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Jesse Jackson and students protest Western Culture program on Palm Drive, photograph, 1987. STANFORD UNIVERSITY
Forbes
Who’s Afraid Of Western Civ?
Michael Poliakoff
The advancement of empirical science, the Industrial Revolution, and
then the technological revolution, the development of representative
government, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo’s David and
Da Vinci’s masterpieces. Bach, Beethoven, Chopin. It’s been a rather
remarkable run.
And how remarkable that this engine of human progress seems strangely
to be faltering. Seventy-one years ago, French novelist, art theorist,
and Minister of Cultural Affairs André Malraux famously noted, “Western
civilization has begun to doubt its own credentials.” One cannot help
but wonder what he would think now, observing how our campuses treat
the study of Western Civilization. We are witnessing a self-wounding
nihilism.
By 2011, none of the 50 top U.S. universities required Western
Civilization, and 34 didn’t even offer the course. Nationwide, only 17%
of colleges require Western Civ, and only 18% require American history
or government. And, most recently, Yale University took its famed
“Introduction to Art History: Renaissance to the Present” off-line,
responding, as the school paper reported, to “student uneasiness over
an idealized Western ‘canon.’”
It has become an ugly “them and us” on campus. If you believe that
studying the forces that shaped modern theories of government, science,
and aesthetics should be a priority for us who inherited this legacy,
you might even be charged with the reflexive, career-breaking “-ist”
labels: racist, classist, sexist. And more.
Witness the gyrations over a new college entrance exam, an alternative
to the SAT and ACT that draws heavily from the Great Books, called the
Classic Learning Test (CLT). (Full disclosure: I’m an unpaid member of
the CLT’s board.) When trade journal Inside Higher Ed released an
article on the CLT, it created a firestorm of online attacks. For
example, one reader commented: “I think by emphasizing “Western Cannon
(sic)” this white conservative/ reactionary crowd is exactly who they
are marketing it to…”
“White conservative/reactionary crowd”? W.E.B. Du Bois would take
exception. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois wrote, “I sit with
Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and
arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide
in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between
the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle
and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no
scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil.”
Even amidst the grim racism of 1903, Du Bois saw the legacy of Western
Civilization as a heritage common to all, rather than a barrier to the
progress of African Americans.
So, pray tell, what is there to fear? How well I recall the furious
response of the University of Colorado–Boulder provost to my offer as
academic vice president of a fully-funded freshman faculty orientation
program with readings ranging from Plato to Publius to Frederick
Douglass to Martin Luther King: “I thought you weren’t going to cram
Western Civilization down our throats.” Equally tragicomic was the
chancellor of another University of Colorado campus who simply scorned
the program as “Dead White Males.”
On some campuses, the campaign to eliminate Western Civilization seems
more like a “canceling” (to use the term now in vogue) rather than an
attempt to add new texts to the discussion. In 2017–18, Reed College
overhauled its signature freshman seminar, a storied course focused on
the classics, due to student complaints of Eurocentrism. “Reedies
Against Racism,” a student group at Reed College, made the ludicrous
demand that the Humanities 110 course jettison all Euro texts as
“reparations for Humanities 110’s history of erasing the histories of
people of color, especially black people.” They haven’t (so far) gotten
all they want, but ancient Greece is now only one of four modules,
sharing the stage with three others: Egyptians, Israelites, and
Achaemenids; Tenochtitlan; and Harlem.
More than 30 years ago, Jesse Jackson led the Stanford University
protests with the cry, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go.”
It quickly became apparent that the movement against Western
Civilization was more ideological than pedagogical: Studying Western
Civilization came to represent Western supremacy, colonialism, and
racism to its opponents, rather than the academic study of the nations,
cultures, and peoples that contributed so heavily to the world we live
in.
In Stanley Kurtz’s new book, The Lost History of Western Civilization,
we find the sad epilogue to the story of Stanford’s defenestration of
its Western Civilization course: “Few junior faculty volunteered to
teach Stanford’s multiculturalist substitute for Western Civ. The
content of the course remained scattered and incoherent; student
interest was low; and the substitute requirement was eventually
canceled as a result.”
Thus, the dissolution of Western Civilization has left a vacuum in the
curriculum. Western Civ was once used to tie other disciplines
together, to supply a forum for discussion of the Big Questions, and to
provide students with a sense of purpose. It has debate and controversy
hardwired throughout. It is the cradle of the critical thinking that
employers value. What system aids human flourishing? Hobbes said
monarchy, John Locke said consent of the governed, Rousseau pulled
toward the state of nature. Western Civilization is the culture of
dialectic, not the culture of conformity. By joining that great debate,
students become part of an ongoing conversation about matters at the
core of human experience.
Cicero wrote, “Not to know what happened before you were born is to be
a child forever.” The good news is that there are bright spots in the
higher education landscape. Some colleges and universities—St. John’s,
Thomas Aquinas, Columbia, Hampden-Sydney, among others—have made
understanding the Western tradition a signature of undergraduate
education. And in the world of K-12, the fact that the Institute for
Classical Education has a network of more than 550 elementary and
secondary schools representing tens of thousands of parents is witness
to a hunger to study, interrogate, and understand our origins.
Especially now, in an era of turmoil and dissonance, the opportunity
for students to sharpen their sense of wonder, as well as their
critical faculties, as they explore the birthright of the place and
time in history that we inhabit, deserves, at very least, a place in
the course catalog of every college and university worthy of the name.
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