A good index of the health of any social institution is its allegiance to the strictures that define this middle realm. “In the changes that are taking place in the world around us,” Moulton wrote, “one of those which is fraught with grave peril is the discredit into which this idea of the middle land is falling.” One example was the abuse of free speech in political debate: “We have unrestricted freedom of debate,” say the radicals, “We will use it so as to destroy debate.”
The repudiation of obedience to the unenforceable is at the center of what makes academic life (and not only academic life) today so noxious. The contraction of the “domain of Manners” creates a vacuum that is filled on one side by increasing regulation—speech codes, rules for all aspects of social life, efforts to determine by legislation (from the right as well as from the left) what should follow freely from responsible behavior—and on the other side by increased license.
More and more, it seems, academia (like other aspects of elite cultural life) has reneged on its compact with society. One of the great ironies that attends the triumph of political correctness is that in department after department of academic life, what began as a demand for emancipation recoiled, turned rancid, and developed into new forms of tyranny and control. As Alan Charles Kors noted in an essay from 2008,
