ARTICLES How Fares Western Civ? Daniel Pipes # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 Eliminating courses on Western civilization ranks as one of the many radical changes in the American university over the last few decades. Symbolically, the shift began in January 1987, when Jesse Jackson led Stanford University students who, in a farcical demonstration with deep implications, shouted “Hey-hey, ho-ho, Western culture’s got to go.” And go it did. Those students, writes Stanley Kurtz in The Lost History of Western Civilization, not only succeeded “to dismantle Stanford's required course on the history and great works of Western Civilization . . . but [they] helped set off a ‘multiculturalist’ movement that swept away Western Civilization courses at most American colleges and set the terms of our cultural battles for decades to come.” Western civ courses matter because they help the intelligent citizen and voter understand three topics: how things came to be; what works and what does not; and where one fits into the world. Their abandonment leaves tomorrow’s leaders less capable. In the late 1970s, well before Jesse Jackson marched through Palo Alto, I taught this course using the History of Western Civilization: A Handbook (1969) by William H. McNeill, my mentor, as the basic text. Only in retrospect, having watched the spread of multiculturalism, do I now recognize McNeill’s spirit of cultural confidence. He calmly surveyed the highlights, spontaneously assumed the importance of Europe and its offshoots, unthinkingly asserted their accomplishments, and uncontroversially presumed these to be positive. Acad. Quest. DOI 10.1007/s12129-020-09914-6 Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, taught European and world history at the University of Chicago; daniel.pipes@gmail.com.