Education: The Canons Under Fire

For two years a debate has raged at Stanford University and reverberated through scores of other schools over a question that could set new directions for American higher education. The issue: Should students be required to read a fixed core of works on Western civilization, and, if so, what should be in it? The heart of the dispute at Stanford has been whether to amend or remove from the university's freshman Western culture courses a roster of 15 prescribed classics. Many scholars regard those works, ranging from Homer and Dante to Darwin and Freud, as part of a sacred canon. But revisionists, including many blacks, Hispanics and women, want to build a new, theme-based program rather too cleverly called CIV (short for Culture, Ideas and Values).

"Nobody is questioning the value of continuing to teach the great works of Western culture," insists CIV Proponent Thomas Wasow, dean of undergraduate studies. The fear that just such a question was being raised, however, brought bellows of protest from academic conservatives like Education Secretary William Bennett. A devout classicist, he accused Stanford's revisionists of "academic intimidation," claiming that a "very vocal minority is attempting to overpower a less vocal majority." Dismantling the core curriculum, he warned, amounted to "trashing Plato and Shakespeare."

Last week Stanford's faculty senate voted 39-4 for a compromise revision of their canon. This fall the original 15 books, all of them written by white, Western males, will be pared down. Out goes Homer, as well as Darwin and Dante. The six new requirements are unspecified works from Plato, the Bible, St. Augustine, Machiavelli, Rousseau and Marx. Next year Stanford's Western Culture Program will be formally replaced by CIV. All freshmen will read works "from at least one" non-European source chosen by the professor, who is required to give "substantial attention to issues of race, gender and class."

Faculty members point out that the new list, which was never meant to be exhaustive, will be supplemented by readings that will vary depending on the emphasis of different CIV teachers. Yet the compromise is a clear signal that Stanford intends to recognize the essential pluralism of Western civilization -- in literary as well as social terms. The major remaining question is how far professors will go in bringing the study of women and minorities into CIV courses.

All the way, if hard-core revisionists are able to suit the word to the action. "We want the idea of a canon eliminated," insists William King, 21, chairman of Stanford's Black Student Union. "The idea that there could be a core list is Eurocentric and biased." Similar opinions are heard at other schools. At Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., Professor Arnold Krupat declares flatly that there is nothing sacred or broadly cultured about any such canon. In fact, he claims, the idea "is almost exclusively Wasp, male and East Coast."