kulture
8A THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2005
HAPPY 60TH BIRTHDAY!
BY ESTUARDO GARCIA
editor@kansan.com
KANSAN SCHOOL STAFFER WRITER
Love it or hate it, for the last 60 years, students at the University of Kansas have been exposed to many different thoughts, ideas and philosophies of Western Civilization.
The course that has kept many students up all night with sometimes-intense readings and writing assignments began on Sept. 14, 1945, after World War II changed the course of the western world.
arguments began on Sept. 14, 1945, after World War II changed the course of the western world. "The original intent of the program was to teach people about war as a means of trying to keep it from happening again," said David Dewar, assistant director of the humanities and western civilization program.
He said Chancellor Deane Mallot and the other founders of the western civilization program did not want to lose important ideas about civilization after two major wars devastated a single generation.
The program began as a five-year trial period before a committee decided to indefinitely continue the program in 1950.
Early students of the course did not attend a class lecture or a group discussion, but were handed only a study guide and a reading list. Students were responsible for a self-guided study program that culminated in a comprehensive exam to be completed before graduation.
Dewar said the reason for the self-guided study was that other departments at the University, including English, did not want the new program to take away from their enrollments.
In 1985, with help of the current program director, James Woolfel, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the program changed to require lecture and discussion classes with a final exam as part of the new western civilization curriculum.
The Mvth
A required course with a stack of books more than a foot high does not survive 60 years without picking up a few epic legends of its own.
years without picking up a few epic legends of its own. Brad Safarik, Lawrence sophomore, is in his first semester of western civilization. He had heard from other people about the difficulty of the class. "I really didn't know what I was getting into," Safarik said. He said he heard the class "sucked" and that students "had to read a ridiculous amount."
After more than a month in the class, Safari thinks he is reading a ridiculous amount, and he is a couple of books behind.
"I just can't read an entire book in a week," he said.
But not all students think the same way.
Cameron Cooke, Overland Park senior heard all the rumors about the class, too but he said he found the class to be cas and if anything it made him a better writer Dewar thinks the idea of western civilization being such a difficult class, originated
when the program was self-guided, and there was no real place for students to get help. Because of the rumors, both Dewar and Woelfel think less students take the course early in their college career and put it off until their junior or senior years.
The two also agreed that western civilization influences all of a student's studies, helping students in not only their future studies but also in their later lives.
"If students could just get their heads around the idea that whether they like it or not, this stuff is shaping everything they do," Dewar said.
Shortcuts
Web sites like sparknotes.com created easier ways to get summaries and discussions of books read in the program. Before that students relied on little yellow and black Cliff's Notes to replace the task of reading Chaucer and Plato.
Since the program started, students have been trying to find better and faster ways to avoid reading the books.
Charles Marsh, associate professor at the School of Journalism, was in the Western Civilization program in the early 1970s. He and four other students under the guidance of Dennis Embry, then a graduate student at the University, created a radio program called Western Civ Review to discuss the class readings of the week. The panelists were made of students who Embry considered to be at the top of their west- civilization classes.
Marsh said he and the other panelists met in a corrugated iron quonset hut on the prairie and recorded their one-hour radio show.
"By this time we were all of legal drinking age, so there had been some alcohol consumed to loosen up the conversation, and we would just have discussions of what the reading was," he said. "To my memory, the only reason it lasted one semester was because students were no longer reading the books. They had discovered they could turn to Western Civ Review."
Even though Marsh was selected for the panel, he said he wished he had paid more attention in class when he was 18, because he sees the influence of the ideas taught in western civilization in his everyday life.