Why the West?

Though only a meager few introductory courses (including History 10a: Western Societies, Politics, and Cultures from Antiquity to 1650) admit it outright in their course titles, nearly all intro courses at Harvard focus on the West. Social Studies 10, Historical Studies A-12, English 10a (and 10b), Ec 10, and Justice, to name a few, stick only to the intellectual, political, historical, and economic achievements of Eurasia and North America (plus the Near East and North Africa during ancient times).

Contrast these departmental intro courses to Core courses (true, Ec 10 and A-12 are also Cores) and youll find more than one significant difference. For one, Cores are much more focused. They purport to teach modes of thought rather than provide a broad background in the topic itself. The aforementioned History 10a, a broad introduction to Western history, counts for the same Core credit as a class on the Cuban Revolution. Additionally, many of these Cores treat non-Western subject matters. These two differences seem to pose a bit of an internal contradiction. More likely than not, your department wont let you graduate from Harvard without grounding you in the Western ideas that pertain to it, but outside of your department Harvard College will gladly hand a diploma to a history concentrator who studied Confucius in her Moral Reasoning Core.

Through the Harvard College Curricular Review (HCCR), the College and its departments are taking their first faltering steps towards reconciling these priorities at odds. Using the apt words of Saltonstall Professor of History Charles S. Maier 60, whereas Harvard students long ago labored under a General Education curriculum designed to instill values, and now under a Core Curriculum aimed at teaching methods, the future of distributive requirements at Harvard will fall somewhere in between. Maier, writing in Essays on General Education in Harvard College, himself touts connectivity as this Golden Meana reaction to the gradual deprivileging of Western values by the new, connected global community in which all of us now reside. In student-speak, this means that Constructing the Samurai might not be around in a couple years.

In the face of this impending compromise between methods and values, the outlines of which have already begun to take shape, it is crucially important that we remember why we study the West. While Maier believes that Western values should no longer be privileged in the way they were during Harvards pre-Core, Gen Ed days, he also adds that, from one perspective, Western values should be deprivileged because of their worldwide diffusion. From this point of view, studying the West is really about understanding the basis of a global culture that many feel is emerging. The West won, and so a firm grounding in its culture and values is necessary. This argument, however, can be strung too far. Its one thing for someone to say that the Western tradition is responsible for the primacy today of principles like democracy, liberty, and freedom. Its another to make a normative judgment and say that these principles are somehow better than other cultures values.

Studying the West is doubly important to Harvard because the courses that provide introductions to aspects of the West are perfect models for the ever-elusive Harvard College Courses on which Harvards new distributive requirements will be modeled. In an internally circulated report last semester, the Committee on General Education recommended that these Harvard College Courses be content based. Not only does this mean that they will not be like Core classes, it also means that theyll be disasters if their boundaries arent well defined. Imagine a course on global culture. Opponents of Western civ courses already criticize the fact that they cover too much material too fast. These are the same people who rant that these courses unfairly privilege Western values. At least Western civ courses focus on a specific culture within defined boudaries, instead of focusing, like many global civ courses purport to do, on the boundaries where civilizations intersect. As McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History Steven E. Ozment writes in the journal Public Interest, Although interesting and certainly au courant, a history that preoccupies itself primarily with the boundaries of civilizations runs a risk of becoming marginal history.

Studying the West in an appropriate way means recognizing the central role that Western thought plays right now, in whatever way one chooses to acknowledge it, and then seeking to discover the origins of that thought. Harvards World War II-era Gen Ed curriculum put Western thought on a pedestal. And the Core tried its best to make Western thought non-essential to graduation (even as most departments ensured their students would be firmly grounded in it). Going forward, the Committee on General Education must simply accord the West the same treatment it gives other subjects. Dont privilege it, but dont neglect it either by citing the importance of some amorphous global culture. With the HCCR mired in indecision, the oft-maligned Introduction to Western Civilization course may be about the most tangible and indispensable part of Harvards new curriculum.

Alex Slack 06, a Crimson editorial chair, is a history concentrator in Leverett House.