New York Times Op-Ed: By Abandoning Civics, Colleges Helped Create the Culture Wars, by Debra Satz (Stanford; Google Scholar) & Dan Edelstein (Stanford; Google Scholar):
Free speech is once again a flashpoint on college campuses. This year has seen at least 20 instances in which students or faculty members attempted to rescind invitations or to silence speakers. In March, law school students at our own institution made national news when they shouted down a conservative federal judge, Kyle Duncan. And by signing legislation that undermines academic freedom in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis is carrying out what is effectively a broad assault against higher education.
We believe that this intolerance of ideas is not just a consequence of an increasingly polarized society. We think it also results from the failure of higher education to provide students with the kind of shared intellectual framework that we call “civic education.” It is our responsibility as educators to equip students to live in a democratic society whose members will inevitably disagree on many things. To strengthen free speech on campuses, we need to return civic education to the heart of our curriculum.
Throughout the 20th century, many colleges and universities had a required first-year course that honed these skills. Typically, this course was known as Western Civ (short for “civilization”). Such courses became standard during the interwar period, as immigration transformed the student body and liberal democracy itself was under threat around the world.
Western Civ also served another, often unintentional, purpose: It provided a mutually intelligible set of references that situated students’ disagreements on common ground. …
In 1987, activists at Stanford denounced the “European-Western and male bias” of the university’s first-year requirement, then called Western Culture. The course was replaced with a program that had no Western focus.
From 1964 to 2010, almost all selective schools (Columbia being an exception) abandoned first-year requirements featuring a common humanities curriculum. Instead, they opted for a “buffet” model, in which students could choose from various curricular tracks. Between 1995 and 2012, Stanford students could pick from around a dozen first-year humanities classes, from a course on gender roles in Chinese families to Technological Visions of Utopia. While many of these courses were excellent, they had no common core of readings nor any transparent rationale for why they were required. …
In the absence of civic education, it is not surprising that universities are at the epicenter of debates over free speech and its proper exercise. Free speech is hard work. The basic assumptions and attitudes necessary for cultivating free speech do not come to us naturally. Listening to people with whom you disagree can be unpleasant. But universities have a moral and civic duty to teach students how to consider and weigh contrary viewpoints, and how to accept differences of opinion as a healthy feature of a diverse society. Disagreement is in the nature of democracies.
At Stanford, since 2021, we once again have a single, common undergraduate requirement. By structuring its curriculum around important topics rather than canonical texts, and by focusing on the cultivation of democratic skills such as listening, reasonableness and humility, we have sought to steer clear of the cultural issues that doomed Western Civ. The new requirement was approved by our faculty senate in May 2020 without a single dissenting vote.
Called Civic, Liberal and Global Education, it includes a course on citizenship in the 21st century. Delivered in a small discussion-seminar format, this course provides students with the skills, training and perspectives for engaging in meaningful ways with others, especially when they disagree. All students read the same texts, some canonical and others contemporary. Just as important, all students work on developing the same skills. Preliminary assessments and feedback suggest that our new program is meeting its goals. …
[I]t is our belief that by restoring a common curricular foundation centered on the democratic skills our students need to live in a diverse society, they will turn to more constructive ways to engage with those with whom they disagree than censorship or cancellation.
