Damian Almeida Baray

The west tower of Harper Memorial Library.

The College will sunset its History of European Civilization program and replace it with a “renewed” three-quarter Western Civilization sequence starting this fall, according to several professors in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division.

The University currently offers a two-quarter History of European Civilization sequence. The first two classes, which satisfy the College’s civilization studies Core requirement, span from the fall of the Roman Empire around 500 C.E. to the modern European Union, and an optional spring-quarter course—Europe in Ruins: After 1945—chronicles the post–World War II development of modern Europe.

The new course will begin earlier, with Ancient Greece and Rome, and end with the European Union in spring quarter, according to Steven Pincus, the Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of British History and the College and the chair of the sequence.

“We’ve decided that now it’s time to really rethink the sequence from the bottom up,” Pincus told the Maroon.

The existing History of Western Civilization sequence covers the classical world through 20th-century Europe, but only one section of the class is offered on campus each academic year, as well as a summer session taught by former Dean of the College John Boyer and additional versions offered abroad. Longtime professors Karl Joachim “Jock” Weintraub and Katy O’Brien Weintraub had taught the course until their deaths in 2004 and 2024, respectively.

Pincus said the existing version of the sequence would also be retired, describing it as a holdover from a previous era of the course. “Jock and Katy designed their course during the Cold War,” he said. “I mean, the Cold War has been over now for some time.… There are questions we want to put on the table that weren’t necessarily on the table before.”

Changes in the Western world have necessitated a new approach to the course, according to Pincus.

“The place of Europe and the West in the world has changed dramatically because of world events—the end of the Cold War, the rise of China, et cetera,” he said. “It’s clear that while Western civilization plays an outsize role in shaping our institutions, it’s not the only set of institutions that are available in the world today, and so we need to place the course in a more complicated world.”

He also cited more recent events that have raised questions about what defines the West, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and an increasingly strained relationship between the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as reasons to reevaluate the sequence’s curriculum.

Students will be able to take either the first and second or the second and third quarters of the sequence to satisfy the civilization studies Core requirement if they do not choose to enroll in all three, Pincus said.

The Western Civilization sequence has been taught in the College since 1948, Boyer told the Maroon, and was originally a requirement for all students; non–social science majors were only allowed to substitute other civilization studies sequences for the course starting in the 1970s, and the requirement was maintained for social science majors until the 1980s.

The College’s overhaul of the Core Curriculum in the late 1990s and early 2000s—which reduced the civilization studies requirement from three to two quarters—led to decreased enrollment in the full Western Civ sequence, prompting the University to replace nearly all of its sections with the two-quarter European Civilization sequence that excluded the classical world in 2002.

Boyer cited the creation of the Ancient Mediterranean World sequence as the reasoning behind the 2002 switch. “There was a sense that, if we were going to have two two-quarter options, [students] might want to do either Greece and Rome or ancient and modern [Europe],” he said.

But Pincus said that many faculty members have felt it is important to teach the history from beginning to end. “We’re absolutely insisting that we need to consider the relationship between the classical tradition, involving the Greeks, the Romans, but also Judaism and Christianity,” and the modern world, he said.

“Inevitably, the Europeans go back to the ancient world,” Boyer said. “There are strong parallels, and so it’s hard to teach the Enlightenment, for example, if you don’t have some understanding of Greek and Roman history. Even the American Enlightenment—people like John Adams were profoundly affected by Roman history.”

Pincus said the new course would feature three evening “plenary lectures” each quarter, focusing on “broad interpretive questions,” for all students in the program. He also emphasized streamlined course themes across sections; all instructors will start and end each term with the same texts, though they will have some flexibility in choosing further course material.

Pincus pointed to a recent rise in institutes and programs at other universities that “have insisted on the centrality of teaching a Western civilization course,” citing the University of Florida’s Hamilton School, the University of Texas at Austin’s Civitas Institute, and Ohio State University’s Chase Center—all relatively new centers for civics education spearheaded by conservative groups and legislators—as examples.

In response, UChicago faculty aim for the new iteration of the sequence “to reassert a distinctive University of Chicago way of teaching Western Civ,” Pincus said, a method that centers on primary sources and a “question-based” course structure.

In 1986 and 1987, the University published the nine-volume Readings in Western Civilization series, known as the “rainbow books,” to accompany the Western Civilization sequence. Those compilations of primary texts offered a way for those outside the University to benefit from its approach.

At the time, “somebody in a small liberal arts college in the middle of Iowa could easily teach a Western civilization course based on the University of Chicago model, even though their library couldn’t support it,” Pincus said.

While the Readings in Western Civilization books won’t be updated, Boyer said, the University does plan to create a “digital archive” of primary texts for the sequence that is available online and includes sources from the 40 years since the publication of the original series.

“That allows us to sort of export the University of Chicago model to other places, but it also makes it much easier for somebody teaching, say, Western Civilization in Paris to access the texts and assign them to students,” Pincus said.

“For better or for worse, Western civilization has shaped the institutions certainly in the United States, but also in a good deal of the rest of the world,” he added. “And so for better or for worse, we need to understand why they were created.”