Much as we may well believe we know where we are at the moment, with progressive forces doing their very best to convince us that the demise of free speech and thought is social justice, many of us wonder where this came from and how such irrational if over-educated ideologues managed to pull of the greatest coup against enlightenment since the dark ages. The President of FIRE, Greg Lukianoff, offers a bit of history to explain.

The 1994 movie PCU, about a rebellious fraternity resisting its politically correct university, was a milestone. Not because the movie was especially good—it wasn’t. It was a milestone because it showed that political correctness had officially become a joke.

The derisive term “P.C.” had referred to a genuine and powerful force on campus for the previous decade. But by the mid-1990s, it had become the butt of jokes from across the political spectrum. The production of a mainstream movie mocking political correctness showed that its cultural moment had passed.

During the ’90s, I was busy fighting against the various wars on crime and paid scant attention to campus shenanigans. Sure, I was aware of the P.C. movement, but it was too goofy to be taken seriously, and it was fairly ordinary for a small group of campus radicals to shriek about such nonsense. There were people wearing Che t-shirts when I went to college. They grew out of it. These children would too, right?

Political correctness didn’t decline and fall. It went underground and then rose again. If anything, it’s stronger than ever today. Yet some influential figures on the left still downplay the problem, going so far as to pretend that the increase in even tenured professors being fired for off-limits speech is a sign of a healthy campus. And this unwillingness to recognize a serious problem in academia has helped embolden culture warriors on the right, who have launched their own attacks on free speech and viewpoint diversity in the American education system.

Greg points to what he calls “The Ignored Years” as the time when the foundation for what we’re now experiencing was built.

After the Stanford policy was defeated in court in 1995, speech codes should have faded away into legal oblivion. Instead, their number dramatically increased. By 2009, 74 percent of colleges had extremely restrictive codes, 21 percent had vague speech codes that could be abused to restrict speech, and only eight of the top 346 colleges surveyed had no restrictive code. Unlike in the ’90s, many of these policies were championed by a burgeoning administrative class rather than by faculty.

As Greg notes, the administrative class came out of education schools like Columbia Teachers College, where ever-increasingly radical theories of educational indoctrination were born and inculcated to future teachers and administrators. It wasn’t understood as indoctrination, but merely the good and moral pedagogy. What student didn’t want to be good and moral? What student didn’t want to ace the course?

These were the admins who crafted the rules, ran the “office” of education and oversaw the hiring of faculty who, like them, were good and moral.

Meanwhile, viewpoint diversity among professors plummeted. In 1996, the ratio of self-identified liberal faculty to self-identified conservative faculty was 2-to-1; by 2011, the ratio was 5-to-1, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles.

More recent statistics paint a starker picture. A 2019 study by the National Association of Scholars on the political registration of professors at the two highest-ranked public and private universities in each state found that registered Democrat faculty outnumbered registered Republican faculty about 9-to-1. In the Northeast, the ratio was about 15-to-1.

In the most evenly split discipline, economics, Democrats outnumber Republicans “only” 3-to-1. The second most even discipline, mathematics, has a ratio of about 6-to-1. Compare this to English and sociology, where the ratios are about 27-to-1. In anthropology, it’s a staggering 42-to-1.

We didn’t start out with a “staggering 42-1” ratio in anthropology. It didn’t happen overnight, but was a process that took years to occur. And the nature of academia being what it is, once the shift to radical social justice began, it became self-perpetuating, with faculty committees hiring other faculty who shared their good and moral values. This wasn’t necessarily  a nefarious conspiracy, but a good faith believe that smart people agreed with their good and moral values, because how could they not?

And if they were good and moral values, how could these admins and their acquiescent if not sycophantic academics not do whatever they could to make students recognize and embrace goodness and morality as well?

Two education school graduates helped develop and popularize “orientation” programs, implemented in various forms around the country, that could be described as efforts at thought reform. At the University of Delaware in the late ’00s, for example, students were subjected to interrogations by student leaders about all manner of personal topics—their views on gay marriage, their own sexual orientations, when they discovered their sexuality, whether they would consider dating members of other races and ethnicities, and more. The program then sought to provide students with “treatments,” such as mandatory one-on-one sessions with their resident advisers, meant to inculcate them with “correct” moral beliefs.

This was largely happening when “no one,” by which I mean people outside the realm of FIRE and that handful of academics who resisted the suppression of politically incorrect words and thought, was paying attention. As these silly and childish ideas strayed off campus and into the “real world,” most of us assumed that they would suffer the same fate as they did in the ’90s. They were widely ridiculed, and the chorus of “just wait until these dumb little shits get into the real world” where they’ll learn what’s what rang out in four-part harmony.

As should not be apparent, it didn’t quite work that way this time. As Greg paid far closer attention to how we got from there to here, he offers an interesting perspective on where things went awry. It’s a warning that the downtime of the “Ignored Years” allowed the foundation for social justice indoctrination to be built in plain sight.