PR on PC

The Fall 1993 issue of Partisan Review was entirely filled by a symposium on “The Politics of Political Correctness” to which twenty-seven people, most of them professors, contributed. Unlike several famous earlier PR symposia, this one can hardly be said to take up either a timely or a neglected topic. Nor is there any novelty in the universally critical attitude toward their subject of the symposiasts, none of whom defends political correctness even as a well-intentioned enterprise gone wrong.

Three years have passed since the “politically correct” (PC) label came into general use to describe efforts on college campuses to promote or impose approved speech codes for referring to groups victimized by past discrimination and, more broadly, to describe the mechanically applied egalitarian principles justifying these efforts. Just about every major newspaper and magazine in the country has run lead articles criticizing political correctness, den...