Western sieve: new methods of education mean that even at the top schools, the best is none too good.

Despite all the reports of, and encounters with, barely literate college graduates, parents and employers seem wont to believe that top-tier colleges are immune. Send Johnny to Yale, and he will still return a thoroughly educated man of letters, right? Maybe not. Based on the dismal results of a recent "cultural literacy" poll taken among upperclassmen at Stanford University, even the so-called cream of the crop bears the stamp of higher education's decision to embrace malignant academic fads.

For example, a full two-thirds of those surveyed found themselves at a loss when asked to name the author of The Wealth of Nations. Several came close, by naming Pocahontas's companion, John Smith --perhaps frustrating Disney's pedagogical aspirations. One student declared that the seminal free-market text was written by Friedrich Engels, Marx's comrade.

The question was one of a handful given to 159 randomly selected upperclassmen at Stanford by The Stanford Review. Performance on the others yielded similarly discouraging results. One-third of those surveyed believed that the Enlightenment preceded the Renaissance. Two-thirds could not name the sixteenth-century scholar who first proposed that the earth revolves around the sun; many confused Galileo with Copernicus. Approximately 72 per cent failed to credit Gutenberg with the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century. And the date of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor eluded a full three-quarters.

Even after two or more years at one of the nation's top universities, many students remain ignorant of basic historical facts every educated American should know. This is hardly surprising. In recent years, Stanford has slackened its efforts to provide its students with a broad-based humanities background, as the university's leaders have opted to embrace multicultural fads instead.

Consider the school's curriculum. Like all but one of the top 50 U.S. colleges, as found in a recent National Association of Scholars survey, Stanford does not require its students to take a history course to graduate. Instead, the university employs a misleadingly labeled "American Cultures" requirement, fulfilled only by courses emphasizing selected limited segments of American culture. Surveys on Protestantism, Irish-Americans, or the American West would not fulfill this requirement; classes that do fulfill it include "Film and Literature: U.S. - Mexico Border Representations," "Contemporary Ethnic Drama," and, for those inclined toward Ebonics, "African-American Vernacular English" -- none of which are likely to put much stress on Pearl Harbor. Students intending to graduate from Stanford must also take World Cultures and Gender Studies courses, fulfilled by the likes of "Chicana Expressive Culture," "Cultures in Crisis," and "Misogyny and Feminism in the Renaissance." In 1988, Stanford dissolved its old Western-civilization requirement and replaced it with its multicultural variant, "Cultures, Ideas & Values" (CIV), a freshman course in which students are as likely to study the Marxist Guatemalan peasant activist Rigoberta Menchu as Plato.

These multicultural courses are not the exception to an otherwise sound liberal-arts curriculum; they have become the liberal-arts curriculum. Thus, in Stanford's history department, no course focuses on the Civil War, U.S. diplomatic history, or even German-Americans, though many cover PC-friendly topics such as "Race and Popular Culture," "Asian-American History," and "Peace Studies." Social history has displaced political history. And multicultural gospel often creeps into benign-sounding courses like "Great Issues in Twentieth-Century America," a class I mistakenly took; it thoroughly covered issues such as poverty, homelessness, and 1960s protests, but conspicuously left out any discussion of World War II, except as it related to the status of women.

With the cost of a four-year Stanford education over $100,000, many students have come to realize the opportunity costs associated with taking such courses, perhaps explaining why fewer students opt to study history and the other humanities. The number of history majors at Stanford has dropped from 647 in 1965, when it was the school's most popular major, to 101 in 1995.

University administrators' responses to the poll results have been unimpressive. When The Stanford Review first released the survey results last spring, Stanford President Gerhard Casper washed his hands of any responsibility by blaming "general secular trends in our attitudes toward learning" and "the deficiencies of primary and secondary schools" for preventing students from summing up key cultural facts.

Of course, secular trends and pre-college schooling do affect students' knowledge of key facts. Casper's argument, however, overlooks the trend-setting role of universities like Stanford. Stanford is the Pied Piper leading primary and secondary education into the politically correct trends that are destroying it. Other trend-setting schools, such as those in the Ivy League, march right beside it. The Ivy-laden towers of the Northeast are littered with classes like Cornell's "Housing and Feeding the Homeless," Harvard's "Fetishisms," and Brown's "Circumcision: Male and Female, Jewish and Gentile." In fact, every Ivy League school but Princeton now offers more courses in feminist studies than in economics, according to a survey by the Young America's Foundation. This disproportion is not demand-driven: economics majors outnumber their women's-studies counterparts by more than 41 to 1 at Harvard, 28 to 1 at Yale, and equally lopsided ratios obtain at other Ivies.

THE curricula of Stanford and other elite universities shape national trends in education which trickle out to other colleges, and down to primary and secondary schools. When these leading institutions de-emphasize the teaching of key historical information for the sake of advancing a politically correct agenda, it should come as no surprise that other schools follow suit. Thus, if Casper and other university presidents want primary and secondary schools to rectify their deficient teaching of core knowledge, then their schools need to set an example of productive reform.

After I commented on the subject in the Washington Times this summer, the vice provost for undergraduate education, Ramon Saldivar, took a different tack: he submitted a handful of isolated traditional courses and requirements as evidence that classical studies are alive and well at Stanford. In a further attempt to vindicate Stanford, he noted that the school had just completed an intensive review of its curriculum, including a two-year assessment of the teaching of the humanities. (A true hard-liner of multiculturalism, Saldivar also contested the notion that Gutenberg invented the printing press. It was the Chinese, he says.)

Multicultural revisionism aside, the logic of this argument is slippery at best. The concern is not whether Stanford's curriculum contains a smattering of traditional education -- it does. Nor is it whether Stanford pays attention to what it teaches -- it does. The real issue is the educational direction Stanford has taken and its effects on traditional education generally and, in turn, students' cultural literacy. Merely spouting a brief roll call of traditional courses in defense does nothing but show Stanford bureaucrats' unwillingness -- or inability -- to defend the non-traditional curricula they promote.

The truth is that Stanford embraces multicultural fads at the cost of traditional education. One need probe no deeper than Saldivar's own most recent course to find yet another example of Stanford's politically correct offerings. "Comparative American Urban Cultures," according to the syllabus, purports to "examine the cultural geography of contemporary American urban spaces for the development of the personal, social, and political experiences of late twentieth century."

So what does that mean? In this class, Saldivar requires his students to watch Menace II Society; read books like Barrio Rhythm: Mexican-American Music in Los Angeles (complete with the chapters, "Papa's got a brand new bag" and "Reflections of a home boy"); eat out at Los Jarritos Restaurant in San Francisco's Mission District; and attend lectures on topics ranging from "youth, music, identity & culture" to "cultural citizenship." The fact that this course is taught by the vice provost for undergraduate education, and that it withstood what Saldivar himself identifies as "the most sweeping examination of [Stanford's] undergraduate curriculum in 25 years," reaffirms my thesis that Stanford's priorities are way off track.

Chasing fads comes at a cost. The Stanford Review's cultural-literacy test exposes some of them. Until Stanford and other colleges jump off their politically correct high horse and embrace the time-tested teachings of traditional education, students will continue to perceive Adam Smith as just another dead white male.