I typically don’t like to do two posts on the same subject in one day, but Johnathan Chait’s piece for NY Magazine really hits the nail on the head:

Even if it were the case that political correctness was totally confined to campuses, it would not make the phenomenon unimportant. Colleges have disproportionate influence over intellectual life, and political movements centered on campuses can spread well beyond them (anti-Vietnam began as a bunch of wacky kids, too). But to imagine p.c. as simply a thing college kids do relieves us of taking it seriously as a coherent set of beliefs, which it very much is. Political correctness is a system of thought that denies the legitimacy of political pluralism on issues of race and gender. It manifests itself most prominently in campus settings not because it’s a passing phase, like acne, but because the academy is one of the few bastions of American life where the p.c. left can muster the strength to impose its political hegemony upon others.

And:

That these activists have been able to prevail, even in the face of frequently harsh national publicity highlighting the blunt illiberalism of their methods, confirms that these incidents reflect something deeper than a series of one-off episodes. They are carrying out the ideals of a movement that regards the delegitimization of dissent as a first-order goal. People on the left need to stop evading the question of political correctness — by laughing it off as college goofs, or interrogating the motives of p.c. critics, or ignoring it — and make a decision on whether they agree with it.

I recommend reading the whole thing.

Chait is correct that Free Speech has become a real problem for the Left, at least in terms of university communities.  The Right would probably act the same way if it had any power to abuse in academia, but it just plain doesn’t.  Liberals really do need to answer for this and start holding the anti-dissent aggressors in their ranks accountable.  Some already do, but more should.