Across conservative America the warning cry has gone out: "The liberal intellectuals are coming, the liberal intellectuals are coming."

And so the valiant defenders of all that is good and just have run for their word processors and issued pages and pages of invective arguments against an apparently overwhelming tide of "Political Correctness," or PC for quick reference.

Sounds pretty sinister, doesn't it? "Correctness." Correct thinking. How restrictive. How oppressive. How un-American.

According to these worried warriors of the right, higher education in the United States is in grave danger. It is being undermined by leftover-hippie types who are infusing curricula around the nation with something called "multiculturalism." Supposedly, these frustrated revolutionaries are busy replacing Socrates, Da Vinci and Thoreau with an assortment of unnamed but evidently lesser "minority" figures. Gays, women, Africans, Vietnamese --you name it, they got it.

Why? Well, it's all part of a plot. Eventually, the great pillars of our civilization will be sufficiently weakened for the fringe-dwellers to take over.

When more college students can discuss the great achievements of Jewish lesbians than the work of HermanMelville, the neo-Marxist professors will start running for the Senate. Soon, the whole nation will be under the thumb of repressive left-wing philosophers.

Right.

The day a small group of college professors advocating greater representation for gays, women and racial minorities is a real threat to anything in this country, I will eat the collected works of Shakespeare. The concept is so ludicrous and so typical of a right-wing intelligentsia (if that's not an oxymoron) with too much time on its hands, it's hard to believe anybody is even considering it.

There are real issues to be discussed here, but they are not nearly as sensational as all that. The cases of PC-fueled repression listed in a recent Newsweek article raise serious questions:

-- A University of Connecticut student was ordered off campus after putting an amusing little sign on her door indicating "homos" would be "shot on sight." The argument in her favor is that she advocated the same thing for preppies and "bimbos."

-- Freshmen in a University of Texas at Austin English class are now required to read only essays from a book on racism and sexism.

-- The president of Mt. Holyoke College spoke out against students who staged a "Heterosexual Awareness Week" to mock a similar effort on the behalf of gay men and lesbians.

The anti-PC stormtroopers cite these incidents as evidence of a growing intolerance of free speech and thought. They love it, of course. How often do conservatives get to defend the First Amendment against liberals?

But they are missing the point. University regulations on offensive behavior have become increasingly strict in recent years, but that is not a reflection of any left-wing agenda. Rather, it is part of a largely ineffective administrative attempt to deal with the unbelieveable hostility of many college students.

Jokes about gays being shot are not funny when increasing numbers of people are being brutally beaten for who they choose to live with. Incidents of racial abuse and sexual harassment are on the rise across the country. The intolerance codes at Penn State and hundreds of other schools are only necessary because there are so many dangerously stupid people on campus.

As for the diversifying of curricula, I have yet to hear one person suggest that all dead, white males be dropped from all college courses. I know a lot of left-wing intellectuals, those supposed enemies of academic freedom, and they are all well-versed in the white male canon: Moliere, Dante, Mark Twain, etc.

On the other hand, there's nothing wrong in re-evaluating those works from a modern point of view. Shakespeare was sometimes anti-semitic. Mark Twain, arguably progressive for the 19th Century, portrayed black Americans as slow-witted and gullible. Almost everyone was sexist. That doesn't make their writings less illuminating or entertaining. It just puts them in much-needed contexts.

Some of the best books I have read in Penn State classes were those dealing with people facing extreme oppression. The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass, for instance, takes slavery out of the history textbook and puts it in your face. It is important, powerful stuff, and should be part of any comprehensive curriculum. Not as a token gesture to African-Americans, but because it contains things that everybody should know.

Of course, there are extremists who would take curricula out of the faculty's hands and free speech out of students' mouths. Like all extremists, they are misguided. But the conservative attempt to discredit an entire set of ideas based on the wild-eyed views of a handful of zealots is dishonest. It's like getting rid of religion because the Jim Jones cultists took it too far.

"Political Correctness" is a non-issue. It doesn't even exist, except in the minds of paranoid right-wingers. The only thing dangerous about PC is that all the commotion has given administrators, faculty and students another excuse to sneer at well-intended attempts to address very real inequalities. My question is, when are these nay-sayers going to stop deriding liberal efforts and come up with effective solutions of their own?

Of course, most of them don't even understand the problems, and don't want to. They just want everyone to shut up and "quit whining." How enlightened.