I was looking through a list of next year's Core Curriculum courses yesterday. I got depressed.

First of all, I've never heard of any of the Literature and Arts B offerings. And don't even get me started on the fact that there is only one Moral Reasoning course in the fall--and it's scheduled for 9 a.m. But in truth, neither of these things would have bothered me at all if it wasn't for the fact that I have to take Core courses. And thinking about the Core makes me depressed.

"It makes us depressed too," my friends said. "Wouldn't it be much better if they had a Western Civilization class and distribution requirements?"

I got even more depressed.

It is obvious that the Core needs reform. It doesn't work. With a very few notable exceptions, professors don't want to teach the classes, students don't want to take the classes. But I'd rather have six more Core requirements than one "Western Civ" class. I'd rather double my science requirements than be told I am about to read the "Great Books."

Unfortunately, although Harvard's Core doesn't announce that it is a tribute to Western civilization, you can slip through learning little else.

I don't really deny that some of the "Great Books"--indeed all of them--have great parts. Nor do I deny that these books are the foundations of the "Western civilization" which scholars have so long defined for us.

But I question the correctness of actively working to perpetuate a system which marginalizes such a significant portion of society.

In the past, it could be argued, ignorance led us astray. Having been trained to see women and minorities as subhuman, how could these great white males conceive of any contribution from other quarters?

But today we pretend we have broken through those racist, sexist viewpoints. There are amendments to the cherished Constitution--surely a contribution to Western civilization--which say that people shall not be discriminated against on the basis of race or sex.

And yet, by advocating a "Great Books" course, we are discriminating on exactly those bases.

Irrational, I am told. You can have another class for women and minorities. But you can't change the list of "Great Books." If you have to leave something out, it mustn't be one of the "founders" of Western thought and culture....

Haven't we recognized the flaws in Western thought and culture in the past 20 years? Since the Civil Rights and the Women's Liberation Movements of the 1960s and '70s, most Americans will admit to the biases that have infected our past perceptions.

If we recognize them now, how can we leave Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. DuBois, Virginia Woolf, Simone De Beauvoir or Zora Neale Hurston off of our lists of contributors to Western civilization?

Unless we would hold that the past decades have wrought no change in our society, then the traditional approach to the study of Western civilization is seriously flawed. By removing those thinkers from our characterization of Western civilization, we are defining ourselves as we were, not as we are, or as we should strive to be.