I’ve written before about the recent trend on college campuses in which Republicans/conservatives are increasingly asserting their rights and opinions, in a growing effort to counter what is generally perceived to be an overwhelmingly liberal university environment. Well, as the Boston Globe reports, this new wave of “political correctness” may have already led to its own backlash, as “liberal” students and professors on campus are increasingly the targets of hostility and discrimination:

Alan Temes, an assistant professor of health and physical education at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, was getting good reviews on the job until his politics became an issue. Temes, who opposes the war in Iraq, began posting updates of the body count of US soldiers and Iraqi civilians on a bulletin board near his office. . . . Later, he was denied tenure, despite apparently meeting the qualifications for it.

This is one of several recent incidents in which colleges penalized faculty and students for expressing antiwar views. In September at George Mason University in Virginia, a student and Air Force veteran, Tariq Khan, stood near a military recruiters’ table on campus with a ‘’Recruiters lie” sign taped to his chest and handed out leaflets.

Another student assaulted him and took away his sign; the campus police then arrested Khan for violating a university policy that bans distribution of leaflets without prior approval from administrators. Charges were eventually dropped after Khan’s case was taken up by the American Civil Liberties Union and by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

FIRE is a nonpartisan organization that champions free expression on college campuses. When the organization was launched in 1998, its main focus was ‘’political correctness” from the left -- attempts to curtail speech regarded as racist, sexist, or otherwise injurious to diversity. Such censorship still endures. But alongside it, FIRE is seeing more cases in which speech is suppressed by political correctness on the right.

Of course, let’s not forget about the University of Kansas Religious Studies professor who planned to teach a course on intelligent design but had to back out after he posted derogatory comments about the merits of the “theory.” Allegedly, he was later physically attacked by two men because of his anti-religious comments, forced to step down as department chair, and is now threatening a lawsuit and saying that he was forced out by university officials.

Ahh, more skirmishes in the growing Culture Wars. This conflict between liberal and conservative beliefs isn’t dying down anytime soon -- if anything, it’s getting worse, with college campuses increasingly being one of the fiercest battlefields. Unfortunately, many careers and lives are likely to get ruined in this war as our nation gradually becomes more and more divided.

What was that about being “a uniter, not a divider?”