All of this explains much of the reason behind the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s grandstanding on January 15, 1987, at Stanford University’s grand main entrance, chanting with 500 Stanford Students the uber poetic,
“Hey hey, ho ho,
Western Civ has got to go.”
Jackson and company were protesting Stanford University’s introductory humanities program known as “Western Culture.” For Jackson and the protesters, the problem was its lack of “diversity.” As a consequence to this romper room protest Stanford’s faculty and administration raced to appease the protesters, and Stanford’s course of “Western Culture” was formally replaced with a new course labeled, “Cultures, Ideas, and Values.”
The new program included works on race, class, and gender and works by ethnic minority and women authors. Western culture gave way to multi-culture. The study of Western civilization succumbed to the Left’s new dogma, multiculturalism.
Notice here that the Stanford’s previous standards here were not expanded so much as they were replaced. The demand of the students most certainly did not lead to more diversity. Instead, the demand of the students eventuated in a remaining narrow curriculum except as channeled in a different direction.