The existing core course was built around fifteen texts, beginning with the Hebrew Bible, Homer, and Augustine, continuing through Machiavelli and Galileo, and on to Marx, Darwin, and Freud. The protesters wanted to expand the syllabus to include nonwhite and female authors, not necessarily on the grounds that they wrote important or timeless books, but that their very inclusion raised the dignity of the cultures out of which they came, and therefore the self-esteem of students coming from those cultures.
