The phrase "political correctness" spreads. At the third annual meeting of the National Association of Scholars, members charge that academe is in the grip of "illiberal radicals." The American Association of University Professors defends itself against conservative critics like Dinesh D'Souza and Roger Kimball by issuing a "Statement on the Political Correctness Controversy." Meanwhile, Lynne Cheney, chair of the NEH, calls political correctness "the new McCarthyism" and urges parents to send their children to non-P.C. schools.

Ioan Culianu, a Romanian emigré and University of Chicago religion professor, is an outspoken critic of his country's post-communist government as well as an expert on mysticism. A disciple of Mircea Eliade's, he studies the invention of imaginary worlds. Shortly after he speaks out against the Romanian government and its dreaded Securitate, he is shot to death in a University of Chicago bathroom stall. Right-wing Romanian papers welcome the killing - one of them refers to Culianu as "a piece of excrement over whom not enough water was flushed." Ted Anton covers "the first political assassination of a professor on American soil" for LF.

Forty-four years after their discovery, the Dead Sea Scrolls are made available to wider scholarly scrutiny. Were the scrolls really so illegible that it required nearly half a century to prepare them for outside review? Critics attribute the delay to the original editorial team's territorial anxiety, desultory progress, and dismissive attitudes toward other scholars. They also point to one disturbed editor's anti-Semitic outburst. Finally, as LF's Katharine Whittemore notes, some suggest that the scrolls were kept secret because they contain explosive material about the origins of Christianity.