Greg Lukianoff (President of FIRE and co-author with Jonathan Haidt of “The Coddling of the American Mind“) is delivering the bad news: Politically Correct culture went underground where it gained substantial followings and it has now re-emerged, led by an army of college administrators, many of whom come from colleges of education.  His article includes a lot of doom and gloom, but also offers hope. The title to Lukianoff’s article at Reason is “The Second Great Age of Political Correctness: The P.C. culture of the ’80s and ’90s didn’t decline and fall. It just went underground. Now it’s back.”

Amid the Second Great Age of Political Correctness, American higher education has become too expensive, too illiberal, and too conformist. It has descended into a period of profound crisis wrought by shifts in hiring, student development, and politically charged speech codes developed during the Ignored Years, when too few were paying attention. American campuses should be bastions of free expression and academic freedom. Instead, both are in decline. We cannot afford to just give up on higher ed. College and university presidents can and should do the following five things:

1. Immediately dump all speech codes.
2. Adopt a statement specifically identifying free speech as essential to the core purpose of a university and committing the university to free speech values.
3. Defend the free speech rights of their students and faculty loudly, clearly, and early.
4. Teach free speech, the philosophy of free inquiry, and academic freedom from Day One.
5. Collect data and open their campuses to research on the climate for debate, discussion, and dissent.

Those who donate to colleges should refuse to do so without demanding these changes.