Manufacturing the Attack on Liberalized Higher Education

So far as the general reading public knew, the PC debate burst suddenly onto the American scene toward the end of 1990. News-magazine readers learned about “political correctness” in the academy from feature stories in Newsweek and Time, ¹ while higher-brow readers encountered it somewhat earlier in 1990, perusing Richard Bernstein’s “The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct” in the New York Times, John Searle’s “The Storm over the University” in the New York Review of Books, and a forum in the New York Times on “Opening Academia without Closing It Down.” ² Business readers of the Wall Street Journal may have noticed early warnings of PC sounding throughout 1990—in, for instance, Gerald Sirkin’s “Multiculturalists Strike Back,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s “When Ethnic Studies Are Un-American,” Dorothy Rabinowitz’s “Vive the Academic Resistance,” and editorials titled “The Ivory Censor” and “Politically Correct.” ³