d organizing knowledge, and not to be able to study what was deemed to be important to your group, rather than to the custodians of the dominant "canon" as it was now called, was to be a victim. If victimization was to cease, minority groups must be "empowered" to define and do things their way. For an academic to impose and expect the historically accepted norms of scholarship was to demonstrate his or her lack of sensitivity, and a desire for cultural domination.
             Political Correctness has come into being as a term born both of scorn and of fear. A conservative American critic described the contemporary universities as "islands of repression in a sea of freedom", suggesting that the universities are in fact going far beyond what the larger society is requesting or even wanting in this area. There is another kind of fear as well: a fear of "tribalism", which, according to the traditionalist's reading of history, is inevitably doomed to chaos. It should be remembered that political correctness is a term that has been introduced by the detractors of the ideas which the PC movement, as it is called, is assumed to represent; and there hasn't been developed a generally accepted word or phrase that represents what it is the supporting forces are after. The "enemy" has therefore set the agenda for the debate. In consequence, we are left peering into a fundamentally important social phenomenon through a window created by fear, distrust and scorn; and what we see inside is too often a defensiveness and militancy on the part of the defenders of political correctness, which is a reaction to the hostility of their critics. To cut through all this to what the issue is really all about is therefore not the easiest of tasks.
             It's easy enough to see the appeal of PC to those who have historically fared poorly in our society. The sense of perpetual victim hood precludes even the concept that the members of a victimized minority could actually rise...