Word: canonically
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...dead white men” are effectively universal and sufficient for learning truth. He declares, “Western values include tolerance for many different ethnic and gendered perspectives, which is why women and minority readers will ‘see themselves’ in a Western canon, even if that canon doesn’t include many women and minority authors...
...read Luke Smith’s op-ed piece (“Bring Back the Dead White Men,” Nov. 6) with one curry bowl-full of shock and two of amusement. Smith apparently wants to impose a whitewashed curricular canon on all Harvard students, no doubt in order to protect those values of “tolerance for many different ethnic and gendered perspectives” that makes “Western society better than its alternatives...
Instead of structuring its general education program around what the Core bureaucrats call “approaches to knowledge in areas that the faculty considers indispensable to undergraduate education,” Harvard should establish a canon of great works that the Faculty considers indispensable to undergraduate education. This canon should include Shakespeare and the Constitution, and there should be no escaping Western truths. While Muslim women and African art are certainly worthwhile to study also, these topics belong in department courses and not in the Core...
...principal objection to establishing a canon at Harvard is that no one would agree on what to assign. But the existence of disagreement does not preclude the existence of a correct outcome. As citizens of a Western society, we should be familiar with its values and how those values evolved. With this specific educational goal in mind, the Faculty could choose works that have dramatically influenced this evolution...
...truth” has shaped the creation of a society where women and ethnic groups are treated equally. Western values include tolerance for many different ethnic and gendered perspectives, which is why women and minority readers will “see themselves” in a Western canon, even if that canon doesn’t include many women and minority authors...