Bye Bye, Western Civilization

I’ve mentioned the decline of the liberal arts in our universities on these pages in the past. Lately, I have noticed that articles from The American Scholar to The New Republic to the blogosphere have been focusing on the same subject. Each year, more universities dump entirely the lower division undergraduate requirement of the core study most often called “Western Civilization.”

Stanford dumped it years ago. UC Berkeley makes it one part of many in the history department. The Ivies, and now most mid-level public and private universities are following suit. Hanging their hats on multiculturalism and the “melting pot” of today’s America, the schools have followed the course set by radical leftists, sociologists, race-baiters and one-worlders. In doing so, the universities have made it nearly impossible for students to comprehend or embrace the concept of American exceptionalism. Barack Obama, the leader of America and the West, is a product of that type of ignorance.

Back in 1987, Rev. Jesse Jackson led protestors at Stanford University demanding the end of “ethnocentric” Western Civilization instruction to be replaced with that god of the divisive left—diversity. No accommodation or modification was going to be allowed. Jackson led the chants of “hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Culture’s got to go.” The Stanford administration complied without complaint. That’s the same administration which had earlier dropped the appellation for the school’s sports teams, the Stanford Indians, and changed it to the meaningless Stanford Cardinal (it refers to the color, not the bird).

It seems that proudly naming your teams after the iconic Native Americans is mysteriously racist and insensitive. That same year, Esquire Magazine ran a cover with a picture of the aged Indian who had served as the school’s emblem sitting in the stands at Stanford Field. He was the only one in the stands, wearing full warrior headdress, with a barely visible tear falling from one eye. In the article, he asked “what did I do wrong?” He didn’t realize he had done nothing wrong, it was those oppressive white administrators who were exploiting him who were doing wrong.

The National Association of Scholars recently released a formal paper entitled The Vanishing West: 1964 to 2010.” The paper lays out the rapid disappearance of the Western Civilization curriculum from nearly every major higher education institution. And the scholars aren’t happy about it. The Black Power movement of the 60s had obtained its own Black Studies curriculum (starting with San Francisco State University), and it quickly became time for every other racial and ethnic movement to have its own department. Suddenly, the study of obscure tribes in Africa or Asia became as important as the study of the Greek scholars, or the writers of the Renaissance, or the Humanists, or St. Thomas Aquinas, or (particularly) America’s Enlightenment Founders.

What pieces of the Western Civilization core curriculum remained were taken over by flower children and former members of the Weather Underground, resulting in a rump Western Civ discipline which became “grim and gloomy” as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Lynne Cheney of the National Endowment for the Humanities has a long record of damning the whole misplaced emphasis on everything except the successes (and failures) of Western culture. Said Cheney in 1994: “Imagine an outline for teaching American history [within today’s academic parameters] in which George Washington makes only a fleeting appearance and is never described as our first President. Or in which the founding of the Sierra Club and the National Organization for Women are considered noteworthy events, but the first gathering of the US Congress is not.”

The problem is that you don’t have to imagine it anymore. Take a look at the current nonsense that has replaced Western Civilization in higher learning. Most of the courses replace traditional Western Civ courses previously required at major universities and old-fashioned liberal arts colleges. The operative word is “replace” rather than “augment.” I won’t even try to list the silliness. Just grab the catalog from your favorite university and check out the wealth of non-Western Civilization courses being offered in place of traditional studies of Greece, Rome, Great Britain, France, and of course, the United States. The Civil War must now compete with the Cultural Phenomenon of Lady Gaga, the Zen of Keanu Reeves, and urban/hip hop culture, and the Civil War is losing.

No wonder ignorant “Occupiers” think that the Constitution is an obsolete document written by old white men impeding social progress. Without a basic understanding of the workings of Western culture and its evolution into modernity, they can’t possibly comprehend the exquisite balancing act done by the Founding Fathers in creating a unique form of government with checks and balances, a voice for the people, and the protection of ordered liberty.

Without that study of the Western development of democratic institutions, self-government, art, science and universal education, the “Occupiers” can’t possibly understand the reasons behind the American Revolution. Most of them claim to understand, but in fact just get everything wrong. Instead of a Revolution for freedom and self-government, they judge the appropriate reason to oppose the powers-that-be in terms of what Abbie Hoffman called “revolution for the hell of it.”