The announcement in June 2007 by Antioch University that it would be closing my alma mater, Antioch College, produced a great deal of commentary.1 One of the better offerings was a 2007 piece in the Weekly Standard by Charlotte Allen, which ran under the title “Death by Political Correctness.”2 Her analysis presents a complex picture, but Allen leaves no doubt that political correctness had a powerful hand in Antioch’s destruction.
Yet, political correctness is all around us. If Antioch died from it, how far behind can others be? What lessons does it have to teach to the rest of us in academe about our own fate? That was the question that drew my attention back to Antioch, from which it had been withdrawn—along with my identification with the Left. My research these days focuses on the dynamics underlying
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