One of the core functions of the humanities for centuries was the passing down of a tradition from one generation to the next. The idea behind Western civilization courses was supposed to be that students needed them in order to understand the origins and development of their own culture. In the 1980s three developments worked against that idea. The first was an educational establishment that was no longer content simply to pass knowledge down from one generation to the next, and that wanted to create new knowledge. The second development, which dovetailed with the first, was the emergence of new approaches to the humanities that examined structures of oppression and domination in traditions previously viewed as unimpeachable. One could examine women’s history, for instance, or non-Western cultures. The third development, which dovetailed with the first and second, was the increasing demand for “relevance” in higher education, with “relevance” being understood as present-oriented and pragmatic, i.e. job-related.

The conflation of these three developments led to the widespread perception — and not just among self-proclaimed progressives — that anything traditional or old was also, almost by definition, conservative, fuddy-duddy, and impractical

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