The Meaningless of the Term "Politically Correct," Part Eleventy-Billion

Charlotte Allen using a Young Americans for Freedom list of college courses it doesn’t like to churn out a quick, lame, and uninformed op-ed is a well-worn and extremely tired routine. (Michael Berube‘s new book does a great job with the genre, especially the use of course titles without any discussion of actual course content.) I thought this was kind of a nice contribution to the well-worn genre, though:

At Duke, you can take “American Dreams/American Realities” (No. 11), a history course on American myths such as “a city on a hill.”

So much for Ronald Reagan.

See, Ronald Reagan was saying that the United States is literally a city on a hill, and anyone who questions it as if it was a metaphor has no business indoctrinating tender young minds! (I also enjoyed her description of a course on “Cyberfeminism” as being about the discovery that “women use computers.”)

But what I really enjoy about the column is that Allen–while arguing that universities shouldn’t offer any courses with titles that make prissy, anti-intellectual reactionaries uncomfortable, irrespective of their content–while touting their description as “politically correct.” Needless to say, the person who thinks speech she doesn’t like should be excluded before the fact in this case is Charlotte Allen, not professors who think that race, gender, or class might in some way be relevant to the study of the arts and humanities.