Academics, Therapists, and thenGerman ConnectionnFor several years now a heated debate has been going onnover Western civilization and humanities requirementsnat some distinguished universities, most notably Stanford.nThe debate has brought up the question of a justification —nor lack thereof—for forcing students into a sequence ofncourses devoted exclusively to Western thought. It has beennargued, correctly, that thinkers featured in such courses arenpreponderantly white and male. Critics complain that suchnan obligatory program of study perpetuates the mistakennnotion that Western white male heterosexuals (pick yournown term of opprobrium) have produced the only works thatndeserve to be studied. Those who raise this charge, mindnyou, are not devotees of the Analects of Confucius or of thenBhagavad Gita. The lists for alternative, non-Western, ornneglected thinkers that have been brought to my attentionnconsist, for the most part, of feminists (either real or alleged).nThird World revolutionaries like Frantz Fanon, and advocatesnof black power. One such list now being circulated atnStanford combines a few serious non-Western and femalenauthors with explicit ideologues once celebrated by the 60’snNew Left.nIn the face of this challenge to Western thought, somenacademics have come forth to speak for the “humanides.” AnPaul Gottfried is a professor of humanities atnElizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and the author,nwith Thomas Fleming, of The Conservative Movement,namong other books.nby Paul GottfriednNational Association of Scholars has been organized bynStephen Balch, Peter Shaw, and other concerned intellectuals,nwho are troubled by academic abuses and by the attacknon “Western” learning. In its publicahon, Academic Questions,nthe NAS has documented the ideological restrictionsnsuffered by professors who challenge leftist dogmas in eithernthe social sciences or the humanities. The same group hasnmade an effort to defend scholars (such as Michael Levin ofnCity University of New York) who have been professionallynharassed for taking seriously inherent gender and racialndifferences. It has also treated positively the by-now controversialnscholarship of Stanley Rothman, who has defendednthe predictive value of IQ tests.nThe NAS has no less passionately stressed the linknbetween ideological intolerance and the current academicnwar against Western civilization. Its members have weighednin behind the campaign to keep required Western humanitiesncourses in the undergraduate curriculum at Stanford.nLike former Assistant Secretary of Education Chester Finn,nthe NAS characterizes the American academic communitynas “an island of repression in a sea of freedom.” It believesnthat its own conception of Western learning must benimpressed on that community in order to make professorsnand their students more like other, presumably free, Americans.nWhile much of the work undertaken by the NAS isnuseful, especially the defense of honest research, the crusadenit is now waging on behalf of the “humanities” may be morennnSEPTEMBER 1990/21n