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 universitys 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 cultures got to go. It has taken Stanford a while, but we believe they may finally have realized Rev. Jacksons 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 ...
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 16 March 1998, on page 1
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