Letters to a Young Conservative Read Online Free PDF Page B

worst, professors. Publish Maya Angelou’s poems alongside a
bunch of meaningless doggerel and see whether anyone can tell the difference. Put a picture of death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal on your Web site and instruct people who think he deserves capital punishment to click a button and execute him online. Whew, I better stop with these suggestions before I get too carried away.
    In a more serious tone, let me address your question about how the current situation on campus differs from what I experienced as an undergraduate. “Is political correctness alive and well?” you ask. “And if so, have your efforts to fight this monster been in vain? How do we fight it more effectively?”
    The first assault against political correctness came in the early 1990s. My book Illiberal Education was, as you note, the first book-length expose. Actually, I began that study quite by chance. I had just finished two years with the Reagan administration and had come to the American Enterprise Institute as a young scholar. Soon after I arrived, in January 1989, I had lunch with Morton Kondracke, a Dartmouth alumnus. I was telling Kondracke about some of the outrages being perpetrated at Dartmouth, but he was skeptical. “It’s hard to believe that this stuff is really going on,” he said.
    “I know,” I told him. “We’re having a hard time convincing some of our alumni supporters. They refuse to believe that the left is that crazy.”
    “Are these things unique to Dartmouth,” Kondracke asked, “or are they typical of what is happening at campuses across the country?”

    I confessed that I did not know.
    “Well, there’s your book idea,” Kondracke said. “Go and find out.”
    I did, and the result was Illiberal Education. My research for that book was helped immeasurably by two things: I was young and could masquerade as a student; and I was a “person of color” and could masquerade as a radical. No sooner did I walk into radical meetings at campuses such as Berkeley and Harvard than the minority activists drew me into their confidence. Their attitude was, “Welcome, brother. Let us show you the blueprints of our revolution.”
    Illiberal Education was published in 1991. The argument of the book, perfectly captured by the title, was that universities profess to be “liberal” while acting in grossly “illiberal” ways. Actually, I hesitated until the last minute about the title. The book had already gone through several titles. When I began the project, Professor Hart jokingly suggested that I call it Bend Over, America. And so this became the working title for the duration of my research.
    Although I am often credited with inventing the term political correctness, I did nothing more than to help publicize it. It is an old Marxist term, once used between Stalinists and Trotskyites to determine who was “politically correct” from the Marxist point of view. The term had been revived during the 1980s to describe policies and attitudes that were congruent with liberal orthodoxy. When I first heard it, I thought the campus activists
who bandied the phrase around were being ironic. But when I saw that these ideologues were deadly serious, I realized that a new form of repression was being advocated in the name of liberation.
    Illiberal Education employed a strategy that had been used to great effect by the Dartmouth Review: that of embarrassing people by quoting them. Ridicule is a powerful political weapon, and it is all the more deadly if it can be deployed by using the target’s own words. The effectiveness of that book was largely a result of its irrefutable documented incidents and tabulated quotations. So no matter how much the leftists and the multiculturalists claimed that I had wrongly described the situation on campus, they could not deny that the things described in my book took place. This, by itself, was crushing. Thus the countless “refutations” of Illiberal Education bounced off me lightly. When the