The question of how such an ideology came to take over the universities cannot be adequately addressed here except to acknowledge that most conservative commentators see the 1960s as the decisive decade when the professoriate acceded to the demands of radical students, unable to withstand the denunciations poured upon those who resisted.
I will always carry a memory of one of my colleagues, a genial and intelligent scholar of Renaissance literature and a tenured professor at a mid-sized prairie university, casting furtive glances around and behind him in order to see how others were voting, his hand mid-way into the air. We were voting in a hiring contest, a contentious one, and my colleague was looking to his friends for direction.
I don’t know the history of the departmental practice of public votes. A friend there once commented that she had always believed we should have courage enough to declare our preferences openly in matters affecting the department. But few did. In those public votes, we raised our hands for a number of reasons — to form or consolidate alliances, to prove our ideological bona fides, to earn credit to be redeemed in a later decision we hoped to influence — but rarely to express our rational and considered preference. Most often, we sought, as in the case of my careful colleague, to vote on the winning side.
Working for four years at this prairie college, I had many opportunities to see political correctness in action: in our so-called “equity” hiring practices, in changes to our course offerings to highlight racial and sexual diversity, and in the unfailing faux-reverence with which all aspects of Aboriginal literature and culture were treated, even down to a discussion about whether, in a job advertisement, we should refer to Canada by its indigenous name of Turtle Island.
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