Greg Lukianoff on "The Second Great Age of Political Correctness"

Detailed, interesting, and thoughtful; check it out, here at Reason. Lukianoff is the head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

Comments

[ScottK]

Anti-education movement conservatives hold fewer slots at institutions of higher education.

This is my shocked face.

[Rossami]

You have the timing backwards. As the article documents, conservatives were increasingly shut out of the higher education community starting 30 years ago. The conservative backlash against higher education didn't start until about 10 or 15 years ago.

You may be shocked but your ignorance perpetuates the problem.

[Queen Amalthea]

Sorry, Nixon and Agnew regularly attacked academics, ditto Reagan (going way back to when he was Governor).

[Rossami]

So did Eisenhower and Kennedy. Those attacks were not the same as the current attacks.

[Queen Amalthea]

Sure, totes different, calling them names, cutting their funding, totes.

I mean, you know the term political correctness was first used in a speech by George *H* Bush. That was a bit more than 10-15 years ago.

[Michael P]

Get a room, you two!

[Commenter_XY]

Ah....The nattering nabobs of negativity. Brings back memories. 🙂

[grb]

You're that old too?

[Ben_]

Not ignorance. Lying or trolling.

[DaivdBehar]

He does not mention this. All PC is case, you vile lawyer scumbag traitors to this country. Your hierarchy must be arrested, tried and summarily executed in the court basement. It is promoting the interests of the Chinese Commie Party, and for its rent seeking, resulting in the destruction of our way of life.

All PC starts as avoiding ruinous litigation by the scumbag lawyer profession.

[Queen Amalthea]

It is amazing that academe isn't more welcome to nutjobs like Behar. Really amazing.

[DaivdBehar]

You deny the chromosomal expression of every human cell of your body. Who is the nutjob?

[Queen Amalthea]

You are Mayor McNutt. Look at what you say regularly. It's more nutty than squirrel heaven. You're a walking testimony as to why academics don't welcome Trumpistas like yourself.

[Michael P]

Sorry, that comment should have been here.

Get a room, you two!

[DaivdBehar]

I date XX people, not XY chromosome people.

[David Nieporent]

Um, paying a camgirl is not considered "dating."

[DaveM]

Here are ratios of self-identified liberal faculty members to conservative faculty members, over time:

- 1996: 2-to-1
- 2001: 5-to-1
- 2019: 9-to-1

I believe they call that an echo chamber. Give the article a read. It's pretty interesting.

[bernard11]

Did you ever think that this reflects growth in irrationality among conservatives over the time period?

[DaivdBehar]

You want to end this Chinese Commie attack on our way of life. Arrest scumbag federal appellate court judges, try them for their insurrection against our nation, and for their promotion of the interests of the Chinese Commie Party. Execute them. To deter.

[Queen Amalthea]

Authoritarian's autistic acrimony.

[DaivdBehar]

That is just a personal insult by a scary clown.

[Queen Amalthea]

It's true noting your authoritarian autistic acrimony is a personal insult. Your coulrophobia is another topic.

[DaivdBehar]

I support PC. Zero tolerance for woke. The slightest woke remark should result in the shutting down of the entire university.

[John F. Carr]

Revenge for the blacklists of the 1950s?

[Queen Amalthea]

The blacklists of the 1950's were backed by considerable government threat of (and the actual taking of) action.

[John F. Carr]

A substantial fraction of the hostile environment is in public schools and counts as government action. As the article notes legal recourse is at least theoretically available against public school speech codes. As it could have been in the 1950s, to the extent federal courts took the First Amendment seriously then. (That was more of a 1960s thing.)

[Queen Amalthea]

I'm talking criminal action. And at the time SCOTUS didn't much stand in the way. Apples and oranges.

[Cal Cetín]

Of course the situations are different.

Giving allegiance to a regime which matched Hitler in its murderousness is hardly the same as using the wrong pronouns.

[Sebastian Cremmington]

Republicans in 1995–Chinese smoke Marlboros so I support free trade with China!

Republicans in 2021–FREE TIBET!!!

[Seamus]

FREE TIBET! may have been Republicans in 2010, but Republicans today are FREE XINJIANG!

[N/A]

When I read "Second Great Age of Political Correctness" in this post, I thought: "Second Age? When was the First? Was that like in PCU?"

So I was quite pleased to see PCU referenced in the article's initial sentence. This sentence shortly thereafter, however, troubled me: "Not because the movie was especially good—it wasn't."

Wrong, sir. Wrong. And not least for this moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5viHvbNDfE.

[Dan Schiavetta]

I ascribe Mr. Lukianoff's historical misanalysis to the fact that he is not old enough to have lived through some of this stuff personally. What we dig up in archives is not always what actually happened or what people were actually saying at the time.

[Jmaie]

Care to share a mistake or 3?

[Dan Schiavetta]

"P.C." started as a joke among progressives on campus, circa 1971. "Let's get a hamburger" was P.I. and "let's get a burrito" was P.C. It was applied to the most trivial choices.

Those of us in human services in the early 1980's got big kicks out of making fun of "shelters for left-handed Lithuanian youth" and how some bald people should be called "follically challenged". It was only in the later 1980's that conservatives even understood what the issue meant let alone made an issue of it.

It reached a peak at the end of the 1980's when people like Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin started arguing that offensive language was "real rape". Law professors started eliminating discussions of rape in criminal law courses for fear of offending people. Conservatives were not interested in the topic of rape at all and so didn't get into the discussion. So the pushback came from progressives like Nat Hentoff and Michael Kinsley. At the time Mr. Lukianoff was 14 years old.

[Absaroka]

Having been alive - indeed well into adulthood - at the times you are discussing, I think you are making the mistake of assuming your particular experiences must be universal.

[Dan Schiavetta]

I went on what I saw and heard and did not cut myself off from conservatives. Perhaps to some extent what you say is true, but I was "at the center" of this controversy both in human services and in law school.

The larger point here is that one cannot research pre-internet events with the same confidence as with events after (say) 1995. Before that, most of what people said and heard was not preserved, unless you were in one of the writing or broadcasting professions. Only a very incomplete picture can be obtained which I have attempted here to supplement somewhat. With the internet and especially the blogosphere, many more voices are preserved that were not preserved in the 1970's and 1980's.

[Toranth]

Mao Zedong in the 1960s used the term to describe political ideas that are "correct" - in that case, those aligned with the Chinese Communist Party. Ideas that were "politically incorrect" were the ones that get you sent to the camps or "interviewed" by the Red Guard.

A meaning it held during the Soviet years, and still holds today.

[Bob from Ohio]

"What we dig up in archives is not always what actually happened or what people were actually saying at the time."

Who needs to do research?

captcrisis: History is only the anecdotes I recall.

[Jmaie]

Care to share a mistake or three?

[Jimmy the Dane]

As someone who spent a decent amount of time on college campuses during this period of time, I can tell you that the historical record does not reflect the actual craziness that was ongoing at the time. You can find some in the student newspapers and local media, but because most of it was confined to the boundaries of the college, little of it bleed into anything more than that. For the longest time if you wanted any "real world" accounts, the alt.news groups of the early internet were your best source.

When Silverglate and Kors dropped Shadow University, that was the first time the public, at large, became aware of the issue despite the fact it had been raging on campus for years prior. Just that no one really took it seriously outside of those confines because the culture, as a whole, wasn't largely accepting of the ideas being forwarded. (Not so much when you fast forward 30 years though...)

[Jimmy the Dane]

Lukianoff won't say it, probably because he can't and be consistent with F.I.R.E's non-partisan position, but the problem has always been the institutional left holed up in higher education. (Notice I said institutional left in higher ed, not the left in general). This was the problem in the 80's and 90's and mostly the problem now. The difference is that now the institutional higher ed left is more much aligned with the left in general. That was not so a generation ago. Since then, the left has generally abandoned free speech and fairness as a principle. Also the shift from "equality" to "equity" is another prime reason. In some measurable ways "equality" has been successful at leveling the playing field in many aspects of life. And when you look at that you think "do we need things like affirmative action anymore" (which is a fair question). But, this is dangerous to the left which is why they invented "equity" which is an ideology that demands something like affirmative action, even at a more aggressive level then what was conceived back in the 70's. And this is why we are at the place we are today.

The right doesn't come to the table with clean hands here either. They were happy in the broader aspects of the culture wars of the 80's and 90's to use many of the same tactics the left is now deploying to "get" them. "Turnabout is fair play" as a professor of mine used to say and now the right gets a taste of it. Also, ignoring the sleeping giant that was building up the higher education administrative state was something that at least the policy experts at Heritage and elsewhere knew was going to be a problem down the line. But, the right did nothing about it. There were some bad terrorists to get on the other side of the world, so that is where the political capital went instead of taking care these longer term domestic issues. So here in 2021, almost 2022, if you are right of center ask yourself if you are happy that so much time and money was spent on those wars....

[Sebastian Cremmington]

I have a bigger problem with being called a “traitor” because I opposed the very real war in Iraq. The original PC war was actually positive…while taking offense when referred to as “him” and men swimming in women’s NCAA events because they got their balls chopped off in a La Quinta motel room and pretending Islam is a good religion is not “positive”.

[Brett Bellmore]

Well, I'm a right of center libertarian, so, no, I'm not happy. Though if the USSR hadn't been opposed in its efforts to subjugate much of the world I might have ended up a lot less happy. Still, I think even the hot parts of the Cold war that were actually necessary could have been done better. (But what endeavor could that not be said of?)

But, yes, the need to do something about the left's long march through the institutions has been obvious for decades. Half a century or more, even. People have been screaming about that at the fringes of the right for that long, and never got any purchase. I think because of a combination of Stockholm syndrome in the Republican caucus in Congress after that long, long period of the Democrats dominating, and the institutional GOP being captured by business interests, and not interested in giving the ideological right anything but lip service.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

On one side: reason, education, progress, tolerance, science, modernity, inclusiveness. Strong research and teaching institutions favoring academic freedom, reason, and science. Successful, modern, educated, reasoning communities.

On the other: backwardness, intolerance (gay-bashing, racism, misogyny, xenophobia), insularity, superstition, dogma, ignorance. Backwater religious schooling and homeschooling whose censorship flatters dogma and superstition. Can't-keep-up backwaters.

Straddling the line: Authoritarianism, freedom.

This constitutes or explains nearly everything one might wish to know about modern America.

Except, however, in FIRE's telling, for some reason.

[Jimmy the Dane]

Because there is no superstition behind leftist beliefs such as equity and diversity...

And hating on differently minded people in not "ignorant" when those people are the "right" people....amirite?!?

[DaivdBehar]

OK, Boomer. Whatever. When are you going to resign so you can be replaced by a diverse? STFU until you do. Nothing you say has the slightest validity, until it becomes personal.

[Michael D]

#AbolishGovernmentSchools
#DefundHigherEducation

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Why do you hate the modern America that public schools built?

Other that being an antisocial, education- and credentials-disdaining, alienated, right-wing malcontent?

[DaveM]

Here are some of the statistics quoted in his article:

Colleges with speech codes:
- Very restrictive codes: 74%
- Vague, easily abused codes: 21%

Ratio of self-identified liberal faculty to conservative faculty:
- 1996: 2-to-1
- 2001: 5-to-1
- 2019: 9-to-1
Ratios by department in 2019:
- Economics: 3-to-1
- Mathematics: 6-to-1
- Administration: 12-to-1
- English and Sociology: 27-to-1
- Anthropology: 42-to-1

Number of attempts to punish faculty for speech since 2015: 471
- Number of these who were tenured: 172
- Number of these who were fired: 27
Percentage of these attempts coming from conservatives: 30%

Take the top 100 universities. Subtract those with "red light", severely restricted speech codes, those with a successful disinvitation campaign, and those with a "Bias Response Team" to enforce speech codes.

Only 2 institutions will be left.

Number of attempts to disinvite speakers on campus: 200
Number of those disinvitations that succeeded: 101

Number on campus who say there is a hostile climate against their beliefs:
- Conservative faculty: 70%
- Conservative graduate students: 62%

Number of faculty who openly admit to discriminating against conservatives:
- In grant proposals: 20%
- In paper submissions and promotions: 10%