THE SECOND GREAT AGE OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS: THE P.C. CULTURE OF THE '80S AND '90S DIDN'T DECLINE AND FALL. IT JUST WENT UNDERGROUND. NOW IT'S BACK.

• Author: Lukianoff, Greg

THE 1994 MOVIE PCU, about a rebellious fraternity resisting its politically correct university, was a milestone. Not because the movie was especially good--it wasn't. It was a milestone because it showed that political correctness had officially become a joke.

The derisive term "P.C." had referred to a genuine and powerful force on campus for the previous decade. But by the mid-1990s, it had become the butt of jokes from across the political spectrum. The production of a mainstream movie mocking political correctness showed that its cultural moment had passed.

At the same time, punitive campus speech codes were being struck down. Among the most prominent cases was Stanford Law School, which boasted a notorious speech code banning "speech or other expression...intended to insult or stigmatize" an individual on the basis of membership in a protected class arguably including every living human. You don't have to be a lawyer to see how a ban on anything that "insults" would be abused: Even showing PCU itself, which makes fun of campus activists, feminists, and vegetarians, could potentially get you in trouble under such a broad and vague rule. The 1995 court defeat of the Stanford speech code marked the end of the First Great Age of Political Correctness.

Some assumed this meant political correctness was a fad that was gone forever. On the contrary, it gathered strength over the next two decades, rooting itself in university hiring practices and speech policing, until it became what people now refer to as "wokeness" or the much-abused term "cancel culture."

Political correctness didn't decline and fall. It went underground and then rose again. If anything, it's stronger than ever today. Yet some influential figures on the left still downplay the problem, going so far as to pretend that the increase in even tenured professors being fired for off-limits speech is a sign of a healthy campus. And this unwillingness to recognize a serious problem in academia has helped embolden culture warriors on the right, who have launched their own attacks on free speech and viewpoint diversity in the American education system.

We've fully entered the Second Great Age of Political Correctness. If we are to find a way out, we must understand how we got here and admit the true depths of the problem.

THE IGNORED YEARS

IN THE DECADES that followed the First Great Age of Political Correctness, you could be forgiven for assuming that campus attacks on free speech were a thing of the past.

Professors and administrators dismissed concerns, claiming there was no shortage of viewpoint diversity (and that those who suggested otherwise had sinister, probably racist motivations). Speech codes had been roundly defeated wherever they were legally challenged. The P.C. movement had been reduced to a punchline. Indeed, it was such a common punching bag that some pundits rejected the whole idea as a kind of right-wing hoax. Problem solved, right?

Hardly. In reality, the major change after the mid-'90s was that professors were less openly enamored of speech codes. The campus speech wars entered their Ignored Years, during which far less attention was paid to campus speech even as the underlying problem grew worse. It was during this period that the seeds were sown for a deeper change just one generation later.

After the Stanford policy was defeated in court in 1995, speech codes should have faded away into legal oblivion. Instead, their number dramatically increased. By 2009,74 percent of colleges had extremely restrictive codes, 21 percent had vague speech codes that could be abused to restrict speech, and only eight of the top 346 colleges surveyed had no restrictive code. Unlike in the '90s, many of these policies were championed by a burgeoning administrative class rather than by faculty.

Meanwhile, viewpoint diversity among professors plummeted. In 1996, the ratio of self-identified liberal faculty to self-identified conservative faculty was 2-to-1; by 2011, the ratio was 5-to-1, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles.

More recent statistics paint a starker picture. A 2019 study by the National Association of Scholars on the political registration of professors at the two highest-ranked public and private universities in each state found that registered Democrat faculty outnumbered registered Republican faculty about 9-to-1. In the Northeast, the ratio was about 15-to-1.

In the most evenly split discipline, economics, Democrats outnumber Republicans "only" 3-to-1. The second most even discipline, mathematics, has a ratio of about 6-to-1. Compare this to English and sociology, where the ratios are about 27-to-1. In anthropology, it's a staggering 42-to-1.

In the Ignored Years, higher education became far more expensive and considerably more bureaucratized. From 1994-95 to 2018-19, the inflation-adjusted cost of public college tuition nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the administrative class expanded, from roughly one administrator for every two faculty members in 1990 to nearly equal numbers of faculty and administrators in 2012.

What's more, preliminary research showed a "12-to-one ratio of liberal to conservative college administrators," wrote Samuel J. Abrams of Sarah Lawrence College in The New York Times in 2018. His conclusion: "It appears that a fairly liberal student body is being taught by a very liberal professoriate--and socialized by an incredibly liberal group of administrators." Following the Times article, Abrams was targeted twice by students in an unsuccessful campaign to get him fired for speaking out.

The '00s also brought the popularization of "bias-related incident programs," commonly known as "bias response teams" or "BRTs." These programs exist to root out "bias" (once called "prejudice") on campus by empowering anyone within the community to file complaints with the administration, often anonymously. They are attempts to enforce campus orthodoxy in ways that might be (just barely) constitutional. By 2016, nearly 40 percent of surveyed colleges had BRTs.

Early versions of BRTs involved policing inside jokes and pop culture references. Eventually, reported speech included everything from a "snow penis" at the University of Michigan to a humor magazine at the University of California San Diego that had satirized the idea of safe spaces to an incident at John Carroll University in Ohio, where an "anonymous student...