Hi everyone-
One morning on the bulletin board in the front hall of my high school a sign appeared for the Dead White Men's Club. It was a year before I got there but by the time I arrived in 1991, people were still talking about it. It was a scandal, the administration was horrified and called it racist. Some of the students were aghast, too, but for a bunch of them it was titillating, a brush with the taboo.
It was daring for white, male high school students to say that they liked, appreciated, and revered dead, white, male writers. That's what it was about. This was an era where the work of western masters was being replaced with modern prize winners revered not for their classic, lasting qualities, but for their identity factors. It was suddenly very important to English departments in top prep schools to replace that which had been taught for centuries with work that was untested but trendy.
This was when education was on the precipice of identitarianism, just as affirmative action in admissions was taking hold, and what we did not know then was that classical curriculum that preserved and taught western culture would not survive. It has not survived. When the kids are taught Shakespeare now it's through graphic novels. It's a travesty.
When the Dead White Men's Club emerged all those years ago, it was in an environment where it was just assumed that the work of dead white men would never follow its authors to the grave. Perhaps educators thought western culture could withstand the onslaught. But it could not, and it has not.
A new article out in Compact from a former Harvard professor details just why he is a former Harvard professor. He's heading off to some school in Florida that is not nearly as storied, but where academic freedom and a devotion to western civilization still reign. He's a history professor and says Harvard isn't even teaching western civilization anymore. The Dead White Men's Club was ahead of its time in the 1990 academic year. Maybe in addition to Turning Point chapters, and branches of Students for Liberty, or the Young America's Foundation, we should all be starting Dead White Men's Clubs, too.
Libby