tacked the thought and speech of its opponents and critics.
Indeed, during the Cold War McCarthy era, thousands of radi-
cals were purged from the universities for their alleged "com-
munist" ideas or affiliations. Scatamburlo shows that, more
recently, a number of right-wing groups have engaged in at-
tempts to target professors with "left-leaning" or "subversive"
tendencies and are thus themselves practicing a new form of
McCarthyism.

Scatamburlo also provides a genealogy of the phrase "po-
litical correctness" and points to the fact that it was once used
ironically among leftists to designate those who showed exces-
sive concern for verbal and symbolic purity. In the hands of
the New Right, however, P.C. has been turned on its head,
stripped of its good-natured humor and denuded of its origi-
nal context. As a result, it has become a label for allegedly
intolerant and oppressive attempts to squelch sexist, racist,
homophobic, and other offensive forms of thought and behav-
ior.

While one could happily welcome a genuine defense of aca-
demic freedom by our conservative colleagues, I fear that their
attacks on P.C. exhibit a large dose of political hypocrisy and
that the whole issue is a smokescreen for an attack on critical
multiculturalism and other progressive initiatives which would
expand and reform the academic curricula and bring in voices
and cultures excluded in standard curricula, thus providing
access to ideas and material that conservatives oppose. There-
fore, I think that right-wing "Political Hypocrisy" (P.H.) is what
we should really be on the watch for, rather than the P.C. that
our conservative colleagues malign.

Putting the campaign against P.C. in its historical and social
context, Scatamburlo provides a detailed study of the media,
academic, and political campaigns to undermine progressive
ideals and initiatives both inside and outside of the academy.
In her study, she engages some of the major texts made popu-
lar in the New Right's culture war by ideologues such as Allan
Bloom, Dinesh D'Souza, Roger Kimball, Camille Paglia, and
others, and provides an ideological critique of their underly-
ing presuppositions and biases. Scatamburlo also depicts the
mainstream media's complicity in promulgating anti-P.C. dis-
course and analyzes the rhetorical strategies employed by the
media in their coverage of P.C.

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