Whoah! Did I just equate the plight of these privileged academics with that of the marginalised in wider society? Of course not. But it seems important to notice the dynamic. Most importantly, we should understand how these conservative academic voices, conditioned by their embattled positions in a tiny corner of a tiny corner of society, can harmonise in dangerous ways with paranoid reactionary voices in wider society. The right-wing media is adept at taking incidents of ‘political correctness’ at universities — sometimes genuinely silly ones, sometimes not so much — and, inflating them out of their context, using them to nurture and prey upon neurotic fears about society as a whole. Sometimes people like Paglia, Pinker and Peterson have views worth paying attention to. But, from my view outside the academy, they seem a little blind: to the relatively small scale of their theatre of conflict, and to the way in which their sometimes valid battles feed the wrong forces in the wider cultural conflicts.