Perhaps the chair was concerned that I had been insufficiently responsive, insufficiently therapeutic, and not customer targeted.
Remember, not a single racist word was uttered by anyone in the class. The sole issue was a single word in Alinsky’s book.
But, like other elaborate ideologies, political correctness is easily misinterpreted and transmuted, and the dictates of managerial
expediency make misinterpretation a certainty. Administrators' needs for power and their overriding concerns with maximizing
endowments and tuition revenues guarantee that subtle arguments about speech codes will be easily forgotten.
The chair responded to a student's misguided complaint by restricting my teaching and creating a rule that could not have
possibly reflected an underlying concern for racist speech. Ultimately, and perhaps unconsciously, her response was a market-driven
one. She believes that certain target markets are under-exploited; she received a complaint from a member of that target market;
and she called on me to help resolve the marketing and quality problem. Sadly, such a pattern tends to replicate itself. As
administrators institute control in the name of political correctness, the McDonaldization of higher education proceeds apace.
Courses will be standardized and speech codes implemented. The McDonaldized institutions arising from the patterns that political
correctness has instigated will remain in place long after the race issue has been forgotten. They will serve pecuniary purposes.
He wishes to alert readers to some offensive language in quotations in this essay