That is the most important reason for civic-minded citizens to study it. The Western tradition is the source of America’s founding principles and constitutional system. How does the radical skepticism of one generation-its indulgence in comprehensive disbelief-become another generation’s blinding moral certainty? How did deconstructionist skepticism lay the groundwork for the omni-directional accusations of racism and bigotry that seem to have swallowed not only today’s college students but American politics as a whole? The connections to today’s student activists are direct, but obscured by a seeming paradox. Those currents in the American academy were skeptical, relativist, historicist, and even nihilist in character. Today’s radical student activism is rooted in powerful intellectual currents injected into university life several decades ago. This report returns to Stanford in 1987, and follows the controversy’s forgotten threads back to the beginnings of American history and forwards to today. And Stanford remains an excellent place to study the origins and the likely future course of our growing national divisions. The divisions that tore Stanford apart then now generate America’s most important political and cultural controversies. What began as a colorful political side-show grew in the years that followed to become the script of our politics. The fissure that opened three decades ago at Stanford-between the new multicultural way, on the one hand, and traditional American conceptions of history and citizenship, on the other-has widened now into a chasm. In January of 1987, students at Stanford University chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go,” kicked off this culture war. The cold civil war we have today emerged, oddly enough, on college campuses. Ideologically, we are split as we were when blue and gray armies faced off at Bull Run, though so far no armies have emerged to back the vitriolic rhetoric indulged in by both sides in our emerging “cold civil war.” The Civil War of 1861-1865 emerged from the national debate over slavery.
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