"Political Correctness"
During the mid-twentieth century, American higher education experienced a massive expansion, as the federal government dedicated resources to expanding the teaching and research capacities of the academy. At the same time, civil rights, feminist, antiwar, Third World, and gay rights movements pushed growing academic institutions to admit more women, students of color, and people from nonelite backgrounds. As the academy became more diverse, many students and faculty began demanding that their institutions better reflect their lived experiences. As Roderick Ferguson writes in We Demand: The University and Student Protest, “The increasing visibility of communities made up of immigrants, people of color, women, indigenous people, queers, transgender persons, and disabled people represent[ed] far more than a demographic change in numbers”; it also “signaled an epistemological shift of the highest order, a shift in how knowledge can be reorganized in political and academic contexts.”
As would be expected, however, such transformations faced a backlash. In the late 1980s, several academics published highly influential books bemoaning the humanities for having lost their way. Books like Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals (1990) fretted over how much of the academy seemed captured by multiculturalism, postmodernism, and moral relativism. Lynne Cheney’s 1988 National Endowment for the Humanities report, Humanities in America, lamented that students were being taught by political activist educators and therefore no longer learned about Western civilization and the “texts that have formed the foundation of the society in which they live.” This hand-wringing about the state of the humanities became popularized in the media under the banner of “political correctness” in 1991. Originally a term used among the Left to denote doctrinaire adherence to certain positions, “PC” was increasingly used among the Right as to refer to forms of speech that, as Christopher Newfield put it, “compromised free speech—or allegedly commonsense language—in order to avoid [causing] offense to a person or group.”
As John Wilson details in The Myth of Political Correctness, right-wing personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Dinesh D’Souza pushed hard on this narrative, supported by organizations like the National Association of Scholars. Right-wing donors including the Bradley, Olin, and Scaife Foundations funded outlets and individual scholars that produced a steady stream of material condemning political correctness. Stories of rampant political correctness filled the airwaves of right-wing radio, receiving wall-to-wall coverage on Limbaugh’s show and in other outlets. “PC” eventually made its way into the mainstream press, which reproduced a narrative about the supposed censoring of conservative views on college campuses. Through a process Wilson calls “mythmaking by anecdote,” exaggerated or often outright falsified stories painted a picture of rampant conservative victimization.