ABSTRACT
The term political correctness (PC) became part of the everyday discourse of educational debate in the late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly in the United States. Slowly it came to be associated with ideas emanating from the cultural left in the US, including restrictions on speech, the promotion of multicultural educational curricula, and the support of affirmative action in the recruitment of students to colleges and universities. These ideas will be fully explored in later chapters, but before this can be meaningfully undertaken it is important to understand the background to these developments. It was conservative thinkers who seem to have been the most vocal in identifying the key parameters within which the debates would be subsequently framed. The main sources were a number of polemics, and some key academic books. In this chapter I will undertake a close reading of three significant polemics: Bennett (1984), Searle (1990), and Cheney (1992); and three best-selling books by Bloom (1987), D’Souza (1992), and Sykes (1992). The main purpose here is to examine critically the arguments which helped identify the contours of the subsequent debates about PC in US colleges and universities in the 1990s.
