Posted on April 12, 2016

Stanford Students Reject Western Civilization by a 6-to-1 Margin

Blake Neff, Daily Caller, April 11, 2016

An effort by a group of Stanford University students to restore a Western civilization class requirement has been decisively rejected by the student body, with voting results released Monday showing it mustering less than 15 percent support.

The ballot initiative was promoted by members of the school’s conservative-leaning Stanford Review. If passed, it would have called for Stanford to require that all freshmen complete a two-quarter course covering “the politics, history, philosophy, and culture of the Western world.” Stanford once possessed a similar requirement, but eliminated it after a student campaign in the 1980s that denounced it as fostering racism, sexism, and other perfidious -isms.

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{snip} In election results released Monday, the proposal failed by an overwhelming margin, with 342 votes in favor and a whopping 1992 votes against.

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{snip} A low-income advocacy group at the school suspended a member based on the suspicion that he wrote an anonymous piece supporting the proposal. A hostile column in The Stanford Daily warned that accepting the proposal would mean centering Stanford education on “upholding white supremacy, capitalism and colonialism, and all other oppressive systems that flow from Western civilizations.”