In 1967, William Styron published The Confessions of Nat Turner, a fictionalized account of an actual slave revolt in 19th-century Virginia. After an initially excellent reception—coinciding perhaps with the warm, "We Shall Overcome" phase of the civil-rights movement—the novel became the object of an extraordinary campaign of hatred and rage. It was denounced as racist and would certainly have been denounced as sexist if the word had been available at the time. A book entitled William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond subjected the author to every conceivable assault. Styron was excoriated for daring to speak in the first person and thus to annex the experience of being black. He was accused of whitewashing slavery and denigrating slaves. He was described as "psychologically sick" and "morally senile." Howls of fury were directed at the novel's depiction of an interracial romance. Styron tried once or twice to stick up for himself in public, but found the experience too painful. "For the first time in my life," he wrote, "I began to share the clammy chagrin of those writers and artists who have stood before whatever intimidating tribunal, hopelessly defending their work to cold-eyed political regulators." The row persists to this day. In many black-studies programs, Ten Black Writers Respond has been a required volume, while the novel itself has not been listed. Looking back, Styron now realizes that he had "unwittingly created one of the first politically incorrect texts of our time."

The cult of P.C., in fact, is probably best understood as a sort of mutation of the 60s, in which all the crappy aspects of that decade have been fused. The idealism and élan are defunct, while in hybrid form all the sectarian hysteria, all the juvenile intolerance, and all the paranoia and solipsism have been retained. And a toxic slogan of the period—The personal is political!—has now spread like a weed, so that the undergraduate population of the country is being encouraged to turn into a generation of snitches, sneaks, and informers, running in tears to the dean at the least intrusion upon their "personal space."

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The worst part of his own pillorying, says Styron, was the fact that many liberal friends and colleagues did not, once he had gotten into trouble with the black-power forces, want to know him. He did, however, attract one very spirited defense. In "William Styron Before the People's Court," an essay published in September 1968, Professor Eugene Genovese shredded the "Ten Black Writers" for their distortions and for their ad hominem venom. He pointed out that intellectual history had known earlier periods when politically committed people had "talked themselves into believing many things they have later had to gag on," and he warned of a coming ''moral, political, and intellectual debacle."

Genovese was a tough critic for anyone to try to laugh off. His book The World the Slaveholders Made was widely recognized as the authoritative study of "the peculiar institution." Later works from his pen, such as Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made and In Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History, have won him every sort of prize and distinction, and established him as one of America's leading radical academics. And his wife, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, author of Feminism Without Illusions, happens to be numbered among the country's leading scholars of gender and society. To the extent that departments of black studies and women's studies have gained ground in the universities, it is due in good measure to the work of the Genoveses, not only in numerous publications but also in professional and scholarly groups. "You could say," observed one acquaintance, "that Gene and Betsey Genovese are the royal couple of radical academia."

It turns out, though, that that long-ago battle, between Eugene Genovese and the blacks who wanted to silence or defame William Styron, was indeed the first shot in a protracted cultural war. Talk to the Genoveses today and you find them candidly appalled at the turn events have taken. "We campaigned for years for a better attention to black America and to women in university departments," said Elizabeth Fox-Genovese when I called her on the phone. "We didn't mean this to happen." I was prepared to hazard a guess about what she meant by "this," but decided not to make any assumptions until I could see the two of them in person. So down I went to Atlanta, Georgia, where both are professors of history at Emory University, and where Elizabeth has a chair at the Institute for Women's Studies. (The Fox-prefix is her family name, which has a claim on descent from Charles James Fox—"in the illegitimate line.")

Seen together, Gene and Betsey make a finely matched pair. Gene resembles the hard-bitten Italian boy from Bensonhurst that he turns out to be. His Sicilian parents didn't want him to be bilingual, so he taught himself Italian in the army in order to be able to read Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. He has all the hallmarks of the City College old-school revolutionary: chucked out of the Communist Party in 1950 (a good year) and toughened by innumerable picket lines and polemics. She, in bold contrast, has a Wasp-like grace and bearing and something of the look of the younger Mary McCarthy. Together they wrote Fruits of Merchant Capital, with its firmly delineated subtitle, Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism. Together they launched and edited the magazine Marxist Perspectives. Together they are working on a grand theory of southern slavery, which will be published under the title The Mind of the Master Class. We are not talking here about some once radical couple preparing to enter mellow and mature retirement. These are serious and committed radicals, not neoconservative defectors. And as they survey the scholarly scene, they want to shout, STOP!

"I realize now that it did begin in the 1960s," says Gene. "It was at the American Historical Association annual convention in 1969 that it hit me. Some people wanted the A.H.A. to take an on-the-record position against the war in Vietnam. I was much more against the war than most people, but to me the point of the A.H.A. was that I could meet and debate with conservatives and liberals. I realized that I was against the politicization of an academic forum. And I also realized that the centrists and the liberals would compromise to keep their positions and their jobs. It was the same as with McCarthyism earlier—the college bureaucrats would always bend with the wind."

The toxic slogan has now spread like a weed, so that the undergraduate population is being encouraged to turn into a generation of snitches, sneaks, and informers.

"And in the women's movement," Betsey says, gently breaking in, "we were forever arguing as to whether it was more expeditious to prove that men had always dominated, or whether to argue that there had once been a Utopian past where the women did the hunting and gathering—as if that was a good thing, which we also couldn't decide."

The same week I dined with the Genoveses, the administration at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) issued a 68-page pamphlet with the enticing title Dealing with Harassment at MIT. This seminal work recommended that "people who are offended by matters of speech or expression should consider speaking up promptly and in a civil fashion," and, in no less imperishable prose, suggested that "people who learn they have offended others should consider stopping immediately and apologizing" In discussion of this sort of campus mentality, with its highly boring and strongly sinister overtones, I was pleased to see on Genovese's face a rictus of that same pained contempt that I feel myself. As he wrote, a couple of years ago:

Who wants to be accused of insensitivity? The answer is, those who recognize "sensitivity" as a code word for the promulgation of a demagogic political program. At Brooklyn College, which I attended in the late 1940s, everyone took for granted that students ought to challenge their professors and each other. Professors acted as if they were paid to assault their students' sensibilities, to offend their most cherished values. . . . In this way we had a chance to acquire a first-rate education, that is, to learn to sustain ourselves in combat against dedicated but overworked professors who lacked the time and the "tolerance" to worry about our "feelings."

This leads one more or less naturally to the great fallacy at the heart of today's political correctitude—that in order to secure something vaguely termed "diversity" it insists on something definitely recognizable as conformity.

"You just try getting a pro-life woman a post in a women's studies department," says Betsey. "At this university, where a graduate teacher who was pro-life had been temporarily hired, a professor said in front of a roomful of students that such a person had no place in a women's studies program. What are the students supposed to do or think, given that a college degree is now a meal ticket and jobs are scarce?"

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Both the Genoveses have friends and comrades who were victimized by witch-hunting in the 1950s. Murray Kempton once wrote a famous column, describing a Republican campaign led by Richard Nixon to have Gene Genovese fired from Rutgers for his stand on the Vietnam War. "So I have a gut hatred for bullying and coercion and uniformity. And, when you take away all the pseudo-ideological blather, this stuff about your personality being political comes straight from the doctrine of Italian Fascism. I could easily show that it derives from Giovanni Gentile, except that most of these types won't have heard of him.''

In one important respect, indeed, Fascist thinking is already upon us. Young people are being taught that reason itself is suspect. Abstract theory and knowledge are not, however, described any longer as "Jewish science" or "rootless rationalism." Instead, they are denounced without irony or elegance as "constructs" of patriarchy, phallocracy, or whatever. (Since when did the penis, of all organs, have a monopoly on reason, of all things?)

Commenting on a recent essay by Karen Lehrman, who had been describing the rancorous mediocrity of many schools of women's studies, Betsey Genovese wrote:

That what she described exists, all of us who have had anything to do with women's studies know to be true, although it remains open to discussion whether it is true of all women's studies programs. But we will never know that until the gag rule that currently prevails is lifted.

Some of Lehrman's critics had written in to say, either innocently or furiously or both, that their own participation in women's studies had bolstered their "self-esteem." "Yes," sighs Betsey at the mention of this odd and unclassifiable concept, "I'm afraid that self-esteem is all that a college can offer once it has decided that achievement and accomplishment are elitist." She makes this deadly remark in a tone of genuine sorrow rather than anger, adding that most universities, faced with a choice between raising the standards and lowering them to meet the capabilities, have in a budget-conscious way opted for the latter.

The Genoveses are materialists, and do not think that society can be bettered by chanting or by consciousness-raising. They both staunchly defend the introduction of black studies and women's studies as having redressed a historical imbalance, and as being at least as justifiable in principle as area studies or Jewish studies. But they are clear-eyed about the damage that is being done to academic discourse and free inquiry by tenured third-raters who loathe dissent. And they regard it as a betrayal of bright young black and female students that they should be instructed so much in self-pity.

"We don't have RC. in the math and chemistry and business departments," says Betsey (rather flattering the business department, I felt, but you see the point). "Why should it be thought helpful to teach unreality and ideology in history and the humanities?" Both of them agree that you cannot be more prejudiced than when you condescend, and that it is a parody of affirmative action to grade people by reference to their victimhood. "It leads to segregation," says Gene. "When Jack London wrote The Iron Heel he depicted a permanent underclass who were kept, in effect, behind barbed wire. That's not fiction now. I ask the people who teach for failure, You don't have that on your conscience?"

Some will reply that there's little to be nostalgic about, and that the so-called ivory tower of detachment and objectivity was a mask for privilege and conservatism and corrupting military-industrial contracts, that the traditional American university was an extension of the gentlemen's club. The Genoveses can remember that, too. "Carl Bridenbaugh, who was president of the American Historical Association, once delivered a speech bemoaning the arrival of the non-Wasp in the profession. He wanted to know how Jews and Italians could ever understand a society that was essentially Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic." But Gene, who remembers this slight, fought against that too. He also contended, as he once wrote, for the right of a black graduate student to master the subject of Italian immigration. "He will, I think, do it in a more detached way than I, although, not having been raised on pasta, well-wrapped fig trees, and vendettas, he will certainly miss some important parts of the culture." In other words, either you like the idea of race-and-gender-determined studies—and students—or you do not.

The late I. F. Stone, doyen of a generation of radical journalists, was once asked how he could describe himself as he did, as "a Jeffersonian Marxist," when it was well known that Thomas Jefferson had been a slaveholder, rapist, Eurocentric patriarch, and so forth. His reply, cool enough in its way, was: "Because history is a tragedy and not a melodrama." This anecdote returned to my mind as I was talking to the Genoveses. For them, the study of history and society still retains the character of something arduous, objective, and scientific. They know that truth can be unwelcome, and that minds do not flourish in a room temperature of positive reinforcement. I hope that I don't make them sound too grim and solemn, because they can see the funny side of P.C. and don't mind referring to their numerous pets as "animal companions." But they don't see the funny side of the dumbing down of American campuses, and, really, I don't see why they should.

"The personal is political." I hated that canting slogan the very first time I heard it. And now look—endless vistas of self-indulgence and quack therapy and predatory "arbitration" and litigation, all imposed on young people for whom the years at college may well be the only emancipated and independent ones they ever get to spend. In the meanwhile, of course, the political has conversely become personalized, with the result that public affairs are dominated by celebrity-style posturing. As an old Yugoslav friend of mine could not be cured of saying, "it makes you vont to womit." Three rousing cheers, then, for some old-fashioned radical fighters who put the yahoos and the faddists to shame.