The Disorderly University: A Reply to Mark Tushnet

Abstract

Can free inquiry and high academic standards flourish in our universities at the same time as those institutions welcome, teach, and learn from the most diverse student bodies in their histories? This is the charged question at the center of the "PC debate" now preoccupying the academy and the media. I believe the answer is "yes," but getting there requires a degree of dispassionate thought that has been strikingly absent from the debate. Mark Tushnet's Political Correctness, the Law, and the Legal Academy is typical of writings on the subject. Though he makes several valuable observations along the way, Tushnet's obsession with order, his aversion to ambiguity, and his quest for a scapegoat for the ills of the university, produce a bizarre analysis of the PC phenomenon.