawn scrutiny for poking fun at serious topics. (The latter included a spoof story about the Snow White dwarves raping a female student.) As universities grapple with what’s racist, offensive, or otherwise inappropriate, they must also deal with the question of how to reconcile their mission of safeguarding their diverse student communities and their duty to uphold the right to free speech and open inquiry—even if the subject at issue is very politically incorrect.