The Scrapbook is old enough to remember without fondness the astounding spectacle of the Rev. Jesse Jackson in 1987 leading Stanford University students chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho! Western culture’s got to go!” The witless infantilism of the chant perfectly encapsulated its substantive content: Who needs to study the poetry of Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton when you can rhyme “ho” and “go”? And what could possibly be a good reason to try to understand a culture you reject—well, unless somebody asked, you know, why you reject it?
The largely successful assault on Western culture on college campuses in the 1980s has evolved seamlessly into the culture of speech codes, trigger warnings, and grievance on campus today. At Stanford, 59 percent of undergraduates now want to major in engineering. Call it a flight to seriousness.
All is not lost on Leland Stanford’s old farm, however. Now comes a “manifesto” from the editors of the Stanford Review, an independent conservative publication, calling for the reinstatement of a two-quarter required course on Western civilization for freshmen. The revolutionary idea behind the manifesto seems to be that students should know something about the culture in which they find themselves:
Note what the Review‘s editors are not proposing: “Ho, ho, hey, hey! Western culture, hip-hooray!” They endorse a curriculum that will examine positive and negative elements of the centuries of history under consideration. The point is that an uninformed critique can’t even explain its own basis and the standards of judgment it employs—which could explain why so many youthful opinions these days begin with the words, “I feel . . .”
The Review‘s editors have started a petition to put their proposal to a vote among Stanford undergraduates. If it passes, the referendum won’t bind the university to accept the proposal. But it would give a boost to those who still believe that a proper liberal-arts education is both valuable in itself and useful in making sense of complex political and social problems.
