A great interview with Roger Kimball here at Frontpagemag . Some paragraphs:

Kimball: From its beginning in September 1982, The New Criterion has been distinguished by its polemical opposition to the politically correct establishment. You will not be surprised to hear that The New Criterion is not on the list of most favored journals at many colleges or universities. Indeed, at many cultural institutions–not only universities, alas–we have sometimes felt that we are actually disliked.

I think, for example, of the time I was lecturing at a college in Providence, Rhode Island. My wife taught there at the time, and I had been invited to talk about multiculturalism. I pointed out that what generally goes under the name “multiculturalism” is really a form of mono-cultural animus directed against the dominant culture. I had barely left the podium when one of her colleagues wheeled into print into the college newspaper to accuse me of being a Nazi.

Well, it has been ever thus for The New Criterion. Of course a lot has changed since September 1982 when Hilton Kramer brought out the first issue of The New Criterion. Back then, there was still something called the Soviet Union, a minatory, intractable behemoth which, for most observers, seemed destined to lumber on indefinitely. The top marginal tax rate had just been cut from nearly 70 percent to 50 percent, but in August of that year, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dipped to 776 and many were the bulletins alerting us to the impending Death of Equities.

By 1982, we’d suffered through the disgusting spectacle of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the brazen economic blackmail of OPEC–how many of our current political woes were engendered by our inadequate response to those assaults!–but al Qaeda was not yet a twinkling in the mullahs’ eyes. No one (near enough) had heard of email, cell phones, or the internet, and the words “multiculturalism” and “political correctness” had yet to be enlisted to register the burgeoning pathologies they named. The university, then as now, was essentially a one-party state, its reflexive, hermetic leftism still untroubled by such broadsides as Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind.

Elsewhere in the world of art, culture, and intellectual life, a similarly sclerotic complacency reigned. The term “diversity” had yet to emerge as the favored shibboleth of those bent on enforcing conformity, but the conformity itself was already deeply entrenched.

Standards–aesthetic as well as intellectual–were low, but then so were expectations. Words like “transgressive” and “challenging” had just begun their bizarre mutation into terms of critical commendation, while traditional epithets such as “beautiful,” “technically accomplished,” even “true” were drifting into desuetude. What the historian Elie Kedourie called “The Chatham House Version”–that toxic amalgam of smugness, moral relativism, and cherished feelings of guilt about the achievements of Western civilization–everywhere nurtured the catechism of established opinion.

This, of course, was a world allergic to dissent, and it was no surprise that when The New Criterion first appeared the reaction was astonishment followed quickly by rage: astonishment that anyone would even think of starting an unabashedly conservative journal devoted to serious culture and the arts, rage that said party would have the temerity to translate that thought into action.