http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2014/01/what_does_the_nas_really_think_of_western_civ.html at January 26, 2014 – 06:00:24 AM CST
Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars (NAS), was kind enough to alert me to an error made in my January 6, 2014 article entitled “More of Those European Dead Guys.” I quoted Cathy Young of the Boston Globe, who wrote that the NAS “led the way in eliminating Stanford University’s Western Culture requirement.”
Ms. Globe was incorrect, and this misinformation needs to be rectified. In fact, the NAS is ardently opposed to Stanford’s elimination of its Western Culture requirement. In a paper entitled “The Vanishing West: 1964-2010 The Disappearance of Western Civilization from the American Undergraduate Curriculum,” written in May of 2011, authors Glenn Ricketts, Peter W. Wood, Stephen H. Balch, and Ashley Thorne discovered that “only two percent of colleges offer western civilization as a course requirement. Remarkably, western civilization is rarely even required for history majors. By contrast, most institutions from 1964 through the 1970s did have this requirement.”
As a result of this elimination of courses dealing with Western civilization, what has emerged is a “form of curriculum apologetics for racism, imperialism, sexism and colonialism.”
The five main findings from the Western civilization history survey course include:
1. Western civilization survey courses have virtually disappeared from general education requirements.