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Notes & Comments

March 1998

Stanford's stairways to nowhere



As many of our readers will remember, back in the late 1980s Jesse Jackson led a group of about five hundred students on a march at Stanford University. Organized to protest the university’s mandatory course in Western civilization, the march instantly earned a permanent place in the annals of academic fatuousness because of its chant: “Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go.” It has taken Stanford a while, but we believe they may finally have realized Rev. Jackson’s dream. It did not happen all at once, of course. First, in response to pressure from Rev. Jackson and his radical supporters, the faculty senate voted thirty-nine to four to abandon the required course in Western civilization in favor of something called “Culture, Ideas, Values” (“CIV” as in “civilization,” but without the offending adjective “Western”). This turned out to be a politically correct multicultural smorgasbor ...

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 16 March 1998, on page 1
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