The PC controversy may have started with attempts to remove ethnic slurs from public use and then proceeded to jokes about replacing "short" with "vertically challenged," but at least on college campuses it rapidly escalated to the thought police level.

When my older son was in college 10 years ago, he was constantly having run-ins with the extreme PC crowd, not over language but over general attitude, mainly with regard to what could loosely be considered gender issues.

For example, he was involved with an alternative campus publication whose policy was to publish anything that any student wanted to submit -- which stirred up recurring controversies in itself. But the episode that really got him riled was when the publication put up posters showing a dominatrix-type figure with a whip saying "You will submit to the (name of publication)" and somebody who considered this sexist went around campus ripping them all down.

At another point, there had been an attempted rape at a different college in the area, and frightened students at his campus hastily pushed through a number of provisions in response, such as requiring dormitory doors to be kept locked at all times -- which meant a student couldn't visit a friend in another dorm without phoning ahead to have someone meet them at the front door and let them in.

When my son stood up at a student meeting to say there was no sign of any need for these regulations, no indication they would prevent a rape attempt like the one at the other college (which had been in a secluded outdoor area, not a dorm), and significant impediments to ordinary campus social life if they were enacted, he was met by a barrage of counter-arguments which essentially amounted to "You have no sensitivity to my feelings."

My younger son graduated from college 5 years ago, and he ran into the same attitudes -- though he avoided direct run-ins, being less confrontational by nature.

The one thing that does seem to have changed in the last 10 years is that you now get these arguments not just from the left, over racial or gender issues, but also from the right over conservative cultural issues. Even here at DU, it's not possible to say "religion is a myth" without somebody telling you that you're insulting believers, or to say "the South is a center of regressive social and economic attitudes" without being told you're an anti-Southern bigot.

It seems as though we're stuck in a linguistic tangle, where the original attempt to set forth norms of public behavior that would prevent outright hate speech has been co-opted to censor any criticism of a particular group's beliefs and attitudes.

To me, the distinction seems pretty clear. On one side is language that tends to perpetuate current power structures by demeaning and isolating anyone whose positions or even mere existence challenges those power structures. On the other is the use of socially subversive language by the excluded as a way of undermining the power structures that hold them down.

Things only becomes problematic when that distinction is blurred. For example, a group that is an excluded minority in the larger society may have sufficient numbers and influence at a liberal college to start acting like a dominant majority and throwing its weight around -- which was my son's objection -- perhaps without even realizing it.

Conversely, groups that no outside observer would doubt are part of the dominant power structure -- like Christians or white males -- may attempt to cast themselves as oppressed minorities, with the right to use socially subversive language themselves while being protected from having it used against them.

(These two situations are connected, of course, since the right has been very good at picking up incidents of excessive PC-ness on college campuses to either argue against all PC-ness or cast itself as the new oppressed.)

There's no simplistic answer to this tangle -- the only solution I see is to raise everybody's awareness of power relationships in our society and how they mediate all social, economic, and legal interactions, without exception.

In fact, that sort of consciousness-raising would be a good thing in general, since unacknowledged power relationships affect almost every current issue, from the Employee Free Choice Act to copyright and file-sharing to the war on drugs. But it's not something that can be accomplished overnight.