David Sacks - The diversity myth: multiculturalism and the politics of intolerance on campus

First, Stanford capitulated to separatist know-nothings and abandoned its Western Civilization course because of its bias toward white males (you know: narrowminded ethnics like Socrates, Jesus, and Jefferson).

Columnist Charles Krauthammer

I n the beginning, before the creation of the multicultural world, Stanford was divided by demonstrations and protests. The most important of these rallies took place on January 15, 1987, when a throng of 500 indignant students and faculty gathered near the University's centrally located White Plaza to hear the Reverend Jesse Jackson.

This assembly was not concerned about founding a new multicultural state. In fact, the term multiculturalism had not yet entered common usage in early 1987, and most of the demonstrators probably had never heard of the word. Rather, the purpose of the rally was to show support for the rainbow agenda, for minority set-asides in admissions and teaching, and for other causes popular with university activists. In short, it began as the sort of protest commonplace on today's college campuses. But on that day, events would be set in motion that would push Stanford towards becoming the nation's first multicultural academy.

As the crowd stomped across the manicured lawns to present a list of demands to a meeting of the Faculty Senate, it translated its grievances into a chant: Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture's got to go! Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture's got to go!students at a bucolic college campus, near sunny Palo Alto, California, an affluent suburban community.

Even at the time, campus observers were struck by the strange spectacle of some of America's elite students and faculty engaged in an unqualified denunciation of the Westthe very civilization, after all, that had established universities like Stanford in the first place. Even Jesse Jackson, the leader of the march, was taken aback by the fury he had unleashed. Reverend Jackson actually tried to quiet the mob, but his admonitions were ignored. The angry chant could not be stoppedand would go on to become the unofficial motto of a revolution with implications far beyond Stanfordbecause it succinctly articulated exactly what important people in higher education had been saying for some time. Similar demonstrations followed in the tempestuous months ahead, and the slogan became synonymous with the university's growing identity crisis, as many of Stanford's leaders came to insist that the academy's mission needed a thorough overhaul.

The nominal target of these demonstrations and protests was Stanford's core curriculum, a required course called Western Culture in which freshmen surveyed the history and classics of the West. This course gave many studentsespecially engineering and science majorstheir primary exposure to the humanities. But the real target was much broader. The Hey hey, ho ho chant resonated powerfully because the Western culture that had to go was a double entendre: It referred not just to a single class at Stanford, but to the West itselfto its history and achievements, to its institutions of free-market capitalism and constitutional democracy, to Christianity and Judaism, to the complex of values and judgments that help shape who we are.

These complaints about the Westpresent and pastwould be repeated over the next several years in many different contexts at Stanford. Increasingly, they would also be heard beyond: at the universities for which Stanford is a model; in watereddown form in elementary and high school classes; and in the popular media and arts where graduates of schools like Stanford have influence. Quite arbitrarily, it seemed at the time, the university's required reading list, or canon, had symbolically come to represent deep grievances about an assortment of broader cultural issues. Somehow, the Farm, as undergraduates affectionately call Leland Stanford's old plot, had been chosen as the pastoral site of an intellectual and cultural rebellion. Although nobody knew it then, this landmark skirmishthe Bull Run, so to speak, of America's ongoing culture warwould prove to be the labor pains of a nationwide multicultural movement.