How, at the end of the 1980s, would we expect a great American university to celebrate the centenary of its founding? More specifically, how would we expect such a university to honor its humanities faculty in a celebration of this sort? Is it conceivable that the university would welcome, as one of several honored lecturers, the legal counsel for the notorious Baader-Meinhof gang, and listen to a philosophical defense of its murderous activities? Is it conceivable that it would invite, as the keynote speaker, a PLO apologist like Edward Said to lecture on the perfidy of the United States and Israel? Or that it would call upon a radical journalist like Christopher Hitchens to discuss American “propaganda” and the “terrorism” of the contras in Nicaragua? Is this what the study of the humanities has come to signify at Stanford?

As odd as it may seem, this is precisely how the humanities were represented when the university played host in February to “Talking ‘Terrorism’: Ideologies and Paradigms in a Postmodern World,” one of a series of conferences the university has scheduled to mark its centenary in 1991. But then, this has not been a very good year for the humanities faculty at Stanford. It is currently embroiled in a furious debate over whether to change its undergraduate “core” reading list to include more non-Western, non-white, and non-male writers. The current list was introduced in 1980, twelve years after the faculty abolished a more coherent Western civilization requirement during the