What, after all, is the South Africa Solidarity Committee position on abortion? AIDS testing? The establishment of a women's center? Contrary to the conspiracy theories that Plotz's article could spawn, no grand meeting was held to determine the platform of the Campus Left for the '90s.

Maybe there's no activist plot to poison the hearts and minds of the student body, but the net effect of these activisms is one that produces "liberal totalitarianism." Perhaps every time an activist group opens its collective mouth, all others take that as a cue to silence themselves. That, too, seems unlikely.

The most recent example, yesterday's mock eviction of house residents by the "Israeli Military Command" staged by the Committee on Palestine, will undoubtedly cause substantial rifts in an (always) already fractured "liberal fascism." There will be those who decry the Israeli Occupation and those who say that now is no time to apologize for terrorism in any form. A broad consensus among various organizations will probably not emerge.

WELL then, are they the masses?

This, it seems, is the guts of Plotz's argument: "The result of this campus activism and media bombardment [by just a few radicals] is that the only voice that gets heard at Harvard is the voice of the PC." Which means that "Harvard's sheeplike liberal majority is large enough and accepting enough of this PC ideology to stifle campus debate." In the end, the blame falls on the "PC crowd."

In other words, Plotz and others utilize the same rhetoric that they deride. By lumping students into a silent majority, they effectively silence that majority. The only people who are left with any real opinions at all are the "PC ideologues," the "oppressed conservatives" reading National Review in Lamont and campus critics such as David Plotz.

So who are the PC?

The problem is that once you have asked someone "Are you PC?" they can't be anymore. The question is equivalent to "Why don't you think?" In formulating an answer, any answer, the respondent has become someone with a reasoned, perhaps a liberal, view.

Which brings us to the startling revelation that the center of Harvard's political thought is left of America's. That does not mean that those on campus are sheeplike, unworthy or stupid. And it doesn't mean they are totalitarian. Instead, they happen to hold the majority view that is worthy of respect. They are people worthy of being asked not "Why don't you think?" but "What do you think?" In asking this, we have moved beyond PC.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. agrees: "Joining mood rings and Earth Shoes, `political correctness' has now entered into the realm of the merely facetious...After all the shouting is over, is it too much to hope that the real conversation, long deferred, may begin?"

When the inquest finally comes, and all the questions are asked, and all the answers are given, don't be surprised if the PC body turns up lost.