ABSTRACT
The main news Americans were taught about colleges during the last few Bush years was that they had been infected with a galloping moral disease, "Political Correctness." Talking with academics across the country and visiting over twenty campuses in the last year, the author came to think that the charges of PC were fundamentally a smoke screen designed to discredit higher education. The American education system has always, in part, been a means for stratifying society. Schools used to sort students, primarily on the basis of class characteristics, into variously named tracks—college-bound, general, or commercial—or into "ability" groups. Now, colleges are being made to play an increasing role in such class stratification. In sum, colleges and universities, especially in the public sector, have suffered unprecedented budget cuts, even as they are being asked to accommodate larger numbers of students.
