ABSTRACT
This essay offers challenges to currently popular schools of thought in the discipline of communication. The argument is made that research and teaching, whether allied with groups claiming to be anywhere on the political spectrum from critical theory to the communication sciences, has become imbued with a political ideology that wrongheadedly defines communication competence as behaviors that value the collective over the individual. Such definitions also value congeniality above all else. It is further suggested that now accepted definitions of communication competence proscribe what is acceptable or unacceptable scholarship. Such political hegemony has led to the premature abandonment of lines of research that provide insights on how communication can be used as a tool of social policy, allowing ideas and people to be judged on the basis of intellectual merit rather than the political correctness of positions advocated.
