I remember hearing that Jesse Jackson was at Stanford leading a chant of protesters saying "hey ho hey ho / Western Civ has got to go."This was in 1987. There is something in me that broke when that happened. I don't know hoe to describe those kind of feelings, where you feel alienated from an otherwise progressive cause.
I know it's not as catchy a chant to say "hey, ho, hey, ho / let's diversify the syllabus a little bit mo."
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One thing I remember about that whole discussion is that the chair of the committee that had put the “Western Culture” reading list together (all white, and almost all male, the only woman being Virginia Woolf) responded to the criticism of that list by agreeing with the critics. He said that the list was not meant to be a “great works” list but rather a list of works that all Stanford instructors could count on their students having been exposed to, and that a more diverse list would be a good thing.
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