EDITH KURZWEIL
585
failing
to
question how the inordinate successes he describes could have
occurred during that time, Markovits also undercuts his own argument.
Ultimately, he trusts that President Clinton will listen ever more atten–
tively to our professors, and will appoint them (including Markovits?) to
Cabinet-level positions.
I have given the gist of this long article because it is the only one on
America in this potpourri of German surveys, and the only one on a
positive note. It also demonstrates that an American professor - this time
one of the politically correct variety - can be put (accidentally or pur–
posefully) into the position of influencing policy in another society.
Certainly, most
Spiegel
readers cannot know Markovits's aims, even if
they may be puzzled by the £:lct that German students when admitted to
U.S. universities get advanced placement or know more than their privi–
leged American-educated classmates - in languages, mathematics and
nearly every other field.
Superficially, professors' and students' complaints are as interchange–
able as Visiting Professorships. Yet because German professors read
Dey
Spiegel
and also American academic journals, I was asked during a recent
stay in Berlin to advise them on "doing the politically correct thing."
"God forbid," I quipped, before beginning to explain that their helpless–
ness in "correctly" integrating "foreigners" and "asylum seekers" from
many cultures can in no way be compared to what is subsumed in
America as "politi cal correctness," such as the antics of a Leonard Jeffries,
some of the textual exegeses by literary scholars, or the public accusations
of sexual harassment made by a former assistant of a nominee to the
American Supreme Court.
Clearly, the instant domestication of what happens elsewhere on the
globe, of unique, often freakish and variform happenings, of industrial
leaps and inventions via media packaging, and the general bent to in–
stantly translate events in other cultures by generalizing from our own -
a practice we unconsciously emulate as we watch the nightly news -
tends to simplifY, distort and assume that we comprehend what we often
misunderstand. Thus we downplay the influence selective reports may su–
perimpose onto the perceptions (or even the policies) of well-meaning
people in other countries. For within our own cultures we all know
more or less what underlying assumptions our intellectuals and commen–
tators share or dispute. But we are less savvy in assessing those of other
nationals.
That is the primary reason why Germans (and others) are bound to
miss the hidden component of what has become a shorthand for a con–
catenation of political stances, in the case of "political correctness." That
the connections among the culture and the university, the culture
if
the
