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

 

By Lizzie Crocker

Stanford students are voting on a plan to reinstate the controversial Western Civilization curriculum more than 25 years after Jesse Jackson helped kill it.

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. 

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Source: The Daily Beast