In the decades that followed the First Great Age of Political Correctness, you could be forgiven for assuming that campus attacks on free speech were a thing of the past.
Professors and administrators dismissed concerns, claiming there was no shortage of viewpoint diversity (and that those who suggested otherwise had sinister, probably racist motivations). Speech codes had been roundly defeated wherever they were legally challenged. The P.C. movement had been reduced to a punchline. Indeed, it was such a common punching bag that some pundits rejected the whole idea as a kind of right-wing hoax. Problem solved, right?
Hardly. In reality, the major change after the mid-’90s was that professors were less openly enamored of speech codes. The campus speech wars entered their Ignored Years, during which far less attention was paid to campus speech even as the underlying problem grew worse. It was during this period that the seeds were sown for a deeper change just one generation later.
After the Stanford policy was defeated in court in 1995, speech codes should have faded away into legal oblivion. Instead, their number dramatically increased.
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