Intolerance on Campus: Is It Time to Bring Back ‘Western Civ’?

First-year courses in Western Civilization, once a common requirement in undergraduate curriculums, have all but disappeared at most college campuses. From 1964 to 2010, nearly all selective schools abandoned first-year requirements featuring a common humanities curriculum and instead opted for a “buffet model” in which students could choose from various curricular tracks. In a recent article in The New York Times, Debra Satz, a dean at Stanford University, and Dan Edelstein, a Stanford faculty director, say this has left students “woefully ill equipped for dealing with disagreements” and has helped to create the culture wars on campus. This year alone has seen at least 20 instances in which students or faculty attempted to disinvite or silence speakers. The authors fault our institutions of higher learning for failing to develop the “shared intellectual framework” that could help defuse or prevent such incidents, and they argue that “to strengthen free speech on campuses, we need to return civic education to the heart of our curriculum.”