RETURN OF WESTERN CIV? – AT 11:51 A.M. ET:  Under assault on many left-wing campuses, Western Civ is making a comeback on some.  Be thankful for small blessings.  From College Fix:   

Back in the 1980s, Jesse Jackson led 500 Stanford students in a chant of “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go.” And it’s continued to be mostly downhill for Western Civ at colleges since.

The idea of learning important things from so-called “dead white dudes” has become a siren call for social progressives who argue that the skin color of the author they’re reading matters more than content.

A small but brave group of independent-minded thinkers who recently tried to re-champion Western Civ at Stanford failed in their effort. That’s not unique.

Today’s student protesters — backed by like-minded faculty — clamor for authors who “look like them.” Curriculums, unfortunately, acquiesced to that demand.

Yet at one college, the narrative has flipped — for the better. In November, The College Fix reported on the Bronx-based Hostos Community College, where Western Civ is taught at a school in a low-income neighborhood that enrolls mostly students of color.

And they’re loving it. Now The Wall Street Journal has picked up the story in a powerful piece that paints a picture on just how much:

On her first day of English class at Hostos Community College during the fall 2017 semester, Maria Diaz glared at the reading handout, a Plato excerpt on the trial of Socrates. “I used to be like, ‘Prof, why are we reading this? It’s so boring and confusing,” she recalls. But only months later, Ms. Diaz would gush about the merits of the Western canon, quoting Socrates’s claim that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

While much of academia continues its progressive and postmodern lurch, these courses at Hostos, first offered in 2016, represent a move in the opposite direction. One of the classes even was designed especially for students who score a “high fail” on their literacy tests. Profs. Andrea Fabrizio and Gregory Marks, along with their colleagues in the English Department, created the courses in collaboration with Columbia University. They borrowed heavily from the Ivy League school’s core curriculum for liberal-arts undergraduates.

COMMENT:  One small step.  I think it will be a long time before this becomes a national trend, as the left has a lock grip on many schools, and is often supported by the party-line press, and identity-politics "leaders."  But the fight is always worth it.

January 15, 2018