That’s the title of an article I published in the October 1994 issue of Public Affairs Quarterly (8.4, pp. 331-340). It is now available online, and
you can find it here. It begins this way:
On university and college campuses today there is a movement popularly known as “political correctness.” Although difficult to define precisely, I think it is fair to say that political correctness refers to a web of interconnected, though not mutually dependent, ideological beliefs that have challenged the traditional nature of the university as well as traditional curriculum, standards of excellence, and views about justice, truth, and the objectivity of knowledge; while simultaneously accentuating our cultural, gender, class, and racial differences in the name of campus diversity. On some college campuses it takes on the status of an orthodoxy. Typically, the politically correct (PC) movement is politically leftist, although some of its harshest critics are also on the political left, just as many critics of McCarthyism were on the political right.
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