{"id":434910,"date":"2021-04-20T11:05:09","date_gmt":"2021-04-20T15:05:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=434910"},"modified":"2021-04-20T11:52:37","modified_gmt":"2021-04-20T15:52:37","slug":"a-spiritual-catastrophe-cornel-west-goes-after-historically-black-college-for-its-removal-of-classics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/a-spiritual-catastrophe-cornel-west-goes-after-historically-black-college-for-its-removal-of-classics\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018A Spiritual Catastrophe\u2019: Cornel West Goes After Historically Black College For Its \u2018Removal Of Classics\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">30<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fa-spiritual-catastrophe-cornel-west-goes-after-historically-black-college-for-its-removal-of-classics%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=434910&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><\/div>\n<p>Cornel West panned the decision of Howard University to eliminate its classics department as a contributor to \u201cspiritual catastrophe.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Neglecting classical literature is a \u201cterrible act [that] treat[s] Western civilization as either irrelevant and not worthy of prioritization or as harmful and worthy only of condemnation,\u201d West and Classic Learning Test CEO Jeremy Tate wrote in an April 19 Washington Post <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/opinions\/2021\/04\/19\/cornel-west-howard-classics\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">op-ed<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Howard University <a href=\"https:\/\/classicalstudies.org\/scs-news\/classics-howard-university?page=6#:~:text=%22Howard%20University%20has%20decided%20to,repurpose%20our%20programs%20and%20personnel.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">announced<\/a> on April 16 that its classics department would be dissolved and its faculty moved to other departments as part of \u201cprioritization efforts.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>West further argues that eliminating classical literature is uniquely harmful to black students, who become unable to find their own voices when they are not \u201cgrounded in tradition \u2026 in legacies \u2026 [and] in heritages.\u201d<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Cornel West and Jeremy Tate bearing witness:<br \/>\n\u201cAcademia\u2019s campaign to disregard the classics is a sign of spiritual decay and moral decline. Those who commit this terrible act treat Western civilization as irrelevant or harmful and worthy of condemnation.\u201d<a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/zYj740EDih\">https:\/\/t.co\/zYj740EDih<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Robert P. George (@McCormickProf) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/McCormickProf\/status\/1384293206364356623?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">April 19, 2021<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>West, a philosophy <a href=\"https:\/\/dailycaller.com\/2021\/02\/19\/cornel-west-claims-opposition-to-israeli-occupation-is-reason-he-did-not-receive-tenure-at-harvard\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">professor<\/a> at Harvard, tied the importance of the classics to civil rights leaders like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, who \u201cmentions Socrates three times in his 1963 \u2018Letter From Birmingham Jail.&#8217;\u201d He said eliminating the classics is therefore evidence of \u201cspiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture.\u201d <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/dailycaller.com\/2017\/06\/10\/professor-equates-white-marble-statues-with-white-supremacy\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">(RELATED: Professor Equates White Marble Statues With White Supremacy)<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>West and Tate describe the Western canon as \u201ca conversation among great thinkers over generations that grows richer the more we add our own voices and the excellence of voices from Africa, Asia, Latin America and everywhere else in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Howard\u2019s decision \u201cis the result of a massive failure across the nation in \u2018schooling,\u2019 which is now nothing more than the acquisition of skills, the acquisition of labels and the acquisition of jargon. Schooling is not education.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEducation draws out the uniqueness of people to be all that they can be in the light of their irreducible singularity,\u201d they argued.<\/p>\n<p>Some higher education professors have worried that their fields are not diverse enough.<\/p>\n<p>A Princeton University classics professor <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2021\/02\/02\/magazine\/classics-greece-rome-whiteness.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">said<\/a> at a 2019 conference that he hopes the classics field as currently taught \u201cdies as swiftly as possible\u201d because some <a href=\"https:\/\/quillette.com\/2019\/02\/26\/how-i-was-kicked-out-of-the-society-for-classical-studies-annual-meeting\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">view<\/a> classical antiquity as the birthplace of liberal democracy. Medieval studies professors have <a href=\"https:\/\/dailycaller.com\/2017\/07\/20\/profs-fear-white-supremacists-are-infiltrating-medieval-studies\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">claimed<\/a> that their field has a white supremacist <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/05\/05\/arts\/the-battle-for-medieval-studies-white-supremacy.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">problem<\/a> because they see it as \u201ca safe place to be white.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cornel West panned the decision of Howard University to eliminate its classics department as a contributor to \u201cspiritual catastrophe.\u201dNeglecting classical literature is a \u201cterrible act [that] treat[s] Western civilization as &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2276272,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-434910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434910"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434910\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2276272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}