The State : Stanford OKs Class Change

Stanford University’s Faculty Senate overwhelmingly approved a compromise to change the controversial Western Culture course required of all freshmen. The plan drops the course’s mandatory 8-year-old reading list of 15 masterpieces and allows teachers to vote each year on a group of texts, authors or topics to be studied. In addition, issues of race, gender and class will have to be tackled and the course will be renamed Cultures, Ideas and Values. The 39-4 vote caps a long dispute that attracted national attention. One side wanted the reading list retained as, what one supporter called, “the common intellectual glue of a Stanford education.” The other side claimed that the list denigrated minorities and women.