STANFORD DOCUMENTS
671
cured by taking a course or a set of courses, the remedy is easily
available. If it cannot be cured by taking courses, what is the point of
the proposed revisions that would abolish or add to the core list of
great works?
The assertion that the study of the great works that have in–
fluenced our present-day traditions generate a sense of alienation
among students is really extraordinary. Normally, exposure to and
active participation in such study overcomes preexisting feelings of
alienation. The confession of a former Columbia College student,
now the editor of a distinguished journal of opinion, on this point is
highly relevant:
Nor, speaking as a Jew, do I find it easy to believe these
students when they claim that because of race or sex they feel left
out or ignored by the great classic texts of the West. These texts,
after all, are largely Christian and by no means friendly for the
most part to Jews or Judaism . Yet when I encountered them as
an undergraduate, I felt that an inheritance of indescribable
richness which in the past had often been inaccessible to my own
people was now mine for the taking. Far from being excluded, I
was being invited in - and so are the Stanford students today .
Perhaps something else is intended. Perhaps it is believed that
the alleged alienation results from the way the great books are being
taught, from a feeling that their study does not sufficiently develop
the proper political consciousness required to purify existing society
from the evils of class, racial and sexual oppression?
If
this is so, then
it becomes apparent that for those who believe this, the reform of the
Western Culture program is a move to politicalize the curriculum.
The attitudes and assumptions implicit in some of the bizarre
criticisms of the existing course, if widely shared, would constitute a
profound threat to American higher education. One criticism pro–
tested that the content of the works studied and the standards of their
evaluation were the products of individuals restricted to "elite
members of Western society ." But under the social conditions of the
past - conditions that were criticized by some of the works studied in
the course - and at a time when literacy was often a monopoly of the
elite, who else but the elite could be the creators of culture? Western
culture has winnowed out the elite contributions of the elite in the
light of the continuing power of the great works of the past to il–
lumine, stimulate and challenge the minds of those, elite or non-elite,
willing to be engaged by them.
