The phrase “politically correct” began its life about a century ago as a satire on gentlemen who had all the right opinions, thoughts, and — no small thing — prejudices. They worshipped alike, belonged to the same clubs, and shared the tepidity of utterly unshakable belief.

When the phrase was taken over by American communists in the 1930s, the joke was squeezed out of it, the communists being thoroughly humorless. To them, to be politically correct was unshakably to follow the party line, whatever contortions that effort might require — and surely that was no joking matter, given (among other things) Stalin’s and Hitler’s brief minuet danced to the tune of the von Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.

It is not surprising that “politically correct” lost currency, and I imagine when the phrase came back in the 1970s and ‘80s, those who used it probably did not know that they were unearthing an unlamented turn of speech. No matter. The resurrected phrase, as we still hear it, is simultaneously earnest and satirical, depending on who was, or is, using it.

It is good news that today we don’t hear “politically correct” very often, and even better news that political correctness itself appears to have run its course. I believe this because, whatever its original motives, modern American political correctness turned out to be an impediment to free academic discourse and possibly thought. The modern politically correct, like earlier ones, have been unshakable in their righteousness.

Granted, given about 4,000 institutions of higher education, any generalization I make about the demise of political correctness can be challenged here and there. In the spring of 2007, for example, Tufts University, uncharacteristically, sanctioned a conservative student publication for satirical articles about black and Islamic students that were offensive to some and, to nearly everyone else, dimwitted and childish. The shield of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution also, I believe, protected them. Free speech and all that.

A hunch I have is that a structured form of political correctness — a speech code, for example — is no longer necessary because our culture has changed; in the last 30 years I have seen discourse shifting toward the better — gradually but definitely. The sources of this shift are hazy, but certainly the civil rights and women’s movements had a powerful effect. After all, we may see a woman or a black man as president of the U.S. one day soon. Political correctness may have been a mover behind this process as well. That is, aside from the occasional boneheaded and offensive utterance, the casual slurs and prejudices of the 1950s (my undergraduate years) have largely vanished from campus speech. I think this happened because policies about speech, general or rigid, changed several generations of high school students — made them aware that some words (and, lamentably, some ideas) were forbidden. Thus, over time, the policing of any academic community’s discourse has become less important and largely immaterial as new expectations were imported from high schools.

It is hard to tell if this means academia has reached a higher and finer sociological perch, or if we have simply scoured its language. I incline more toward the second possibility, but not entirely. Biting our tongues could mean that we are actually thinking before we speak, always useful to do. We have, I mean to suggest, become more tolerant of others and more aware of their proximity.

Moreover, if we have not arrived at a higher plane of social consciousness, we have visibly adopted, and adapted to, a more sophisticated, even sensitive, set of rules of engagement that reflects a common (if not universal) understanding of our expectations about how we talk to each other. How this has come about is hard to describe much further than I have, but another hunch tells me that it may be related to an expansion of the doctrine of “fighting words.”

I am not suggesting that the denial for First Amendment protection for words likely to cause a “breach of the peace” (Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire 1942) ever directly entered the public consciousness. But it seems credible that along with the racial integration of the armed services and schools (and baseball) and the social integration produced by the GI Bill, suburbanization, and the rights movements, a realization that fighting, or prejudicial, words are out of bounds further liberalized our cultural responses and, quite likely, later was given a leg up in the academy by structural political correctness.

This may have helped to refine our sense of tolerance, but it is not all to the good. “Breach of the peace” may be a broad idea, but it is readily understood and has hundreds of years of common-law experience to clarify it — specifically, that fighting words are likely to produce fights, and the state has an abiding interest and obligations to keep the peace.

When fighting words become those that may create a “hostile learning environment,” the clarity of the original concept is lost because both the idea and the way we state it are slippery. The most gentle and constructive criticism can appear hostile to some, while gross insults pass others by. Can a Socratic interrogation by an instructor that publicly reveals a student’s failing of logic produce a hostile environment, or is the student simply corrected for not thinking clearly? And isn’t that a fundamental operation of higher education? The notion of a hostile environment created by speech is so imprecise that it actually can thwart the education that it was intended to advance.

This lack of precision — not righteousness — may have been what has diminished political correctness and may see it off altogether. It is one thing, and a good one in my book, for a cultural desire for equity to be in the air. It is quite another to give equity a structure in a printed speech code. As soon as colleges and universities began writing down what could be said and what could not, the idea of forbidding certain examples of speech began collapsing under the weight and feebleness of its excruciatingly detailed specifics: Codes not being able to predict every exemplar of hostile speech, what meant to be specific turned out to be only muddy. Formal speech codes, unlike a belief in tolerance and equity, proved to be impractical in a culture committed to free expression, innovation, and criticism — and often seemed ridiculous, nannyish, and an unneeded intrusion of someone else’s superego.

I know that academic ideas and fashions come and go, eventually exhausting themselves, often for reasons we can’t see or name. I am glad to see a decline of political correctness on American campuses. But I would like to see even more.

Attempts to silence or intimidate speakers and those who have invited them to campus have been justified by saying the speakers’ views are incorrect or even hateful, and so they may be. One of the most prominent was Hamilton College’s cancellation of a speech by Ward Churchill, a troubling and troublesome man, in the face of threats of violence. In other cases, speakers have been heckled into silence, people have invaded stages and swiped the microphone, or otherwise derailed academic freedom because they did not like the speakers or their thoughts. The proper response when speakers have something obnoxious to say is not to listen to them (leave the room) or to confront or counter them with a rational argument. Good for those who do so with civility and poise. And shame on those who give in to intimidation because a speaker is horribly incorrect.

A take-away thought: Academic freedom is still a work in progress, and academic progress always works slowly.