Wherever political passions dominate in a school or a classroom, the freedom necessary for the mind to think and for the heart to love is burnt away.
The situation was this: I was at Providence College, where I had taught for 27 years, most of them happy. But the college had allowed its signature program, what had been a four semester, 20-credit course in the development of Western Civilization once required of all freshmen and sophomores, to be severely curtailed—shrunk in time and in the subjects we could cover. But that was not enough for professors who hated that there was such a course. One of them, who to my knowledge never sat in on a single class, likened it to “cultural genocide.”
So I wrote in a Catholic magazine to
defend the course, and called out its critics for their incoherence.
When you are teaching material spanning 4,000 years, four or five
disciplines, and several continents, coming from about 20 different
cultures, with literature written originally in Babylonian, Hebrew,
Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Italian, English, French, Spanish, German,
and any of a number of other languages for modern works, it is a little
galling to hear that you are culturally “narrow,” and from people who
teach only works written in English about what happened in New Jersey
last week. About a hundred students responded with an angry public
protest against me, spurred on by a couple of politically minded
colleagues. The young man had taken part in it.........To Read More...
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