The End of Western Civilization

I gave my last ever exam in Western Civ II this morning.

It’s a class I’ve taught many times, and it’s one of my favorites. It moves right along – I start in 1300 or so with a broad and vaguely Scholastic overview of how medieval Europeans thought the world ought to be organized (feudalism, orders, and so on) and we usually run out of time right around the end of the 20th century with the EU and the disintegration of Yugoslavia serving as contrasting post-Cold-War trends. Along the way we go through several of my favorite set-pieces – Malthus and the Counter-Enlightenment; why Freud was a terrible psychologist but a fantastic symbol of his era; the tripwires that led to WWI; the Dawes Plan. It’s a fun class to teach.

This year I really had a particularly wonderful bunch of students. They were comfortable asking questions – and not just one or two talkative students, but probably about half of them. They got along well with each other. It’s one of the few classes I’ve ever taught – and certainly the first one since the pandemic – where I routinely had to call the class to order because they were so engrossed with conversations spanning the entire room. And their work was interesting. Most of my assignments require students to take a position and defend it with evidence and I always appreciate it when they don’t all end up on one side. It’s more interesting, and it’s nice when they take positions opposed to the ones they hear from me. That’s why I give them that evidence to use, after all.

Plus, for the last few years I’ve been putting together PowerPoint slides to show them as I run through my stories. It’s interesting to see what people and things looked like, after all. As we get into the 20th century I start to slip old photos of my family into the presentations. I used to do this just for me but recently I’ve been pointing out to classes which photos these are because the students seem to like knowing that these events have a connection to the class. The first family photo that makes it into the slideshow is one of someone on my dad’s side of the family who served in WWI. This year that inspired two students to search through their own family photos and then show me the results. That was really impressive, I thought.

But all good things must come to an end, however prematurely.

The state legislature in its infinite hostility to higher education declared that we needed to revamp all of our gen-eds on an insanely compressed schedule, and then the Mother Ship Campus decided not to follow the lead of every other such campus implementing all of this and instead impose their unique curriculum on us, with the net result being that we’re going to be devoting a wholly disproportionate amount of our time on those classes and not much else.

And somewhere in that cloud of dust, my little Western Civ II class disappeared.

The other historian on campus and I are going to be teaching a new required class – Twentieth-Century World History – that hasn’t been taught on our campus for so long that nobody can find a syllabus for it, so we’ll be working on figuring that out. I can reuse about a third of my Western Civ II material for it, including at least two of the set-pieces that I enjoy, and I’ve got some ideas on how to set up the rest of the class as well so it should be fine.

But I will miss Western Civ II.