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Stanford University is considering reinstating Western Civilization courses.

(The Associated Press)

Plato. Dante. Voltaire. Augustine. Darwin. Freud.

Great men all, but their time has passed. That's why they're known as Dead White Males.

They used to be required reading at the nation's most prestigious universities anyway. These influential thinkers were on the curriculum because a college education wasn't only supposed to prepare us to be bankers and lawyers and entrepreneurs. It was supposed to help us become better people, with rich interior lives and far-reaching intellectual horizons.

Then, in the 1980s, the protests started, with the center of the student-revolution storm moving south from its Vietnam-era headquarters in Berkeley. In 1988, the president of Stanford University's Black Student Union, advocating for the end of compulsory Western Civilization courses, declared that a core curriculum based on "an outdated philosophy of the West being Greece, Europe, and Euro-America is wrong, and worse, it hurts people mentally and emotionally in ways that are not even recognized."

"Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!" his fellow students chanted.

Stanford's administration recognized there was some validity to the criticism. The school reshaped its basic liberal-arts offerings to "include the study of works by women, minorities and persons of color," moving Plato and the gang mostly into the sphere of electives. Many other universities across the country followed suit. Problem solved.

Except for the law of unintended consequences. The successful banishment of Western Civilization courses "was the beginning of a wave of protests against Western culture on college campuses in the 1990s that, today, has seen a resurgence in the form of trigger warnings on syllabi, safe spaces and policed speech," Lizzie Crocker wrote this week in The Daily Beast.

That resurgence has left many university administrators in a state of bewilderment and paralysis. Last fall, a Yale University student confronted a school administrator over a suggestion by an associate master that students should simply ignore Halloween costumes they found offensive. That suggestion proved Yale was not fostering a "safe space," the student charged. Video of the incident -- "These freshmen come here and they think this is what Yale is!" the outraged student yelled -- became Exhibit A in the case for political correctness having gone too far. (You can watch the video below, but be aware: it includes some harsh language.)

But now Stanford is trying to reverse -- or at least massage into a new, more acceptable form -- what it started. Students this week are voting on a proposal to reinstate Western Civilization to the school's core curriculum.

The final decision on the curriculum will be made, of course, by the university. But it's meaningful that it was a group of students, not faculty, who have pushed for the return to the past. These future Stanford grads saw the value of a traditional liberal-arts education that is immersed in Dead White Males. "There's commercial pressure from Silicon Valley to take more tech courses, and then a race to the bottom among professors to recruit students with easy courses like 'The Language of Food' rather than courses that explain the world in which we live today," Stanford sophomore and Western Civilization proponent Harry Elliott told The Daily Beast.

In February, Stanford Review, the student magazine leading the charge for Western Civ's restoration, published its proposal for a course embracing "the narratives and values that bind us: the polar opposite of 'awareness and understanding of differences.'" This course would include the study not just of Plato, Homer and their ilk but also 19th-century African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass and 20th century French feminist and existentialist Simone de Beauvoir, to name two suggested additions to the canon.

Not all students got on board. "Two weeks later," academic freedom campaigner Eric M. Bledsoe wrote in the conservative journal National Review, "the editors reported on the backlash against the student signers, who were accused of racism, classism, hatred, etc."

Bledsoe was hardly surprised by this response, insisting it was an inevitable reaction after more than 20 years of political correctness. "What started as a populist movement for inclusion and egalitarianism has only resulted in a more divisive, fractured, and discontented American student body," he wrote.

Political correctness has been a hot topic in recent months even far beyond academia. Republican presidential candidates, seeing a valuable wedge issue, have harped on its evils. The front-runner in the race, businessman Donald Trump, called political correctness "the big problem this country has" as he rambled through an excuse for his sexist comments about comedian Rosie O'Donnell and others. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, talking about U.S. terrorism policy, said "political correctness is killing people." He has called on law enforcement to conduct random surveillance of U.S. neighborhoods with Muslim populations.

The liberal comedian Bill Maher says the rise of trigger warnings and "policed speech" has led to a dangerous backlash, one that emboldens biased, hateful thinking that is far worse than what students were protesting in the 1980s when they called for the end of Western Civilization courses. Donald Trump, for example, "says whatever flies into his head -- there are Tourette's patients with more control -- and people like it," Maher said in February. "Americans have been choking on political correctness and overly careful politicians for the last generation or two and are sick of it."

Political correctness and its agonists aren't going away any time soon. They're entrenched in the culture and the political scene. But Stanford is now trying to find a balance everyone can live with. Other university leaders -- as well as the country's politicians and comedians -- are surely watching and waiting to see how it turns out.

-- Douglas Perry