"I don’t like the term “political correctness” because conservatives tend to employ it to distract from serious racial, class, national, and gender discrimination. It’s a divisive phrase that perpetuates the so-called culture wars. I first heard the term in the 1970s, when it was used among progressive people as a safeguard against our own rigidness and the rigidness of other people on the left. Many political meetings ended with a period of evaluation and this was one of the problems acknowledged as something to avoid. The term has been bowdlerized since then. I welcome a range of opinions in my classroom and we always discuss the importance of genuine disagreement on the first day of term. I aim for a stimulating, surprising, awakening, collegial, and safe classroom, and try to foster this by encouraging everyone to speak and by creating assignments in which students work in a variety of small groups. We speak, we agree, we argue, we laugh, we learn."