“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed it ourselves.” – Abraham Lincoln
Last spring, as I registered for my current classes, I was looking through courses offered at Notre Dame under the “core history” obligation. What I found was shocking and a little absurd.
Out of 187 courses, there were only 13 that studied American history before 1900 and were not related in any way to topics of gender or race. Among this slim group, the titles were oddly focused on niche subjects: One studied America’s national parks and another class on wildlife invited students to “see North American history anew through the eyes of a race horse, a sled dog, a passenger pigeon, a grizzly bear, or a field mouse.”
Curious, I looked at history courses offered at other universities. The Ivies exhibited classes like “Race Science: A History” (Harvard) and “Early Histories of Sexuality” (Yale). And this past spring, Stanford offered a course titled “Doing Gender History.”
Apart from the absurdity of these titles, the courses of Notre Dame and other universities reveal a disturbing disappearance of American history from the classroom, an absence which poses a threat to the cohesiveness of American society. Following a broader trend in academia, Notre Dame has largely sidelined any serious historical study, focusing on what divides and differentiates us rather than our common heritage.
Anyone who watched the recent presidential debate doesn’t need to be told that America is a sorely and tragically divided country. Partisan lines have so deepened in our country that any discourse between Right and Left seems unattainable and futile.
This national divide is not foreign to Notre Dame. A recent Irish Rover poll conducted across campus found that the student body holds an almost even split between support for Trump and Harris: 47.6 percent and 45.9 percent, respectively.
A university produces the next leaders of a country—it is where the future president learns to understand, to think critically, to gain wisdom. A university’s primary goal may not simply be to create the next generation of leaders, but its role in forming the nation’s future cannot be ignored. As such, the university holds an enormous responsibility, one that cannot be taken lightly.
A nation’s history has a more profound influence on the thoughts and mores of a culture than most would credit. Universities, in removing even the most basic American history from their offered courses, are doing a disservice not just to their students, but to all of society. They are producing graduates who have an incomplete understanding of American history, and thus little understanding of what America is.
The future politicians, lawyers, and judges of America—our future leaders—are preparing for their professional careers by taking classes like “Gender @ Work in US History.” When the time comes for them to draft new laws and analyze court cases, they will lack any solid and accurate understanding of the philosophical and political heritage of their country.
To misunderstand something’s history is to misunderstand the thing itself. In short, universities are producing leaders who don’t understand America.
The second, more important, result of the rejection of basic American history in the classroom is ironic, given the attitude of acceptance and the emphasis on cultural heritage that dominates every university policy, commencement speech, and department initiative. In discarding our country’s history, universities are casually dropping by the wayside the sole identity shared by every American: our common heritage. Denying this identity, or intentionally forgetting it, is denying the last thing which unites us.
America is a country of immigrants. Her uniqueness comes from this aggregation of cultures and nationalities; to teach American history is not to disregard the individual history of each citizen—it is a way to unite the various identities that make up our country into one.
The classes taught at Notre Dame are examples of our culture’s systematic rejection of fundamental American history. Rather than give her students an education that unifies, Notre Dame, in imitation of other elite universities, teaches material that divides the student body.
This is not to say that no “real” history is offered at Notre Dame. In my course search, I found a number of interesting courses on Christianity, Western civilization, Greco-Roman culture, and African and Asian history. But for American history, typical course offerings were “LGBT in the 20th-century USA,” “Black Arts and Black Power Revisited,” and “Gender @ Work in US History.” This fixation on gender and race not only exaggerates division in identity; it chooses to ignore what unifies. Notre Dame ought not decry divisiveness and a polarization while fostering it herself. If we wish to be united, we cannot disregard our identity as Americans.
Universities are extending an invitation for discord. They are placing blinders on the eyes of their students, deliberately reframing the past in an attempt to control the future. Any hope for a unified country must come from a genuine desire to understand the entire history of America—her successes and her failures alike.
Lucy Spence is a sophomore from northern Virginia majoring in piano performance and the Program of Liberal Studies. She can be reached at lspence@nd.edu.
Editor’s note: This article was corrected after publication on September 30, 2024. The names of two courses, “Foxes, Hedgehogs, and History” and “Humans and Other Apes,” were removed and replaced.
Photo credit: Matt Cashore
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