There have been calls from the student body at Providence College to reform the college’s most highly valued and most central course: Development of Western Civilization. A program that spans over the first four semesters of every Providence College student’s academic life, the course focuses on the four key areas of development from the ancient cities of Mesopotamia to the present day. These fields are literature, theology, history and philosophy. Taught in conjunction with a team of professors, students are able to read texts and documents and understand the importance of human life and development. To some students, this program is merely a class that takes up space in their schedule; however, for students like me, it taught me how to be an active thinker in a 21st century world, supported by the foundation of nearly three millennia of thought, theory and ideas.
In recent months, a faction within the student body advocating for institutional change in the aftermath of racial bias incidents occupied the house of Providence College President, Father Brian Shanley, O.P,. and demanded him to sign an agreement to address racial concerns on campus and incorporate diversity into the college’s core requirements and curriculum. One of the first programs to come under fire was the Western Civilization Program. Student protesters focused on the lack of writers and thinkers from outside the Europe and from different racial and ethnical backgrounds.
It is evident that the Western Civilization Program, which has been a foundational program for Providence College students for more than 40 years, has been resistant to tectonic changes; yet change has been increased over the past four years. The past few years have seen a stable reformation of the program to include a small open discussion seminar component in collaboration with large substance based lectures. The implementation of these colloquiums offers students in the second semester of their sophomore year to choose an examination into a special topic within Western Civilization.
Yet, these student protesters want more changes to come to the program to include authors and thinkers from other ethnicities and regions of the world to offer a more multicultural survey of Western Civilization. While there has been little resistance to these student’s demands, one faculty member published an article defending the academic based demands of the student protesters.
Dr. Anthony Esolen, a prominent member of the English Department as well as a professor that teaches the Honors Western Civilization Program, offers a holistic counter argument to the students. Dr. Esolen writes that everything is about ourselves. "We don’t want to study other cultures. We want to make other people study about us, and from our preferred point of view. I say to students, “Here, let me teach you about Milton,” the author of the greatest poem in the English language. The students reply, “No, let us teach you about us.” This is certainly an arguable point and it may reflect the generational characteristics of Millennial, overachieving and driven, yet absorbed by their own desires to learn what they want.
Here is what I argue about the program:
The Development of Western Civilization teaches is not a program aimed to cover just one story of one people, believing in one religion. It is a transformation of human society. Greek, Roman, Gaelic, French, Phoenician, Jewish, German, Spanish, Latin American; all these cultures converge together over countless interactions within our history. We were taught at the beginning of sophomore year the dangers of a single story of which, history is remembered in one way, rather than from the prospective of another people, marginalized or not.
The Development of Western Civilization triumphs on championing the key components to an overall holistic approach to a liberal arts education. If a person dislikes the Western Civilization Program, they are entitled to their opinion. However, when a student decides to enroll at Providence College, you also enroll in the Western Civilization Program as a part of the institution's mission to produce critical thinkers and learners sound on the understanding of human life, existence and purpose.
The Development of Western Civilization program is not an outdated program. If anything, it is a program that is as strong as the roots that make up its core foundation. It transcends modern culture by bringing students into a meaningful examination of how our modern society came to be. Knowing that sets students up for the success necessary to seek out the truth and transform the world for the better.
