In considering the overall good quality of history courses at two-year and upper-level colleges in the State University of New York system, I would remind SUNY officials in Albany who want to drastically alter history courses, and the way they are taught, to be mindful of the adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Twenty-seven years ago, civil rights activist Rev. Jesse Jackson led 500 students in a march around the Stanford University campus to protest the requirements that undergraduates take a history course on Western civilization, which they denounced as Eurocentric, white-male indoctrination. The marchers chanted, “Hey, hey, ho, ho; Western culture’s got to go.”
Three years ago, a SUNY advisory committee posted a 31-page report, “Proposed changes to SUNY gen ed” that proposed “to decolonize the curriculum and reduce the preference shown to Western communities.” Basic Western civilization history courses would be removed from the core curriculum and offered only as electives. Traditionally taught U.S. history courses would be restructured under a U.S. Historical and Civic Engagement category. It appears that students would be allowed to complete the requirements for this category without actually taking a fact-based U.S. history course.
U.S. Historical and Civic Engagement courses, similar to the proposals to modify other courses, would be redesigned to “articulate perceptive insights into personal cultural roles and biases, analyze their relationship with the people of other backgrounds and to be able to suspend judgments based on their own personal........