Paglia was also a more acute critic than Bloom, because she realized that the so-called tenured radicals were not really radicals at all but apple polishing class president types, or else plain hucksters. All the real radicals had flamed out on drugs or dropped out of academia after one rejection too many by timid hiring committees. The universities were abandoned to “toadying careerist, Fifties types who wave around Sixties banners to conceal their record of ruthless, beaverlike tunneling to the top.” Paglia had every reason to take their success personally, because these colorless people had adopted the mantle that should rightly have been hers. She, not they, had been a genuine rebel and paid the price in rejection by the establishment. These PC Professors were the establishment. This grudge lent a certain zest to Paglia’s punditry. She called them ignorant, she called them craven, she called them sex starved.
None of it made the slightest difference, because the levers Paglia and her comrades were yanking on so energetically were not connected to the engine fueling the PC craze. Just as stomach ulcers were belatedly discovered to be caused not by stress but by a humble bacterium, historians of the future may well discover that the real reason campuses erupt in fanaticism is the prosaic fact that the rest of us have started shoveling money at them. The first round in the 1960s took place at a time with the number of college students in America had increased by a factor of five in the space of three decades. Naturally this swollen demographic became conscious of itself as a bloc and wanted to throw its weight around, like new money. The administrators and professors had their heads turned, too, by newfound cultural importance and flush budgets, and so they let them.
In the 1990s comedy sequel, every last one of America’s parents could have been convinced that colleges were all subliterate orgy dens, and political correctness would still have rolled on undaunted, because there was no chance those parents were going to let their children neglect to get a college degree. The credential was too important, and getting more important all the time. No matter how ridiculous particular institutions were made to look, collage in general became only a bigger and bigger slice of the national economy. In the first hundred days of his presidency Barack Obama proposed spending $12 billion on community colleges, which, if it had passed Congress, would only have resulted in more states deciding that fireman and state troopers must learn how to put their footnotes in MLA format before we give them permission to save our lives. The effect that credential inflation has had on the professoriat is easy to imagine. When they see that they have the power to make a man who once would have been an adult with a wife and kid instead sit in a cage well into his midtwenties, taking creative writing from some goateed drudge, they don’t worry whether they have the power to get away with a comparative bagatelle like gender-neutral pronouns.
Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster (Sentinel, 2021), 115–16.
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