Political Correctness Takes the Campus Panic Mainstream

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, American conservatives captured broad public attention over a crisis unfolding in higher education. As a new constituency of neoconservatives entered the political discourse, academia faced a level of popular scrutiny not seen since the upheavals of the Vietnam War. Neocon intellectuals like Allan Bloom shared the right’s cultural pessimism about the academy, but could communicate his complaints to the public in the cosmopolitan dialect of a tenured professor. With his Closing of the American Mind, Bloom successfully reopened the campus-panic genre of literature dating back to William F. Buckley’s 1951 treatise, God and Man at Yale, to new audiences. Unlike in the 1950s, the message resonated across the political spectrum at the end of the Cold War. By the time of the Reagan and first Bush presidencies, conservatives were able to mainstream their long-held notion that academia required overhaul for its overly permissive ethos. With the help of strategic federal education reports, a parallel K12 movement, deep-pocketed donors, and a new constituency of neocon liberal-whisperers, the right served up a variety of rhetorical defenses of this position to millions of concerned readers. After decades of warnings about campus radicalism, claims that were once dismissed in the 1950s as the tirades of red hunters were finally taken for granted by mainstream commentators of the early 1990s. By tracing the intellectual history of rightwing criticisms of the university, we begin to glimpse a different perspective on US intellectual life after the Cold War when conservative critiques of the campus transformed classroom panic into cultural power.