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Now the focus of p.c. multiculturalism seems to be shifting from curriculum battles -- so many have already been won -- to the suppression of "hate speech," which is loosely defined as anything that any recognized minority or victim group chooses to find offensive. A chief tenet of political correctness is that minority groups must support each other, rather like union members refusing to cross a picket line. The very use of the term "of color" -- which embraces blacks, historically antagonistic Asian ethnicities, Native Americans and Hispanics, many of whom are ethnically white -- implies that these disparate groups are bonded simply by not being of Northern European descent. Often such coalitions add up to a majority, but they cling to rights based on minority status. When white male conservatives feel harassed, multiculturalists retort that they are enabling these fellow students to share in the sense of disenfranchisement, enriching their understanding of the world.
One thing is certain: there are a million ways to give p.c. offense. At the University of Nebraska, graduate student Chris Robinson kept a 5 in.-by-7 in. desktop photograph of his wife wearing a bikini -- until two female coworkers complained that it constituted sexual harassment and got the department chairman to order it removed. The Universities of Wisconsin and Minnesota, bowing to pressure from Native Americans and allies, adopted the "nickname rule." This dictum bars sports teams from playing nonleague games with schools using American Indians as symbols.
At the University of Pennsylvania, black students who disliked a student's columns challenging affirmative action and the character of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., stole 14,000 copies of the Daily Pennsylvanian and said they were combating "institutional racism." At Duke University, gays who did not like a student columnist's opinion that theirs was "a dirty, sinful lifestyle that doesn't deserve any special rights" blocked his way to class and shouted epithets. At neither Penn nor Duke were the perpetrators disciplined. During the academic year that ended in June, there were 12 major incidents of U.S. campus papers stolen or destroyed because their contents transgressed political correctness. This form of censorship hits most at "alternative" newspapers -- a term that in the '60s and early '70s automatically denoted a leftist competitor to the main campus organ, but that today means one leaning to the right. More than 100 such papers challenge what they see as liberal orthodoxy. The climate of political correctness has diverted the eternal spirit of adolescent rebellion clear across the political spectrum.
What does it mean to be p.c.? To qualify, one must be pro-feminist, pro-gay rights, pro-minority studies, mistrustful of tradition, scornful of Dead White European Males and deeply skeptical toward the very idea of a "masterpiece," because it implies that one idea, culture or human being can actually be better than another. One must believe in a consumerist approach to education: whatever the student wants is what the curriculum ought to be. Academics must recognize that ignorance of student wishes in favor of one's own scholarly interests is wickedly elitist.