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When I came to Stanford University in Silicon Valley in 1989, where the start-ups at that time produced computers and chips made of silicon in addition to software, the humanities at this “technical” university were far from being closed today.
In the final phase of its rise to international excellence, the university shone with a small group of world-famous thinkers, mostly born in Europe, such as the philosophers René Girard and Michel Serres or the literary historians Lazar Fleishman, John Freccero and Stephen Orgel, who were led by teaching and Administrative duties hardly disturbed working on their books.
The general education-oriented lessons for students and the supervision of the few doctoral students were handled by colleagues who, besides friendliness, had little more to offer than adequate competence in their mother tongues.
After all, thanks to a reform of the binding reading canon aimed at the inclusion of “minority cultures”, the university had received an attention to which the prominent conservative writer Allan Bloom in his book “The Closing of the American Mind” in 1987, with the term used critically for the first time the "political correctness" reacted.
Stanford for life
Today, a good thirty years later, pretty much all of the humanities scholars employed at Stanford for life can count themselves among the world's finest in their disciplines, and the ambition warms up with the tautological resolve to appear “professional”.
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That means: In teaching and research, one describes the identities of cultural minorities excellently, emphasizes again and again without being asked how much they value them ("Black Lives Matter"), agrees to suggestions for erasing historical names from the public ("cancel culture"), whose wearers do not meet the ethical standards required today (such as the Southerner Woodrow Wilson, who rose from Princeton Rectorate to president), and trims his own language to gestures of protection ("trigger warnings") for the sensitive minds of the younger generation ("snowflake generation ").
How have the humanities - and they alone want to be politically correct - developed so over the past three decades?
The decisive energy was provided by a generation of specialists in literature, art, history or philosophy, who considered themselves chronically underestimated and now largely emeritus, whose urge for visible political commitment hardly anyone resisted due to a lack of political relevance.
This dynamic converged with the progressive dissolution of the historical worldview and its premise that different criteria of the judgment must apply to different epochs.
That is why it has now become plausible again to measure the Middle Ages against the values of the twenty-first century - as in the decade of the French Revolution, when titles of nobility were deleted from the texts of the classical seventeenth century.
Never enough recognition
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In addition to politicization and dehistoricization, there was a transition from analyzing economic-social class differences to maintaining cultural identities.
Its representatives articulate themselves in the staccato of the lawsuit, never to find due recognition and consideration, with which the role of victim has risen academically to the status of the highest existential dignity.
Nevertheless, around forty students and lecturers can meet on Thursday evenings to discuss the philosophical treatises mostly "old white men" without taboos.
Who outside of our humanities does “political correctness” actually bother?
Perhaps it has long dominated the academic structure of the United States.
In any case, when analyzing Donald Trump's response among minorities, the university intelligentsia got stuck with well-worn fascism comparisons.
And academic solutions to the real problems of the country are certainly not visible.
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On the contrary: The self-portrayal as embodied contrast to the educated elite almost helped Trump to get re-election - also and especially among male voters from the cultures of Latinos and African-Americans.
An optimistic conclusion from such stocktaking of the non-academic effect of “political correctness”: It creates the opposite of what it aims to do.
We should usher in a return to the risk of passionate thinking.
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is Albert Guérard Professor in Literature (Emeritus) at Stanford University. Most recently his translation of Baltasar Gracián's “Handorakel” and “Prosa der Welt” appeared in German. Denis Diderot and the periphery of the Enlightenment "