(FORTUNE Magazine) – Back in the stressful Sixties, ''Tell it like it is!'' was the banner and byword of rebellious youth. Now those kids have grown up. They live in the White House. They dominate the political establishment, the universities, the media, and the 42nd Street Development Project. And anybody who tells it like it is today is odds-on to get accused of ''insensitivity.'' What got us going on this item was a spate of late-July news stories about one Dale W. Lick. It seems that Lick, a leading candidate to become president of Michigan State University, suddenly became an ex-candidate. The reason is that several years ago, when he was president of the University of Maine, he made some remarks about the school's basketball program in the course of which he uttered (and a student tape-recorded) these words: ''A black athlete can actually outjump a white athlete on the average. All you need to do is turn to the N.C.A.A. playoffs in basketball to see that the bulk of the players on those outstanding teams are black.'' When the quote surfaced in Michigan, Lick was assailed by numerous educators, including MSU administrators and professors who deemed his remarks insensitive. An MSU trustee was quoted in a Lansing paper as averring that ''there is no way we can have this man as a candidate.'' Nobody claimed that the statement somehow manifested ill-will toward blacks, which it obviously doesn't. And anyone imprudent enough to argue that the statement was inaccurate would have been challenged by millions of American sports fans, not to mention the moviegoers who last year thronged to White Men Can't Jump (it's about the inner-city basketball scene) and the white director-screenwriter, Ron Shelton, who says he gave the flick that name because ''white men can't jump, and that's the way it is.'' The sensitivity cops are by no means restricted to our politically correct campuses: -- When Pepsi-Cola denied that cans of its sparkling beverage contained syringes, Advertising Age reported that critics were calling the company insensitive to consumers. The critics may or may not have shut up when the syringe story proved phony. -- Ann Landers wrote a column recently about the problems of extremely thin women, whom she described as looking ''consumptive.'' After some thin women wrote in to complain, Ann pleaded guilty to insensitivity. -- In New York City, Judge Jack Weinstein was pounded with the I word because, in sentencing a group of mostly Dominican immigrants on welfare-fraud charges, he said the community's leaders should discourage efforts to milk the welfare system. -- A March 1992 USA Today analysis of George Bush's decline in the polls -- he then had an approval rating of 41%, down from 89% after the Gulf war -- quoted experts as pointing to the ''appearance of insensitivity'' built into his insistence that the recession was over. The fact that it was over, as most economists then held and the National Bureau of Economic Research subsequently confirmed, cut no ice with the analysts. We do not claim that imputations of insensitivity are directed only at those speaking obvious truths. Sometimes folks seem to push the ''insensitivity'' button when they want to kvetch but don't have a sharply defined grievance. The Los Angeles Police Department's Behavioral Science Services Section (oh, you didn't know about that?) surveyed LAPD officers and employees after the May 1992 riots and discovered that they felt cop management was (in the words of police chief Willie L. Williams) ''insensitive to their needs.'' In case you are wondering about the Big Apple's 42nd Street Development Project, charges of insensitivity were broached (in the Times letters column) the other day, when the project forced Al's Deli to relocate while being unable, for various complicated New York reasons, to evict porno theaters on the street. What ever happened to ''unfair''?