Vanishing Act

May 19, 2011, 12:35 pm

Yesterday the National Association of Scholars issued a report, The Vanishing West 1964-2010: The Disappearance of Western Civilization from the American Undergraduate Curriculum. It documents something that I imagine few would doubt—namely that survey courses on the history of Western Civilization have become very rare in the curricula of America’s top colleges and universities.

Nonetheless, we have spent roughly nine months compiling the evidence, going through old course catalogs and disentangling myriad academic requirements. The initial point, which we thought would take only weeks to establish, was to see whether the general impression was true. Have colleges and universities really retired Western Civilization from the curriculum?

But as often happens, simple questions do not necessarily have simple answers. We do have a general answer: The often two-semester survey course usually taught by faculty in the history department that covered the West from ancient Greece to the present has indeed gone into radical eclipse.

Readers who want to peruse the data have the link at hand, and there is no real point in my repeating it here. But to give a flavor of the study, we found, for example, that in a cohort of 50 top-ranked colleges and universities, in 1964, 41 of the 50 offered a complete two-semester or partial (one-semester) Western history survey course. At 10 of the institutions it was a general education requirement. The nine universities out of the 50 that didn’t offer a Western history survey course all had instead a required interdisciplinary Western Civilization requirement. In other words, all 50 had some version of a Western Civilization requirement, some stricter than others, and a minority (18 percent) taking an interdisciplinary rather than a historical approach.

By 2010, the Western history survey course was no longer a general education requirement at any of the 50 institutions, and the interdisciplinary Western Civilization requirement was gone too. Sixteen of the 50, however, still offered the history of Western Civilization as something that could meet broad distribution requirements, i.e. it was one course on a list of seven or more that a student could take to fulfill a requirement. Two institutions offered Western Civilization as an option in what we called a cluster: One course among six or fewer that fulfilled the requirement.

Gaze at something long enough and deeply enough and you are almost certain to find things you didn’t expect. We were pulled along by the logic of the enterprise. If Western Civilization was disappearing from general education requirements, was it still a requirement for undergraduate history majors? If it was growing scarce at elite colleges and universities, was it still common at major public universities? If not Western history, what about survey courses in American history? The answers in all three cases proved mostly negative. Forty-five of the 50 colleges and universities in our benchmark cohort had no pertinent requirements for history majors.

And the pattern held for public universities as well, in both general education requirements and requirements for majors.

And the data on American history survey courses look much the same.

Of course, the real question is, “Why does any of this matter?” One reason it matters is that the Western Civilization survey course once provided the coherent organizing principle of the liberal arts curriculum. It has not been driven out by a better organizing principle but mostly by ideological opposition. In its absence, the liberal-arts curriculum has descended into a mixture of self-indulgent specialization, triviality, and gestural attempts to establish a core out of a collection of fragments. Nothing has really come along that can provide the compelling and intellectually rich interconnectedness or the narrative wholeness of a curriculum based on the study of Western Civilization. “World history” is too amorphous. “Multiculturalism” has proven to be little more than reification of ethnic resentments. “Diversity” can’t keep its own narrative straight, let alone organize a curriculum. Race-class-gender reductionism organizes things all too well, and marches students into a desert of intellectual sterility.

The results have a mass migration of students out of the humanities and the liberal arts. Moreover, the excision of Western Civilization as the organizing principle of the curriculum has coincided with a vast decline in academic standards.

Yes we know, “correlation is not causation.” Maybe the out-migration from the humanities and the liberal arts and the cratering of academic standards had other causes. Surely it had other causes. I would put mass higher education at the head of my list of suspected causes. But then again, the arrival of mass higher education was one of the reasons why the Western Civilization survey course was slowly phased out. It was read by many critics as too elite in character.

There is a complex story here that goes well beyond what I can say in this format and beyond the NAS report itself, but some of the elements are clear enough. We have to distinguish Western Civilization itself; the college-level history course often called “Western Civilization,” and Western Civilization as a governing idea for the curriculum. The governing idea can linger even if the history course disappears, and to some extent it has. But without the course, the governing idea doesn’t govern very well. Students may learn to refer to the Greeks, Medieval Europe, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and so on, but their knowledge of such subjects is chaotic: crowded with excess detail here, blank there; by turns schematic and ornate; over-interpreted and half-baked. The purpose of the survey course was to give a rounded overview, and in its absence, students acquire that hodgepodge of facts and misproportioned opinions that might be called an underview. And not just students. This has gone on long enough and penetrated so deeply into graduate education that it is characteristic of many faculty members as well.

I don’t exempt myself. I spent my undergraduate and graduate years studying social anthropology and I graduated from college in 1975 knowing a lot more about the colonial history of sub-Saharan Africa than about American or European history. I learned to regret what I missed and to repair the gap as best I could. As someone who had all the supposed benefits of an unstructured, multicultural undergraduate education, I grew skeptical of the idea that anyone had done me a pedagogical favor.

To some critics, Western civilization itself is an object of hatred and derision: a source of misery and oppression at home and abroad. Studying such a civilization except as an act of debunking is a waste of time. A related line of criticism holds that the traditional survey course on Western Civilization was merely an exercise in class triumphalism: telling the story in a manner that justified the privileges of the elites.

If one subscribes to such views, there really isn’t much more to say. Except that those views are themselves pretty silly. Misery and oppression are, of course, part of the history of the West, as they are part of human history everywhere. There is no Western exceptionalism on that score. On the other hand, if we seek to understand the advancement of human freedom, it is pretty difficult not to focus on the West. Slavery as a social system was fairly close to universal until the British legally abolished first the slave trade and then slavery itself. Concepts of legally enforceable personal rights are by no means exclusive to the West, but if we seek to understand the development of political systems centered on such rights, the West again looms large.

So, should we study the West because of its exceptional character? That is indeed a pretty good reason, provided that we are ready to own the sheer difficulty of the question. The West compounds a history of intellectual, philosophical, religious, scientific, institutional, political, commercial, military, and technological innovation, with each feeding into the others and being fed in turn. Theorists of how these developments interlace and how the causal factors are to be teased apart disagree profoundly.

When I talk with students in college right now, I am often struck by their unearned confidence on matters like this. “Western history? We covered that in high school.” “American history? We all took the AP exam. No need to repeat something so simple.” “It is just memorizing facts.” Those are more or less direct quotations from students at Bowdoin College with whom I spoke on Monday night. Bowdoin does not require—in fact it doesn’t even offer—a Western history survey course, or an American history survey course. The Bowdoin students I spoke with did not sense any lacuna.

That epitomizes the problem. There is no AP history examination on Western Civilization that covers the topic from ancient Greece and Roman forward. And while I have no doubt the AP exams are good for something, they really are not a substitute for a well-taught college history survey course.

We are met here with a lack that a good many bright students don’t experience as a lack. They are confident that their curriculum with its surfeit of options and opportunities for zeroing in on specific topics is serving them well. So an argument in favor of teaching Western Civilization survey courses is not likely to succeed if it is founded on consumer demand. The students—a good many anyway—have no idea what they are missing. They may one day awaken to that defect, but I judge by own experience that it will prove a hard thing to remedy.

The better arguments for teaching Western Civilization survey courses are founded on what students need to know, not what they want to know. They need to know something about their own civilization, especially if they hope to improve it. They need to know the history of the West if they hope to navigate the fads, delusions, and manias of our time, because these are merely the newest iterations of follies that run perennial in our culture. They need to comprehend the cultural predicates that fostered the growth of scientific thought in the West and gave our civilization what the historian William McNeill called its unique “restlessness.” They need especially to understand that if they hope to be thoughtful participants in great struggle to shape world civilization.

Having said all this, I suppose it sounds as though the NAS report ends up calling for a restoration of the old Western Civilization curriculum. Actually, it doesn’t. There are probably too few historians capable of teaching it even if colleges and universities were suddenly seized by a collective desire to dust off fifty year old syllabi and resume where they left off. But no, we don’t that would be a good idea. The world has changed; the discipline of history has been changed; and in any case the task of constructing a meaningful synthesis of the past is always changing.

The Vanishing West concludes with a series of recommendations that colleges and universities each do their own fine-grained assessment of how Western Civilization is present (or absent) in their current curricula, and proceed to rebuild on that basis; we call for repairing the graduate education pipeline so that we have teachers who are once again competent over the whole history of the West; and we invite the development of new Western Civilization courses that synthesize traditional and contemporary perspectives.

The report aims at amelioration, not revolution. But I’ve spent enough time on the topic to know that controversy awaits. Contemporary academe has more than made its peace with its flattened, randomized, and multicultural curriculum. To many faculty members and a fairly broad gathering of students, “Western Civilization” is not an academic course. It is a provocation.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged National Association of Scholars, Western Civilization. Bookmark the permalink.

E-mail

whitakal

I’ve noticed that Wood’s posts usually attract a barrage of (negative) commentary. Is the absence of comments on this post an indicator that Wood is unquestionably right or, more likely, that his final line is wrong: Western Civilization is not even a “provocation.” It is as simply out of sight / out of mind as, say, the traditions of mandatory student chapel or the wearing of Oxfordian gowns? If the latter’s the case, then what does this silence say about his more important claim that the vanishing of Western Civilization as a unifying principle has left a void at the core of a liberal arts education? Maybe this is the surprising true result of years of decentering: nobody has anything to say about what it’s all about (besides, perhaps, the hokey-pokey).
chuckkle

OK, let’s grant that the old Western Civ and US History sequences have declined in the past 50 years. If someone else tried to make the point, it might have been possible to start a discussion about the reasons for that, the effect of it, and so forth.

But when Peter Wood starts talking, it isn’t very long before any pretense of an actual dialogue or reasonable exchange among those who differ but are willing to respect the other’s opinion disappears. According to Wood:
““World history” is too amorphous. “Multiculturalism” has proven to be little more than reification of ethnic resentments. “Diversity” can’t keep its own narrative straight, let alone organize a curriculum. Race-class-gender reductionism organizes things all too well, and marches students into a desert of intellectual sterility.”

This is not how you talk to a colleague you respect. Rather it is how you score points when you have contempt for the other person. Why does Wood do this? Well, most of his postings to the CHE Innovations section have an inherent problem inasmuch as they also appear on the National Association of Scholars website. As organizational spokesperson, for the NAS loyalists, he has to toss them some red meat. But CHE blogs are open to a wide range of readers, many of whom feel free to respond to Wood’s more dogmatic and short-sighted statements. Thus the same essay might pileup a lot of retorts (and retorts to the retorts) in a couple of days, while the NAS site only draws an occasional equivalent of “pip, pip!” or “jolly good!”

Wood doesn’t rest easy with this dilemma, and he sometimes shows his irritation at and impatience with his interlocutors. Unlike some of the other conservative bloggers in CHE, such as Mark Bauerlein, Wood can’t seem to shift over into dialogue mode, or change tone and direction with a personal anecdote, or respond in the comments section with a genuine engagement.

It’s clear he is inflexible, but he doesn’t really reveal why. A basic personality feature? Or perhaps he lacks experience with the intellectual give and take often present in classrooms, as well as academic conferences and forums, due to spending much of his career in administration? Wood often seems most comfortable in bureaucratic mode: issuing dicta, broaching no innocent questions or determined challenges.

Wood wrote a book about the decline in civility in the US: he attributes a willingness to express “anger” as a social problem. He doesn’t see his own smug contempt as a problem at all. But wouldn’t most people say anger certainly can be seen as a reasonable response to scornful self-righteous contempt.

Chuck Kleinhans
nordicexpat

I don’t see “Western Civilization” as a provocation, but I think characterizing it as “the coherent organizing principle of the liberal arts curriculum” is asking a bit much of an academic course (even if we think of it as a two-term course). Asking whether a particular course (in the liberal arts) is required or not tells you about its symbolic importance in the curriculum.The requirement alone doesn’t tell you whether students acquired an overview or an underview of the subject, or whether it really does provide a “governing ideal” for the study of different subjects (Full disclosure: I took a two-term Western Civ class, and the description Wood gives above concerning the chaotic knowledge of Western history probably would apply to many of the fellow students in that class). But to see whether the Western Civ class Wood describes is an actual course or pure fantasy, let’s ask how many college students at the beginning of the 20th century would describe a Western civilization course in the way Wood does? (And many of those students probably learned to read ancient Greek by the age of 8).

Is this a typically American obsession? What is the history of obligatory general education survey courses outside the US? The countries I am familiar with don’t even have general education courses.
eberg

I suppose a similar line of analysis could reveal the loss of mathematical sequences and general competencies for all but majors (same for sciences?) in the first two years of college. Why the reorganization of curricula in U.S. colleges and universities arose as it did is itself a topic suited for investigation by intellectual historians of several stripe, not simply a self-serving NAS report. Given the fact that western civilization disappeared as completely as it did from the most selective elite institutions casts considerable doubt on Wood’s convenient hypothesis that “mass education” is the culprit.
mbelvadi

Wood seems to be very much among those conservatives who pushed very hard for the principles of globalization when it meant macroeconomic forces that distributed wealth and power upwards at the expense of the working man, but are unable to accept the social and intellectual consequences of globalization for their pet non-economic ideals – that everyone realizes now that non-Western civilization is at least as important for today’s undergraduate to learn about as Western civ, and that forcing non-history majors to take 2 semesters of Western civ crowds out the opportunity to learn other things that will be more valuable in a global community that is increasingly dominated by the East.

And someone just has to inject this quotation into Wood’s adulation of Western culture: Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization, responded, “I think it would be a good idea”.
profmomof1

The problem is not that multicultural courses have been added to the curriculum. The problem is that most universities (mine included) have no coherent, structured approach to a multicultural curriculum. Instead, students are required to take several courses from a very large selection, most of which provide narrow little windows onto a subject. Western Civ courses (which we still have, though not required), feature an in-depth 2-semester structured and organized overview. We have no equivalent World (or Non-Western), or Global Civ overview course sequence. While indeed Western Civ is very valuable, it needs to be accompanied by an equivalent overview of the rise of civilizations in Asia, the Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, etc., since not only do these regions impact America today, so we need to be educated about their histories, but many of today’s American citizens come from those regions of the world.

However, rather than an organized and coherent overview, students can meet the multicultural requirements with, say, a course on art of Japan, one on Native American crafts of the American Southwest, and one on the history of Viet Nam or on literature of the Harlem Renaissance or depiction of Women in film. Not bad courses, but no one could say that provides a comprehensive education on world history. And why does Harlem Renaissance have to go into multicultural category, anyway? It happened here in the West. As did the lives of women, and of Native Americans encountering Europeans. So Western Civ needs updating of course. But, it doesn’t get updated, and comprehensive world civ courses don’t get offered, we move more and more into the the fractured and specialized course offerings. That’s just intellecturally easier on faculty and students.
whitakal

I’m not a professor of rhetoric, but did Prof. Kleinhans just complain about Wood treating colleagues with contempt by way of … an extended ad hominem attack? Is this a wry case of postmodern irony? Or the consequence of taking the curricular (if not the political) as personal? Or an instance of simply having nothing to say about the topic itself?
nordicexpat

I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with this in the abstract, but, again, I think there is a pretty wide disconnect between the reasons why a course might be required, and what a particular course would be able to accomplish. I think if you one were to write down a list of actual learning objectives (that is, what students would actually be able to DO after a given course was completed), we would find that a university education would take far longer than 4 years for students to acquire all the knowledge that it is “essential” for them to know in the 21st century. Again, what would it mean for students to be “educated” about the rise of civilization in Asia, the Arab world, sub-Saharan Africa, South America, etc? Does anyone think a survey course could accomplish this? Now add all the arts and sciences. Again, what sets of skills do we want students to acquire, and how long would it take for them to acquire them?

I think this one reason why some schools abandon language requirements. The reasons for learning an additional language are excellent. However, those reasons tend to assume the student has achieved fluency in the language, and how many students acquire fluency after they have fulfilled the requirement? So if most students don’t achieve the level that is assumed as the reason for the existence of the course in the first place, why keep the requirement? (Note: I’m not saying that students shouldn’t study an additional language at university; I just think the justification for a requirement that they do so has to be tied to specific learning objectives of the courses). I think general education requirements become ideological battlegrounds because that’s what they are designed to be: more symbolic expressions of what the institution thinks is important rather than an actual set of learning objectives that are sequentially linked in a coherent curriculum. And for that reason is not surprising that the discussion becomes so politicized.
rjosephhoffmann

Worrying because it is true. Not knowing the history of your own city, as it were, doesn’t mean you can’t live there but it’s a dog’s view of environment and contentment. We’re cheating students out of the satisfaction of knowing their primary historical environment in order to avoid the dangers of classicism and Eurocentrism–neither of which slogans apply to students who know almost nothing about classics or the history of Europe and its spawn. This is an important warning.
cmpintl

The question, “What is the West?” struggles for answers in academe and even when two courses in the history of Western civilization were required, those courses were more reminders of an earlier era that was long gone. That was certainly the case in the early 60s at the University of Pittsburgh where I earned an undergraduate degree. I’m glad Peter Wood and NAS have published this study. Perhaps it will encourage us to ask, what is the West?
peterwwood

I am accused by mbelvadi of pushing “very hard for the principles of globalization” when that meant favoring the rich and the powerful but disliking the consequences for non-economic ideals. This is mbelvadi’s private fantasy, unsupported by anything I have ever written or said. I have never pushed for globalization, “hard,” medium, or soft. As a social scientist, of course, I take account of the existence of globalization as a fact to be reckoned with. If mbelvadi took the time to read the NAS report, he would find that it fully acknowledges the importance of teaching non-Western civilization as part of the undergraduate curriculum. The question is whether students can do very much with knowledge of the non-West if their knowledge of their own civilization is scanty or superficial. What we need is an undergraduate curriculum that does both things: one that teaches Western history survey courses that are reasonably thorough and also builds outward to the study of the other cultures and civilizations.

Peter Wood
peterwwood

Oh dear. Chuck has an unhealthy obsession with me. A week or so after I post items on the Innovations blog, my colleague Ashley Thorne with the Chronicle’s permission re-posts them on the NAS website. But I write these posts for Innovations, and the Chronicle’s readership is my primary audience. Chuck’s continuing research into my past seems to have missed the 25 years or so I spent in the classroom. As to respecting the opinions of those who differ with me, it depends. We apportion respect to those to whom it is due by evidence of their good faith, commitment to finding the truth, and the quality of their thought. It isn’t so easy to summon respect for someone who trades continuously in ad hominem attacks and inneundo and almost never mounts a substantive argument in favor of his views.

Peter Wood
paxton

I agree with a lot that has been said here. The humanities could benefit from a bit
more coherence. But I also agree with some of the commentators that this coherence should come from a firm understanding of what our learning goals are. A few thoughts to add:

I think the problem with a Western Civ. course is not just that it ignores non-Western civilizations but that it ignores a significant part of Western civilization as well, not in the least the West’s interaction and cross-fertilization with other cultures.

The historical moments that we might call defining – Ancient Greece, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment – could be replaced with other ‘defining’ moments – The Roman Empire, the Great Schism, the rise of the Ottoman Empire, the Reformation, the French and American Revolutions, and so on. In the process we would tell a very different story. So I suppose the objection to these kinds of survey courses is that they are always, necessarily selective and partial narratives. The more comprehensive they become, the less coherent and the less practical. Hence cmpintl’s question, “What is the West”?

The idea of most current requirements – as I understand them – is that they are now organized around a set of values not a historical narrative.

Therefore even if students are no longer required to study the historical Renaissance and Enlightenment, they are still required to study in some form the ideas that emerged from those historical moments. It’s still coherent; it just lacks a historical coherence. The emphasis is on ideas and values, not the history or origins of them.

Ironically, then, by detaching these values from a historical
narrative we reinforce the sense that these ideas are “universal” and eliminate
any sense of their historicity (is that a word?). Perhaps the same ‘Western’ bias lurks in our curriculum, but we’ve only succeeded in obscuring the fact.

All that said, I think BBC Radio’s recent “History of the
World in 100 Objects” offers a wonderful example of what could be done on a
global perspective. It organizes
its history around global trends and themes. What emerges is an extremely interesting and quite diverse
picture of world history, which is nonetheless coherent. I’m no historian, but I wonder if
anyone else familiar with this series had an opinion on it.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=14826035 Pat Dolan

What’s really fascinating about this is that what the Western Civilization course has fallen prey to is not, pace Peter Wood, “trivialities” like Africa and women, but to the commodification of higher education, specifically the demand by students (conservative and liberal alike) that their education be constructed as a way of purchasing credentials. They don’t want to spend two semesters on ideas and issues unconnected (in their minds) with business, engineering or nursing. And given the fact that higher education costs are being offloaded from the taxpayers onto the students, who can blame them? In other words, the market has spoken, and the right is whining. Again.

I am a faculty member in a Rhetoric Department (talk about a place where people don’t have a coherent notion of what the discipline is!). I would characterize Mr. Wood’s diction and tone as dismissive and contemptuous, and his style of engagement as unreflective point scoring. That’s his prose. He may be a thoughtful, open-minded person. His writing style and his manner of argumentation, not so much.

I’d like to see every college student graduate fluent in calculus, able to write clearly in English and able to speak a language other than English. I’d also like to see the return of a challenging history course (or sequence), organized so that students have a general map of world events, and can position the United State on that map. Given my beliefs about history, I’d like to see the US portion of the syllabus derive from Howard Zinn (for example, touching on conservative opposition to the end of slavery and to the expansion of civil rights, including civil rights for women). I’m pretty sure when Peter Wood suggests that Western Civilization return to the center of university curricula he really means the “Western Exceptionalism” courses I was taught when we were young. Pretty stories; bad history.
barbarapiper

I was fortunate enough to attend an undergraduate college with a Great Books curriculum, and so I am sympathetic to the proposal that there are benefits to a well-designed and coordinated Western Civ curriculum. But it also taught me that the kind of Virtue attached to it by Dr. Wood is fully as ideological as the ideologies he frequently rails against ostensibly and explicitly because they are ideologies, including his recent critique of “sustainability”. So rather than argue the merits of curricula, perhaps I can ask if anyone else senses at least a whiff of a double standard in Dr. Wood’s positions as he has presented them in this forum?
peterwwood

And your model of good history writing is Howard Zinn? Color me contemptuous.

As to “Western exceptionalism,” yes, that’s a major reason why the West deserves special scrutiny. Whether you approve of Western civilization or regard it as an unparalleled catastrophe, the West is plainly very different in its historical trajectory from the rest of the world. Why this is so is a matter of lively scholarly debate, but that it is so is hardly an open question.

“Conservative” opposition to the end of slavery: well worth understanding. You are referring, I assume, to Stephen Douglas and other stalwarts of the Democratic Party–politicians invested in the old order of racial division, a tradition that clearly lives on, though, ironically, it now calls itself “progressive.”

Peter Wood
geescott

Your choice of graphics are terrible. I recommend you read The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte. Your 3D charts look amateurish. They are consistent with your other posts though. That is to say, they contain extra ink (well pixels) that provide no extra information.
peterwwood

Thanks. I’ll be sure to pass that along to the person who did the charts.

Peter Wood
patdolanatiowa

Yes, indeed, I was referring to the Democrats, both 1860 and 1960. I was around in the sixties, and heard what conservative Democrats and the forefathers of the current conservative movement had to say. I know who voted for and against the Civil Rights acts and who shot the uppity protestors. Of course, thanks to Richard Nixon, Jessie Helms, Ronald Reagan, Lee Atwater and Haley Barbour, what remain of those guys call themselves conservatives now. (Read some history, why don’t you.)

Also, of course, I refer to William F. Buckley Jr.’s defense of lynching in 1957 (John B. Judis, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (2001) p. 138), and the unbroken continuum of conservative racism since. You may have contempt for Howard Zinn, but he never countenanced segregation, employment discrimination and contempt for equity as National Review did then and the Pauls (pere et fils) do now.

I approve of Western Civilization, in the main. It’s been good to me and mine. Hence the devotion to teaching at a university. One of the things that’s the best about the procedures of western inquiry is that legitimate research doesn’t start with the question, “Why is western civilization is so much better than all those other civilizations?” which as far as I can tell is what Lynne Cheney was about when she wrote in 2001, ”We call upon all colleges and universities to adopt strong core curricula that include rigorous, broad-based courses on the great works of Western civilization as well as courses on American history, America’s founding documents, and America’s continuing struggle to extend and defend the principles on which it was founded.”

This is circularity in action. The proper teaching of history, it seems to me, is “What happened, and what does it mean?” rather than, “Why are we so much better than all those other countries and traditions?” It sounds to me as though you’re afraid western civilization can’t stand up to dispassionate examination.
goxewu

When I graduated from college–at a considerably earlier date than Prof. Woods’s commencement–America was assumed to be the star of the world, with Europe a supporting cast who gave us our start and interesting places to go in the summer, and the non-Western rest of the world (to borrow a painfully apt term from grand opera) spear-carriers. Naturally, my curriculum’s history and literature menus had been composed of mostly courses in American and European doings, with the few non-Western offerings presented as exotic curiosities for the few.

Times have changed. The Chinese or Indian economies will soon be the world’s largest, with the U.S. dropping to third and with us owing the farm to China. The population of the U.S. is “browning,” the main cause of which is the grownth of the non-European Hispanic population. The center of the kind of turmoil that can quickly involve the whole globe is not Europe in the 1930s, but the Middle East right now: oil, Israel/Palestine, Islamicism, popular revolts, etc. The United States itself is gradually tilting west (the geographic direction, that is) toward the Pacific and south toward Latin America.

The graduate decline of “the West” as curriculum quotient is probably much, much more due to these changes as it is to some leftist bias on the part of humanities faculty that thinks that the West is the villain in the world today. The world is becoming increasingly “non-Western” in the top-down sense most of us in U.S. academe having grown up with, just like the U.S. is becoming increasingly non-English-only. Most rhetorical claims of our becoming woefully ignorant of our own heritage aside, it would seem both reasonable and practical to keep increasing the non-Western quotient of our college curricula, just as it would seem prudent to start learning Spanish instead of wasting time on “English only” campaigns.

Prof. Woods’s complaint seems to stem from a fancified nostalgia more than anything else.
chuckkle

For the record (since relatively few folks are likely to read this, given the short shelf life of a blog article and responses), responding to whitakal and Wood.

Whitakal doesn’t seem to grasp how blog-and-response works. Wood posts something mid-day (after most online readers of CHE have already looked at it for that day). A few hours later whitakal speculates that the absence of negative comments proves that Wood is correct. More plausible explanations could be: 1) most comments would probably come in the next day when folks would be alerted on the daily email announcement from CHE; 2) Wood’s posts are typically extraordinarily long (this one is close to 2000 words) for a blog post, and a detailed critique would take some time to prepare; 3) in addition, the report itself is a 44 page single spaced item which itself would take some time to go through; and 5) for many readers, this is an end-of-the semester and graduation time, or the last few intense weeks of the final quarter. So, not real surprise that there are not substantive comments. Whitakal’s speculation is foolish, at best.

My response was not to the whole report (I’ve not had the time or interest to carefully read through the whole thing, in any case), but to the post, and specifically 4 sentences that show Wood articulates sweeping generalizations that assure he is dismissing people with another view in advance. The art of politics (as differentiated from moralizing) is to seek the space between two different positions and try to bridge that gap through exchange of ideas, negotiation, compromise. Wood clearly is not trying to do that, but is grandstanding for his NAS buddies. He will simply grant no validity to the other side.

Is it then an ad hominem attack? There are two common meanings for the term. Often and commonly it simply means “personal attack” or attempt to demolish an opponent by referring to a personal trait, such as male pattern baldness (something I have) that has nothing to do with the quality of someone’s thought or character. Or dismissing them by their association with others: as if, for example, I dismissed him because his book on anger has a jacket blurb from Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the radio talk show advice giver who recently resigned her show after a controversy when she repeatedly attacked an African American woman married to a white man who asked for advice on dealing with inlaws who used racist language. Dr. Laura repeated the “n-word” while criticizing the caller for being too sensitive. An ugly incident, to be sure (though Dr. Laura claimed her First Amendment rights were being restricted by people who articulated being appalled by her behavior, in another ploy of phoney right-wing victimhood). None of this invalidates Wood’s ideas. Indeed, the blurb itself, in retrospect, reflects on Dr. Laura’s failure to understand the ostensible lesson of Wood’s book: “…Wood…shows us the dangers of unrestrained anger and the blessing of mastering yourself.”

The other usage refers to various flaws in formal logical argumentation (Wikipedia has a useful summary). But I wasn’t working through Wood’s entire essay. Rather, I was pointing out that he had just declared things in sweeping generalization, about multicultural and diversity matters, for example, without actually arguing the case or providing documentation. If there was an argument, we could get to work. Instead there is an attitude, or a pose, and delivered with a condescending snotty and snarky tone most of the time by Wood.

Since Wood claims I seldom make a substantive argument, let me try this one. Wood (and his NAS fellows) studiously ignore, or are oblivious to, fundamental economic issues which underlie the problems they worry about and the solutions they propose. For example, in the Western Civ report, under recommendations (Study the Problem beginning on p. 22), they call for:

“A. Every college president should appoint a commission to examine the current place of Western Civilization in his undergraduate curriculum.
B. College trustees should carefully prepare appropriate questions to ask college officials on this subject. Alternatively, we recommend that college boards of trustees ask their presidents for a full, systematic report on how Western Civilization and American history are taught within their institutions.”

These commissions and reports would presumably include or be lead by senior faculty members. But of course this is a new burden on them, so typically, especially at Research One schools, since research commitments and expectations can’t be lessened, such time consuming service is accommodated by the administration releasing the faculty members from teaching responsibilities, and this is done on the cheap by hiring adjuncts or having grad students take over the prof’s intro courses. The net result: the hand-wringing dilemma (for many right-wing reformers) of undergrads not being taught by senior faculty.

This is but one very small example of a general problem with Wood and NAS thinking. By not thinking though the economics of higher education, they often can’t figure out the real problem, or have only the most superficial remedies. A few postings ago April 13), I mentioned the attempts by Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) and his conservative financial backers to link faculty pay to student evaluations and to validate only faculty research tied to short term immediate benefits. I thought this would be an opportunity for Wood to express his strong opposition to both policies; at least we could agree on something. But no, Wood misread my remarks as saying “Wood supports whatever Governor Perry proposes.” This misstatement then wanders off without addressing the fundamental economic issues of financing higher education related to Perry’s proposed policies. Matters such as a policy shift to funding higher ed through consumer debt financing and decreasing state contributions to public higher ed do put students in the (consumer) driver’s seat. The earlier shift from corporations paying for training, apprenticeships, and research as part of their operations and shifting the burden to the state higher ed system has clear effects. Someone has to pay for it if business avoids it: of course, it’s the taxpayers. (Bauerlein’s May 21 Brainstorm blog post addresses some of this.) It would be helpful to his own goals if Wood could learn more about this and think through the connection of freemarket capitalism and higher ed.

Chuck Kleinhans
barbarapiper

It may also be worth asking Dr. Wood why he singles out Western Civilization as his project. His rationale is summarized in this paragraph:

“The better arguments for teaching Western Civilization survey courses are founded on what students need to know, not what they want to know. They need to know something about their own civilization, especially if they hope to improve it. They need to know the history of the West if they hope to navigate the fads, delusions, and manias of our time, because these are merely the newest iterations of follies that run perennial in our culture. They need to comprehend the cultural predicates that fostered the growth of scientific thought in the West and gave our civilization what the historian William McNeill called its unique “restlessness.” They need especially to understand that if they hope to be thoughtful participants in great struggle to shape world civilization.”

I was struck by the “fads, delusions, and manias of our time” and “the cultural predicates that fostered the growth of scientific thought” in the West. I would have imagined that the conservative denial of global warming – despite melting ice caps and glaciers, etc – and rejection of evolution, among other suspicions of science, would be among the fads, delusions and manias that Dr. Wood might have students “navigate” (a useful word, since it doesn’t quite mean “avoid”, but could mean “steer directly toward”).

But my immediate thought went to the recent overhaul of the Harvard undergraduate curriculum, when someone was quoted as saying that every Harvard undergraduate reads all of Shakespeare two or three times, but does not know the difference between genes and chromosomes. A bit of an exaggeration, but we get the point. The hard science faculty felt that “what students need to know” in the 21st century is more science, not Western Civ. I suspect that many disciplines feel the same way. If the “great struggle to shape world civilization” has any meaning, it may rest with software developers, hedge fund managers, and materials scientists. Surely we can make equally strong arguments for beefing up all of these in the curriculum to meet Dr. Wood’s “need to know” criterion.
mhigbee

OK, Western Civ courses have declined as a required sequence in the curriculum.True! Obviously. What Wood omits consideration of is whether that decline means much about what students learn. Taking a course on a subject doesn’t mean that students learn much about it, or that crucial features of that subject are not also covered and learned in other courses, with other titles. Western civ courses were hardly the timeless stable of higher education that Wood imagines them to be: their heyday was short-lived, from the end of WWI until the 1970s. Western civ entered the curriculum for reasons that were no less “political” than the reasons for its recent decline. That’s the nature of universities: They change over time, responding (however imperfectly) to a changing world.
sand6432

“The West compounds a history of intellectual, philosophical, religious,
scientific, institutional, political, commercial, military, and
technological innovation, with each feeding into the others and being
fed in turn. Theorists of how these developments interlace and how the
causal factors are to be teased apart disagree profoundly.” I am sure I would be among those profoundly disagreeing with the way Peter Wood would link these developments together, but having said that, I do think the basic thrust of his critique is on target. The “smorgasbord” approach to higher education promotes freedom of choice at the expense of coherence, and that is a disservice to undergraduates seeking a well-rounded education in the liberal arts. Yes, the old “Great Books” and “Western Civ” efforts to provide such coherence are outdated, yet we desperately need to find a way to interconnect the courses that students take in a manner that makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts. Even within a major there needs to be more such interconnection. It makes no sense, e.g., for a student to be reading Aquinas or Hegel or Nietzsche without being exposed to Greek philosophy first or to study Marx without first knowing about Hegel. But philosophy departments rarely make any effort to guide their students in this fashion, allowing them just to pick and choose as they wish. Sciences, certainly, need to be better integrated into the teaching of humanities and social sciences also. The trick, of course, is to provide more structure and interconnecttvity without surreptitiously importing an ideological bias into the process, as perhaps someone with Dr. Wood’s orientation might do.—Sandy Thatcher
peterwwood

Mhigbee falsely attributes to me a view I do not hold: “Western civ courses were hardly the timeless stable of higher education that Wood imagines them to be.” The Western history survey course flowered after World Wat I and continued to be a mainstay into the 1960s. The project of synthesizing Western history into a coherent narrative, however, is significantly older, as is the project of writing global or universal histories. A chapter in my book, Diversity: The Invention of a Concept is titled “Diversity before Diversity,” deals with the latter.

I wonder why Mhigbee is so quick on the trigger to make such a false attribution?

As to the difference between what courses we teach and what students actually learn, I have no doubt that students fail to learn some of what we teach. But their chances of learning what we don’t teach seem even smaller.

Peter Wood
http://www.facebook.com/people/Charles-Chapman/1189989157 Charles Chapman

There’s another possible cause for the decline in western civ offerings:like composition, a well taught western civ class isHARD WORK- IT’S A LOT EASIER, AND, P-ERHAPS, MORE PRETIGIOUS TO TEACH “PREJUDICE ELIMINATION FOR SKULLS FULL OF MUSH, OR TO LOBBY THE DEAN TO FOUND A CCENTER FOR THE ELIMINATION OF ORIGINAL SIN and get 3 credits for runni8ng it.
chuckkle

Interesting footnote to this subject:

The push for Western Civ in the news: CHE news, May 23

http://chronicle.com/article/Student-Group-That-Opposes/127610/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

(begin quote) The student group—Youth for Western
Civilization—says it’s not a racist organization. Its stated mission
is “to organize, educate, and train activists dedicated to the revival of
Western Civilization.”

But the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish advocacy organization, says in its report
that the student group uses “Western civilization” as a euphemism for “white culture.”

According to the Anti-Defamation League, Youth for Western Civilization does not makemake direct references to minority groups, but uses instead terms like
“multiculturalism” and “racial chauvinists.”(end quote)

Chuck Kleinhans
http://twitter.com/jfigdor Jonathan Figdor

I fail to see why World Civilisation ought to be mandatory for undergraduates as a means of providing a coherent framework for their educations, when Philosophy, a course of study available at any respectable University, is already available? Western Civ is respectable, but by no means the only or the best way of organising an undergraduate education. As a Philosophy major at Vassar College, I found Philosophy to be an excellent organising framework for my academic studies, a framework which I brought to my graduate education at Harvard Divinity School where I completed my MDiv in Humanism. Interesting discussion you’ve stirred up though.
http://twitter.com/jfigdor Jonathan Figdor

One quick clarification: by “Philosophy,” I mean Analytic Philosophy, not Continental Philosophy. Continental Philosophy reeks a little too much of, to quote Richard Dawkins, “Haute Franco-phony-ism.”
http://www.facebook.com/people/Dave-Newport/100000330111921 Dave Newport

A better number 1 might be: “how old are you? If you are over 50, plan for retirement, not a new job.” If <50, read on.
livebythegoldenrule

At what point does moving on make sense? I’m at that point now. I have been actively searching for a decent librarian and/or archivist position for several years after my museum art librarian position was downsized, never to return. Nada. Nada. Landed one school librarian job after that which was like being incarcerated in Leavenworth and critically understaffed and underpaid. The competition for these jobs (or, I should say, what is left of these jobs) is fierce. It’s not that I have no experience in the field – have 15 years, but still no takers. I’ve come close in a few interviews where it’s down to two people, but when you have 300 people going for one job, “close” is still not enough. So, after much thinking, I am leaving the profession for good and returning to the administrative field – that’s right – clerical and secretarial jobs. This is all I can find in this abysmal economy and, even then, competition is tight. I am very afraid for our future when I see the state of the economy and its lack of good jobs. Most that I see are $10 – 15/hr with no benefits. Who can realistically live on that for any length of time, let alone support a family? Middle manager jobs have been almost totally eliminated – and that is what most librarians and archivists are. So, now I’m off to an interview for a part-time job as an administrative assistant to a local scientist. This is all I can find and I’m grateful for even this. Just sign me – No Longer a Librarian. Yes, I’ve moved on.
http://twitter.com/JoVanEvery Jo VanEvery

I would advise that the corollary to #1 is “are you publishing”? There are too many people out there that think all the low paid teaching jobs they are doing are “good experience”. They aren’t. If you cannot demonstrate that you are committed to scholarship by finishing your PhD and publishing from it, then you aren’t going to get a tenure track job. If you don’t like the sound of that, stop looking sooner rather than later.
http://who-will-kiss-the-pig.blogspot.com Richard Grayson

I’m old enough to know a great many people who have moved on and are now over forty, and by now I don’t think any one of them regrets it. Humans are wonderfully adaptive.
graddirector

I would say that if you are on the academic job market for more than two cycles, it is time for some soul searching. Particularly, you need to be brutally honest with yourself about how competitive your credentials are.

On a regular basis I encounter Ph.D.s who have been applying to faculty positions for years who say that their lack of success occurs because “I have been treated unfairly because I am a ____” or “there are no jobs in academia”. However, a look at their credentials always reveals that the problem is that they have either 1) no demonstrated productivity (in one case I saw an article about the plight of perpetual postdocs where the poor downtrodden “example” had generated fewer publications from their entire Ph.D. and 7 years of postdoc than some of our best undergraduate researchers) and/or 2) no teaching experience at all.

These folks are very employable in a variety of fields, but they have demonstrated that they do not have the self discipline necessary to be productive as academics. In that case, it is time to move on.

In that same light, in many/most cases the truly competitive applicant finds themselves weighing 3 or more job offers and perhaps even turning down interviews at some schools. Thus, many different search committees have made the same assessment that a candidate is great. This is why so many faculty searches “fail” since these competitive applicants can only take one job. Thus, if you have no interviews after sending a 100+ applications, one should consider this as 100s of independent assessments stating that you just are not competitive for a faculty position.
copesan

Thank you for your honesty in this. I spent too many years on the job market, having gotten my degree at 50, thinking it was my fault, because it never occurred to me that my previous decades of working experience in education would work against me as a newly minted Phd.
ElizaBro

“It is unconscionable that this publication continues to natter on, fiddling while the academic world to which the writers refer burns to the ground.” You’re not a regular reader of this publication, are you? It’s been publishing Thomas H. Benton’s columns for years, ranting about adjunctification and urging graduate students to reconsider graduate school. And there have been countless news stories about these trends for 10-plus years.
5768

Albert Ellis in the 1980s denounced self-esteem calling it “the worst sickness known to man or woman, because it says “I did well, therefore I am good,” which means when I do badly–back to shithood for me.” Pretty much anathema to even suggest such a thing nowadays. Shithood? How dare him whether I did badly or not.

Ellis opposed self-esteem to self-acceptance. The latter means I accept myself whether or not I do well, according to Ellis.

Needless to say, even the notion of “self” itself varies from traditional Eastern to Western societies and is likely undergoing considerable transformation just as did the word “freedom” in Chinese which originally was attached to a word that meant “to stand out” from the collective in the pejorative sense. Given enough time “shithood” may come to be a most admirable quality worth of “praise” depending how far society sinks.

“Praise” is something I myself think of as reserved for training dogs by behavioral conditioning, which when similarly employed for children may speak volumes, both having formative reasons. Use of praise (empty praise or false praise) in adults whether on the part of giver or receiver seems manipulative and suspect, whether used to manipulate committees or individuals. Giving standing ovations based on mere enthusiasm alone bespeaks how low quality both audience and performer likely are.
mycantarella

I plead guilty. As a parent– and now grandparent– I issue praise all the time. Maybe too much. But I also plead some special circumstances. I am African American. Minority kids don’t always bask in the glory of a world that loves them. There are studies that even show that their parents, more concerned with survival, don’t praise as much as those more privileged by ethnicity or affluence. So while as a dean and administrator I also have concerns about students who come to college with attitudes of great entitlement they feel is due them. I also think that we have to take cases individually and that maybe some students need more affirmation than others. At The Eagle Academy Schools for Boys in New York City where I chair the advisory board, one of the strategies helping these minority young men beat the odds and graduate is that they are in a culture where finally they feel valued. Some ego strength is needed for survival, too much becomes arrogance and is unacceptable. Finding the balance is key.
Marcia Y. Cantarella, PhD Author, I CAN Finish College: The Overcome Any Obstacle and Get Your Degree Guide
KMHahn

As I think about this I am reminded about my first application to graduate school. I asked my boss for a letter of recommendation and he asked me to write something up to get him started. In the end he just signed what I wrote. I had taken the reference instructions at face value, writing a letter highlighting my strengths and weaknesses. I was too young and naive to understand that mentioning weaknesses on a letter of recommendation is not common. At the interview I met an almost hostile group. Looking back (the story is much longer) and considering the experience (I did not get in), I learned that letters of recommendation are not to be written honestly. This seems to permeate our culture more than can be blamed on “generation me.”
texasguy

The University of California, San Diego was built top-down around an existing research institute. The idea was to develop academic excellence from the beginning. Universities that start as a teaching institution have problems recruiting research-oriented faculty and end filling the gaps with teaching-oriented faculty who will not necessarily adapt very well when the university starts adding graduate and doctoral programs.
TownsendRalph72

like Janice replied I’m shocked that any one able to get paid $7106 in one month on the internet. have you seen this page ===>>⇛►http://meetfreelancer.blogspot.com/