584
PARTISAN REVIEW
it ends up celebrating ethnic differences, whereas in Germany it describes
and attempts to solve the problem of integrating foreign nationals into
the mainstream. Thus PC in America is a negative force, whereas in
Germany it could be a positive one. But when professors and the media
focus on the similarities alone, they - deliberately or unintentionally -
confuse the public, sometimes to promote their own political biases.
For instance, an article in a special issue (March 1993) of
Der Spiegel,
Germany's lively, left-oriented equivalent of
Newsweek
or
Time,
miscon–
strues what goes on in American universities. There, an American
(Hungarian-born and "politically correct") political scientist, Andrei
Markovits, enthuses about the inordinate success of our system of higher
education. He highlights its openness, range of options, diversity, and
endless versatility; he describes "the feminization and totally transformed
discourse since the 1970s," the visible multiculturalization even of our
most respected intellectual stronghold, Harvard; and he praises dedicated
American professors and their eager students. By totally ignoring our
widespread public polemics about the sorry state of student achievement
- that many students manage to get degrees for little more than "life ex–
periences," and the fact that standards in general have reached an all-time
low - he appears to ignore the
Spiegel
study's aim; that is, to rank uni–
versities in line with students' achievements and "satisfaction." For in the
preface the editors state: "The German university is growing and grow–
ing - and keeps getting weaker. Semester after semester classes get larger;
professors are discouraged or can't meet demands and £lee into research.
Possible solutions to the misery have been debated for years, so far with–
out success."
Der Spiegel
initiated a complicated rating scheme of profes–
sors by students and colleagues, of conditions deemed optimal by profes–
sors, and of learning situations deemed acceptable in the various disci–
plines, in order to determine which of the sixty-nine German universities
might serve as models for the rest of them.
Professor Markovits, however, started out by contrasting the alleged
glories of American universities to our elitist, expensive and inadequate
health care system, our unmanageable bureaucracy, our weak business en–
terprises, economy and party structure, and our neglected cities and fami–
lies, which, he assures us, President Clinton and his team will fix - despite
"twelve years of neglect, brutality and cynicism." Although he supplies
the top twenty-five American rankings (of our 3,600 institutions), he de–
clares at the outset that ranking has been "fetishized ... into its use as a
commodity just like most things in our capitalist economy," and thus
avoids assessing what he is asked to rank - that is, optimal conditions for
student learning. By rejoicing that the "anti-intellectual days of Reagan–
Bush cynicism and their neglect of the university system are gone," and
