ALAN WOLFE
737
ministrators, trained to find compromises and to soothe hurt feelings,
tend instead to become partisans in the academic wars over which they
preside. As newsworthy as some of the stories involving political correct–
ness may have been, the real story was not the incidents themselves, but
the transformation of the university, that made them possible. American
institutions of higher learning had been preparing themselves for some–
thing like the political correctness phenomenon for decades. Many of
those forms of preparation have not been discussed here, such as the rise
of scientism in the humanities and social sciences or the lingering effects
of notions, such as that of "repressive tolerance," which represented the
less attractive side of the 1960s. But one in particular does stand out: the
mi ssionary zeal of university administrators
to
make the world a better
place. What we now know as political correctness will last as long as the
universities find so many things to do other than discover new knowl–
edge and pass it on to new generations.
