"WESTERN CULTURE'S GOT TO GO"

Western culture is not transmitted through the genes. It has to be taught to each succeeding generation.

We are reminded of the rupturing of our cultural pipeline by the current debate over curricular changes at Stanford University.

In a speech at Stanford on April 18, Secretary of Education William J. Bennett blasted that University for scrapping its basic course, "Western Thought," which has been required for all freshmen.

The "Western Thought" course was introduced in 1980. It was a step toward rebuilding the worthy curriculum that was trashed in the 1960s and '70s at the hands of nihilistic students and deranged faculty.

The course consisted of the study of great books that are the landmarks in the long development of Western culture.

"Western Thought" from its inception became the target of a small but loud gang of protesters.

Their chant in a demonstration last year, led by Rev. Jesse Jackson--"Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture's got to go!"--

Their ostensible objection to the course is that white males are overrepresented in the reading list while women, blacks, American Indians, Hispanics etc. are omitted.

The Stanford Faculty Senate voted 39-4 with 5 abstentions to gut "Western Thought."

Nine of the 15 required books and all 18 "highly recommended" books are dropped, to be replaced by "works by women, minorities and persons of color."

Whatever may be the proper role of such books in education, they are no substitute for the great classics that are the foundation stones of our culture.

Choosing books by authors' gender or ethnic category rather than by the books' quality ought to embarrass all educators.

THE UNIVESITY LIBRARY: TOOL FOR IDEOLOGICAL CONTROL

By James A. Lee
Human Events, 26 November 1988, p. 10
http://www.fortfreedom.org/r07.htm

(Mr. Lee, a professor of management, has served as dean or department chairman in universities in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East for a total of 11 years. He has taught at the universities of Utah and Wisconsin and, since 1969, has been at Ohio University, where he has served as department chairman and director of graduate programs for the College of Business.)

Over the last decade or so I have noted numerous articles in conservative journals pointing up the Marxist-Socialist influence on American campuses. Some authors are content to count Marxist faculty from this poll or that by universities or by their academic departments and this is considered alarming enough.

Others point to the Marxist-Socialist influence among those who interfere with an open dialogue process, whether it be within the university community or between the community and outside guest speakers.

None of the pieces I have seen has dealt seriously with the long-term effects of their dominating presence on future students and the future of their institutions.

One of the major sources of ideological control in our
universities is faculty control over library acquisitions and textbook choices.
A few years ago our student newspaper printed a letter I had written pointing up that in our current Sociology 101 text (Sociology by Ian Robertson), Karl Marx had 55 different pages of reference or one for about every 10 pages of text. Next came Max Weber with 26 citations. Adam Smith had one reference and the average for the remaining several hundred authors was two.

In successive opposition letters from the Sociology Department head, a sociology professor, and a local appeals court judge who had taught law part-time for us, I was called ``half-bright,’’ ``imbalanced,’’ and ``wooden-headed.’’

Our newspaper published the results of their interview with the text author, but edited my rebuttals so severely that I broke off the dialogue.

Faculty control over library acquisitions is even more serious, in my opinion. Such control will have far greater long-term consequences than shouting Jeane Kirkpatrick off the rostrum or taking over the microphone at a conference here and there. It simply does not have the attention-getting value, however, and unfortunately it is generally ignored or, more
typically, not known.

Librarians generally believe that the faculty will be objective in their collections control and see no harm in relinquishing to them the budget for acquisitions. Nothing could be sillier.

Faculty simply do not request the library to add materials whose points of view they disagree with. They do not ask for books or periodicals to be added that are critical of their disciplines.
Few university libraries contain many of the volumes critical of our colleges of education or our teachers, our law colleges, our choking litigiousness in America, or of the various inventories of the failures of clinical psychology and psychiatry.

College of business faculties do not use their
budgetary control to spend money on books critical of business education or of MBA degree programs, and so on.

Below are some samples of books that our (Ohio
University) library did not have (note the ideological dimensions of these omissions):

A Matter of Honor: General William C. Westmoreland versus CBS.
Our journalism faculty did not want it in our collection. This was likely an extra sensitive choice for a faculty that counted CBS’ Van Gordon Sauter, then president of CBS News, as an illustrious alumnus.)
The Fall of Rome: A Reappraisal by Michael Grant. (Liberals in the history department could see no use for it.)
How Democracies Perish by Jean-Francois Revel, Destroying Democracy by James T. Bennet and Thomas DiLorenzo, and The Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union by Edward Luttwak. (Our Political Science Department chose not to spend their budget on these.)

It doesn’t matter that a volume was for weeks on one of the best-seller lists (as with How Democracies Perish) or that it was recommended by the Library Journal.

Jesse Jackson and the Politics of Race by Thomas Landess and Richard Quinn was reviewed by the Library Journal as ``controversial, daring ... and recommended.’’

Again, our political science faculty didn’t want
it on our shelves.
Arthur Koestler’s Arrow in the Blue was on our shelves and quite naturally so. This first volume of his memoirs does not cover his break with the Communist party. His Invisible Writing, which does cover his break (and the Communist attacks that inevitably followed), is nowhere to be found in our library.

It should be noted here that my status as a faculty member in the College of Business does not allow me to spend funds allocated to the political science, sociology, or history departments.

Most state university librarians, while endorsing the ``Bill of Rights’’ adopted by the American Library Association Council in 1953, simply ignore provisions such as these:

``Materials should not be excluded because of the ... views of those contributing to their creation ....
``Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues .... Libraries should cooperate with all persons ... concerned with resisting abridgement of free expression and free access to ideas .... It is in the public interest for ... librarians to make available the widest diversity of views and expressions, including those which are unorthodox or unpopular.’’

I was never able to convince our librarians that I did not want to tell them what to collect, but that I wanted them to be true professionals and balance our future collection.

Having given away their power to uphold the ideals carried in their ``Bill of Rights,’’ librarians have become more inventory control and purchasing specialists than providers of balanced collections for their present and future readers.

They spend considerable sums on systems helping to make their collections available to users, of course. But they care little about the contents of their collections, although as an aside, I suspect they generally agree with the ideological biases threaded into their collections.
Given the tenure and promotion system, young
conservative faculty quite naturally shy away from the confrontation necessary to moving our collections toward a better ideological balance.

And unfortunately for our future library users, conservative senior tenured faculty feel so outnumbered that confrontation seems to many to be fruitless.

And, of course, in some departments, there are simply no conservative members, given the careful weeding that has taken over the last coupe of decades.

Somehow, library acquisition department heads must gain control over a sizable portion of the acquisitions budget so they can adopt an objective system to guide selections for their collections. This will require that university presidents take some initiative and do battle with the faculty over budgetary
controls. And this may be one more battle in which many of them would rather not become engaged.

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