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April
17, 1991, was a heady day for Benno C. Schmidt Jr. and Donald Kagan.
Beaming triumphantly at a news conference, then-President Schmidt and
Kagan, who was dean of Yale College, announced some spectacular news:
Lee Bass '79 would be giving Yale $20 million. It was an unusual gift
for the University, not only because of its size, but because of the
specificity of its academic purpose: the study of Western Civilization.
Schmidt hailed the gift as "one of the largest and most inspired ever
received by Yale.
But four years later, Yale's new President, Richard C. Levin, found
himself giving Bass his money back. - Bass,
Yale, and
Western Civ. |
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The money was returned - at Bass's request - because the Yale faculty,
in a nutshell, bristled over the condition that Western Civilization be
taught at Yale, and refused to go along. Multiculturalism had
gained its foothold in elite academia; angst poetry written
by a Ethiopian rug merchant trumped Plato and Churchill. Today's
announcement then, while no real surprise, a formality really, is, I
dunno, like your dad dying after a long bout of cancer. You knew
it was coming, but the finality of it is shocking.
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Earlier
this year, Massachusetts and New York, blaming budget troubles, pulled
the plug on their state tests in U.S. history. Given the strident union
rhetoric against “high-stakes” testing— America's Federation of
Teachers’ Randi Weingarten has accused reformers of turning schools
into “Test Prep, Inc.”—one would have expected social studies teachers
in the two states to be elated. Instead, they were outraged. Don’t
know much about history… |
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