The trend is developing (reports the Jan. 18 New York Times) not at the usual high-powered academic leaders, but in mid-size and smaller settings with sizable minority populations, ranging from places you’ve heard of (Clemson University, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) to others you may not know of (Delta State, midway between Memphis and Jackson, Miss.) In just the last three years, courses featuring the Great Books curriculum are springing up, and the names they cover are the sort who allegedly hold no interest for minority students: Homer, Plato, Dante, Augustine, Hume, Yeats, Keats, T.S. Eliot.

An especially interesting case highlighted by the Times is Wilbur Wright College, a community college in the north side of Chicago "that caters to high school graduates considered not ready for four-year institutions, as well as to X-ray technicians, cellular phone sales clerks and bank tellers looking to better their lot." There, a Great Books curriculum in only its second year has 900 students enrolled, many in night classes. Comments the Times: "What may be most remarkable at Wright, where more than half the students are minorities and recent immigrants, is that students who grew up worlds away have been so drawn to courses that center on writers from Western Europe, white America or ancient Greece or Rome."

What’s going on here? If you believe the self-proclaimed spokespersons for various racial minority groups, this shouldn’t be happening. Black students supposedly only care about black writers like, say, Toni Morrison. Hispanic students just want to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez. All those dead white guys — well, they’re just part of the racist/sexist power structure bent on keeping all the nonwhite peoples down.

Only that’s not what the students at places like Wright College say.

Keith Morgan, a black former army sergeant, found he could relate to a story about another returning veteran: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. "I have a dream, just like Gatsby, to be successful," he says. "To me, as a black man, you have to get past your color and just appreciate what’s being written."

"I’m here to make myself a more intellectual person, regardless of my race, regardless of my background," adds Mexican immigrant Oscar Martinez, who studied and appreciated Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels last semester.

All this is good to see, for more reasons than the obvious fact that these students are getting exposed to great literature.

It’s good to see because if you really want to experience diversity — the catchword of people who promote minority-focused classes — you won’t just read books focused on the experiences of your race. You’ll read authors who took on great and transcendent themes like the relationship between God and man, man and man (and woman), man and the state. You’ll read authors whose work has stood the test of centuries, and learn why people saw things differently than they do today.

It’s good to see because it provides not just diversity, but a basis for unity. Yes, I know I just praised diversity. But there's a difference between valuing diversity and making it our overriding priority. Any society needs common ground — a sense among its citizens that they are one people with a common culture, not merely a bunch of consumers who happen to occupy the same continent. Our country cannot survive if a large portion of its people see themselves not primarily as Americans, but as hyphenated Americans — especially when, whether the hyphen is preceded by "African," "Hispanic" or "Asian," the emphasis is always on the first word, not on "American." It cannot survive when large numbers of people see another race as The Enemy. But when students in a city as race-conscious as Chicago reach out to explore the heritage of Western civilization — which is also the heritage of the country we all live in — it’s a hopeful sign.

But the best aspect of the Western civ resurgence is that many students will discover something more than history; they’ll discover truth.

To be sure, they’ll run across plenty of disagreements among the authors they read. (The Christian giant Augustine isn’t on the same page as the atheist David Hume). But they’ll notice that certain questions and themes are recurring. They’ll see Christians warning of worldly and spiritual temptations in works like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress — temptations like popularity or despair — and they’ll recognize similar things in their own lives. They’ll see the destructiveness of revenge and the noble-but-difficult calling of duty in Shakespeare’s royal characters. They’ll see the connection between classical philosophers and America’s Founding Fathers in stressing the need for limits on government, and for a virtuous people to sustain self-government.

These things can be found in Western civ, but they’re not just Western. They’re universal, and everyone can benefit by them.