Times have certainly changed. Increasingly over the past 30 years, universities across the country have dropped general education requirements in Western Civilization. As a result, the average graduate of the average liberal arts program today has almost no familiarity with Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Livy, Augustine and Aquinas. He may know that Rome was an Empire (if he has seen Gladiator) but not that it was first a Republic. He has heard of but has probably not read the Bible. He thinks of the West, if he thinks about it at all, as a place, not as a civilization.

These aren’t just obscure academic questions, relevant only to a handful of stodgy professors who spend all their time in libraries. Our whole university system is founded on the idea not of getting trained for high-paying jobs (believe it or not), but of preserving and communicating the Western tradition. By offering young people a “liberal education” — that is, a broad introduction to Western science, philosophy, and history — the modern university sought to keep this tradition alive.

No more. The disappearance of Western Civ courses from university curricula is a symptom of a broader decline in liberal education. And this, in turn, is the result of a failing faith in the significance and value of Western Civilization itself. At a time when the West is literally under attack by people who reject all that it stands for, this can only spell disaster.

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To understand the reasons behind this decline, you only need to consider the case of the University of Chicago. Earlier this year, the UC announced that it would phase out and eventually eliminate its famed undergraduate sequence in Western Civ. The decision took many students and alumni by surprise. Long considered the centerpiece of the university’s vaunted Common Core program (a rigorous, two-year curriculum in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences required of every Chicago student), the Western Civ sequence is for many a symbol of all that is distinctive and valuable in undergraduate education at Chicago.

It’s not as if no one wanted the curriculum; just the opposite. Students definitely wanted it. The College Council, representing the University’s 4,000 undergraduates, unanimously voted in favor of a resolution calling on the university to reconsider. The UC student paper, the Chic ago Maroon, also came out against the decision, and a student group, Education First,backed a campus referendum on the future of Western Civ: 68 percent of those who voted wanted to keep Western Civ.

Chicago students weren’t alone in voicing their opposition to the university’s decision. Public reaction to the decision has been largely thumbs-down. Conservative academic groups like the National Association of Scholars and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni issued strong denunciations. Not-so-conservative big-gun alumni, including Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow, followed up with a petition demanding that the administration resist the “mindless narrowing and specialization that has characterized other universities for decades.” Other alumni pledged to withhold donations if Western Civ isn’t restored. (For full details of alumni response, click here.)

For all this groundswell of opposition, the UC administration doesn’t seem to care. Beginning this October, the university says it’ll go ahead with its plans to phase out Western Civ, reducing the number of sections offered while introducing two new courses (“European Civilization” and “Ancient Mediterranean World”) to take up the slack.

The university’s stubbornness is nothing short of amazing. It’s in the midst of a major fundraising drive, and can ill afford alienating students and alumni. So why does insist on doing away with Western Civ?

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According to a number of critics, the university’s decision to eliminate Western Civ is a reflection of increasing faculty specialization: Unwilling or unable to teach broad surveys of the Western Civ variety, junior faculty have banded together to pressure the university into revising its curriculum. As Albert Keith Whitaker put it in National Review Online: “Western Civ is dying because the departments have not hired faculty truly committed to liberal education. The departments have not done so because past and present administrations have not forced them to look beyond very narrow disciplinary turf.” In short, UC hasn’t been hiring anybody who gets the big picture well enough to teach about it.

But Chicago’s administration has its defenders. In a recent front-page article for The Chronicle of Higher Education (“The Smearing of Chicago,” June 28, 2002), Thomas Bartlett claimed opponents of the university’s decision have simply gotten their facts wrong. For instance, though Western Civ satisfies the civilization requirement of the Common Core, so too do a number of other courses (including courses in South Asian, Islamic and Latin American civilization). What’s more, Western Civ itself has not been a required course since 1966. The administration’s move, in other words, doesn’t fundamentally threaten the integrity of the Common Core. Nor, Bartlett says, does the decision to do away with Western Civ mean that students will no longer be able to take broad survey courses in Western history. Most of the material formerly covered by Western Civ will be incorporated into the new offerings in “European Civilization” and the “Ancient Mediterranean World.” Since faculty will be teaching much the same material as before, faculty specialization was not a factor in the decision.

Maybe so. But if Bartlett is right and the recent changes announced by the university are not really changes at all, why dump Western Civ in the first place? And, if something needed to be cut, why Western Civ (where, according to published reports, enrollment continues to be high)? Why not East Asian Civ or Latin American Civ or some other course? On this point, Bartlett — like the history department committee responsible for first proposing the changes — is strangely silent.

But we can get insight from another source, UC President Don M. Randel. In a June column for the University of Chicago Magazine, Randel defends his administration’s decision against those who charge that the university has “sunk into a pit of utter relativism and lost all sense of what the achievements of European and American society might be said to be.” Not at all, says Randel: The decision to eliminate Western Civ from Chicago’s curriculum was simply a recognition that times have changed. After all, he asks, “why should we wish to adhere eternally to narratives about our history written by some number of German or British writers of the 19th century?” For Randel, it’s all quite simple. The idea of Western Civilization is obsolete: Now that we’re past all that, we can move on.

Before moving on, however, it’s worth considering what we’re leaving behind.

 Western Civilization courses of the Chicago variety are indeed founded on a late 19th-century vision (“narrative”) of Western history. According to this vision, the history of the West, though messy, is ultimately a story of progress (expanding democracy, increasing wealth, the spread of scientific inquiry) and unity (it’s a story that pulls together over 2,500 years of history to show us how we got where we are). This is the sense of the term “civilization” in “Western Civilization:” It means that despite all their their differences, the peoples, cultures and histories of the West are joined together by a higher unity distinguishing them from others. As Stanley Kurtz put it in National Review, “the point of the Western Civilization sequence is to nurture this sense of a living and continuous tradition of the West.”

It’s precisely this perspective that is missing from the courses that are slated to replace Chicago’s Western Civ sequence. Both the “Ancient Mediterranean World” (ancient Greece, Rome, and the Mediterranean basin more generally) and “European Civilization” (late medieval Europe through the present) will look after their discrete chunk of the Western past. By all appearances, however, neither will attempt to draw connections between one piece of the Western past and the next. In short, no case for the West as a civilization will be made.

Of course, it’s one thing to question the idea of civilization and, more particularly, the coherence and distinctiveness of Western civilization. Indeed, getting students to think about these matters has long been one of the principal aims of Chicago’s Western Civ sequence. The problem is, Chicago’s curriculum changes don’t seem to question the idea of Western civilization so much as they exclude it in advance.

It is this, I suspect, that has gotten Chicago students and alumni so agitated. By replacing the Western Civ sequence with two, much narrower courses, Chicago’s president has in effect opted for replacing one vision of Western history and identity with no vision at all. The danger is that this absence of vision will become a vision in its own right. Some — no doubt including the better part of the university’s history faculty, the group responsible for proposing the changes — may welcome this outcome. But it is a sign of the continuing health and seriousness of Chicago as an institution that most do not.

No doubt such dire conclusions will strike some as overblown: So what if Chicago has decided to give up Western Civ? Though the university’s decision to stop teaching the course may be a disaster, it is surely a local one. Not so. What happened at Chicago earlier this year has already happened elsewhere many times. Once a stalwart of liberal education programs at colleges and universities across the country, survey courses in Western Civ have quietly disappeared from most curricula.

You can, of course, obtain a sense of Western civilization without taking a college course of the same title. But in calling it quits on Western Civ, the UC administration has not only put an end to a venerable and well-loved course but also struck a blow at the symbolic heart of the university itself. The whole idea of Western civilization is closely implicated in the idea of a liberal education: the “German or British writers of the 19th century” so glibly dismissed by Don Randel also happen to be the very men who established the modern university on liberal foundations.

 When a president of the University of Chicago thinks Western Civ is nothing more than some 19th-century oddity, you can’t help but conclude that the barbarians are already at the gates — and perhaps inside them.