Stanford Students Want Western Civilization Studies Back as the PC Backlash Begins

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Daily Beast:

In 1988, the Rev. Jesse Jackson—then a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination—joined students at Stanford in chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!”

 

With that spectacle, the university promptly dropped required courses in Western Civilization. Fifteen texts—a “core list” that included Plato, Voltaire, St. Augustine, and Marx and Engels—were replaced by a more diverse canon.

 

It was the beginning of a wave of protests against Western culture on college campuses in the 1990s that, today, has seen a resurgence in the form of trigger warnings on syllabi, safe spaces, and policed speech.

 

At Stanford, a backlash against this censorious student culture is taking shape in the form of a petition to reinstate the university’s Western Civilization curriculum.

 

In the next two days, students will vote on a referendum proposed by the Stanford Review, an undergraduate political magazine, urging the Stanford’s Faculty Senate to require a two-quarter course for freshman “covering the politics, history, philosophy, and culture of the Western world.”

Harry Elliott, a sophomore and editor in chief of the Stanford Review, said the idea for a petition has been brewing for roughly a year, when they ran a story on Stanford’s humanities’ requirements relative to MIT, CalTech, and other elite schools.

 

“There’s commercial pressure from Silicon Valley to take more tech courses, and then a race to the bottom among professors to recruit students with easy courses like ‘The Language of Food’ rather than courses that explain the world in which we live today,” Elliott told The Daily Beast.

 

Under the new curriculum, Stanford students would “immerse themselves in the writings of Homer, Plato, Locke, Douglass, and de Beauvoir,” the petition reads. “The scientific revolutions hundreds of Stanford students use would gain historical context. We would lament the horrors of slavery and oppression—and applaud those who fought for freedom.”

________

 

Ancient Greeks Matter!