<p>Harvard and Hoover Institution professor points to Stanford as proof of the Decline of Western Civilization:</p>
<p>Niall Ferguson: why the West is now in decline
For 500 years Western civilisation was full of self-belief, but now, historian Niall Ferguson argues in his new Channel 4 series, its dominance is coming to an end.</p>
<p>So Stanford ceased to offer its traditional “Western Civilization” history course beginning in 1963 and that was literally what started the downward spiral of the decline of western civilization? Damn, Stanford is in deep trouble, this explains the 2013 rankings.</p>
A rather conveniently selected time frame. It neatly sidesteps the embarrassing fact that people in other parts of the world were signing peace treaties, building functional plumbing, writing medical treatises, performing advanced math, passing laws to protect women’s rights, and notating music while people in Europe were still shivering in huts.</p>
<p>As for the author, he’s another in a long line of people trying to make a buck by peddling a book designed to stir up fears about the impending and terrible decline of western civilization. It’s nothing that hasn’t been covered in painstaking detail by other, better scholars like Victor Davis Hanson.</p>
<p>He is right…western civilization did control the world in the past 500 years. Why is that hard to accept? He isn’t stating that it is better, more reasonable, or more capable, but rather simply that they emerged on top. With this point, it is simply implied that the most significant factor of the last 500 years would then be western civilization. Not including that in modern history would be like studying 1932-1945 and not once mentioning totalitarianism.</p>
<p>sounds like I’m sitting in a basket weaving class with a left over hippie professor who has not left campus since 1968. such a silly subject and then the canned standard responses about how backwards europe was and every one else was so advanced. we all can picture history to fit our own agenda. something tells me the glory days of cultures in and outside of europe were not so fun or happy in the last 5oo years or the 500 years before that.</p>