Word: canon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Last week Stanford's faculty senate voted 39-4 for a compromise revision of their canon. This fall the original 15 books, all of them written by white, Western males, will be pared down. Out goes Homer, as well as Darwin and Dante. The six new requirements are unspecified works from Plato, the Bible, St. Augustine, Machiavelli, Rousseau and Marx. Next year Stanford's Western Culture Program will be formally replaced by CIV. All freshmen will read works "from at least one" non-European source chosen by the professor, who is required to give "substantial attention to issues of race...
...hard-core revisionists are able to suit the word to the action. "We want the idea of a canon eliminated," insists William King, 21, chairman of Stanford's Black Student Union. "The idea that there could be a core list is Eurocentric and biased." Similar opinions are heard at other schools. At Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., Professor Arnold Krupat declares flatly that there is nothing sacred or broadly cultured about any such canon. In fact, he claims, the idea "is almost exclusively Wasp, male and East Coast...
...shifted within traditional ((studies)) as a result of the growing presence of women, blacks and people of color." Duke's Barbara Hernnstein Smith, president of the influential Modern Language Association, notes approvingly that "writings by women and black authors are now being studied and taught" right alongside the old canon. Examples of the new eclecticism...
...scholarly minds, any permanent settlement of these centuries-old issues seems unlikely. Despite the soul searching at Stanford and elsewhere, no reading list is ever going to satisfy everyone. Nor should it. Even friends of Stanford's original 15 readings concede that they constituted a mighty loose little canon -- for example, two pieces by Freud, but no Shakespeare and not a word by any American writer or political philosopher, such as James Madison...
Stanford' s faculty revises its Western Civilization requirements, as universities debate the nature and merit of the great- books canon...