The Problem with Dead White Males

February 27, 2004 | Source: Tech Central Station

A recent poll suggests an alarming gap in university presidents’ knowledge: the entire past 200 years. Asked to name the books “you believe every undergraduate university student should read and study in order to engage in the intellectual discourse, commerce, and public duties of the 21st century,” the academic leaders came up with a list highly deficient in science and that pretty much excluded anything written after 1800.

The problem: In the 1960’s, radical students launched a concerted attack on the “irrelevance” of the college curriculum. What they demanded, however, was not more study of science and technology, but instead a new focus on gender and ethnicity. These leftists are now ensconced in positions of power in universities.

The article writer’s own list:

  • The Blank Slate, by Stephen Pinker
  • The Age of Spiritual Machines, by Ray Kurzweil
  • The Transparent Society, by David Brin
  • The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson
  • Eastward to Tartary, by Robert Kaplan