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God and man at Yale: The superstitions of "academic freedom" (Great debate books)

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This seminal work of one of the most courageous conservative thinkers of the 20th and 21st centuries laid the groundwork on which numerous other media voices built. He descrbes how it all started when he was an undergraduate at Yale University from 1946-1950. He writes from his conscious. Buckley is precise in describing how he felt traditional American values were being ignored, undermined, and distorted by academics. He makes his case by citing specific classes, instructors, and textbooks. In the revised edition he brings readers up to date on how critics and the public responded when the book originally came out. Buckley earned the right to be the quintessential role model for conservatives because of his courage and gift of clearly communicating his argument in a logical manner. There are no ad hominem fallacies here or in any of his writings. He confronts isses head on. He even discusses his motive for writing the book by saying it is tied to his love for his alma mater and the country in general. By that he means his desire is for constructive change. It is in pointing out the errors that he hopes to achieve the positive resolutions he seeks. Buckley has remained a voice worthy of an audience in the marketplace of ideas for decades. This is the book that launched him and it is worth reading at any point in time.

Superbly written. Easy to understand. And full of common sense. It was probably its "common sense" that caused liberal academicians of Yale and other prestigious "institutes of higher learning" to reject Buckley's assessment and recommendations. For the "wisdom" was (and is) that if it's not sufficiently profound and complex, then it cannot be relevant or useful. Yet, Buckley's common sense suggestions for reforming the methods of education were (and are) right on target. By rejecting what he said out of hand, the stage was set for post-modern relativism that is rampant at "institutes of higher learning" as we enter the 21st century. A lot has happened since Buckley wrote this book, including the discrediting of collectivist ideologies and the collapse of Communism. But despite the passage of time, Buckley's words still ring true because they are rooted in conservative principles - principles based on the constancy of man's nature. My only regret is that since the writing of this book, Buckley has embraced the "snobbish" dialect of the english language. Consequently, his more recent books repel the simple man in search of common sense. Pity too since Buckley still dispenses much common sense.

Some might find it hard to imagine a time when it was shocking to find that students in an Ivy League university were being taught, even sometimes indoctrinated, by socialists and atheists. Today that's about as amazing as the news that water flows downhill.

Mr. Buckley has been right about most things for the last half century. He was very young when he wrote this book, and it was a sign of even better things to come.

How could a book by a very young man who had just graduated from college that contains detailed criticisms of the philosophy, attitude and method of individual professors under whom he studied change the entire course of American politics? How could a book about policies and personalities in one Ivy League school gain almost instant national recognition and cause intense reactions of either joy or rancor throughout the American intellectual community? More than fifty years after its initial publication in 1951 and after the death of its author, why would you want to read such a book? The answer to these questions is simply that this book is Mr. Buckley's first step down the road toward a conservative revolution against an advancing socialist hegemony and as it was Mr. Buckley's first step it was the nation's first step.

Mr. Buckley was a devout Catholic and committed individualist (I will use this word as he uses it and hope you gain full appreciation for it after reading the forward of the book). He saw that during his education, Yale promoted neither religion nor the ideas of free market economy and personal responsibility in contravention of its own charter. Indeed, most of the professors openly scoffed at both and forcefully propounded the ideas of liberalism that had developed during Wilson's presidency and flourished under FDR. So he wrote this book to admonish the faculty for its bias and imbalance, illuminate the hypocrisy of the college administration and to suggest that the alumni take responsibility for guiding the direction of the curriculum. Along the way he demolishes the myth of "academic freedom." The book failed to change now yet more liberal Yale because the naive Mr. Buckley had not yet learned that alumni out making a buck and carving a life hadn't the time nor intellectual interest to pressure the faculty nor that the faculty was entrenched in academia guarding their collectivist atheist ideas because they intentionally wanted to promulgate their dogma for the purpose of self validation.

So if the book failed to change Yale, how did it succeed nationally? It defined the intellectual battle-lines and called together the troops of the opposition. Thousands of people across Westendom started nodding their heads like bobble dogs saying "Ya know he is right - they did try to shove a lot of nonsense into my head when I was in school." Thousands of people stood up and said "I am an intelligent thinking person and I believe in God - get over it." This book and the then more obscure but now essential "Road to Serfdom" by Frederic Hayek serve as the starting point for rejecting collectivism, big government and the fascism that raises up every 20 years or so whenever America is economically troubled (if my use of the word fascism here puzzles you, please read Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism"). Every kid bound for college should read this book so they can learn not to look at their professors as demigods and to resist their sneering anti-Capitalist anti-religion proselytizing. Every Red State Minded person should read this book to learn to look at the left critically and face them unabashedly.

Mr. Buckley went on to found "National Review" the most widely read magazine of political commentary in the nation, to write spy novels (he was a spy briefly), editorials and works of non-fiction, to produce the PBS show "Firing Line" and to provide much of the impetus for the Reagan Revolution. Second only to my father he was the most influential man in my life. Everything he ever wrote is a delight and this book is a great place to discover that delight.

"The duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world...(and) the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level."

So wrote William F. Buckley in 1951, not long after he graduated from Yale. In this landmark book of the conservative movement, Buckley urged Yale alumni to withhold financial support from the school, because many of Yale's departments had been taken over by liberals and were attempting to inculcate socialism and unbelief in their students. Buckley also discussed the true definition of academic freedom.

In the book, Buckley also tackled many economic issues that are just as salient today as they were in 1951, such as distribution of income, the income tax, inheritance taxes, government spending, and inflation.

Liberals responded to the book with their standard ad hominem attacks, but Buckley had touched a nerve, and the book launched him on his way to the head of the conservative movement.

The movement may have transformed the world, but left the academy mostly untouched. A few years after the book was published, Buckley founded National Review. Conservatives eventually took over the Republican Party, Ronald Reagan was elected president, and the Soviet Union was vanquished, but, sadly, the situation in our universities is as bad today as it was when Buckley chronicled it.

"God and Man at Yale" belongs on the reading list of anyone who wishes to investigate the intellectual pedigree of the conservative movement.

Obviously a book about the state of college life and of Yale in particular which was written in the early fifties will take some lumps for its dated references to the specific personalities and issues of Yale life in 1950. His main theses are that collectivism, an older term which, as the author points out in an updated prologue, has morphed in "liberalism", is the dominant principle which guides the teaching of Economics, Philosophy and the social sciences, and secondly that, by any reasonable measure, agnosticism and atheisism are the prominent world views held by the majority of faculty and are in full evidence even in the Department of Religion. Not only do you sense his personal frustrations (being a Catholic and an advocate of small government), but there is a note of dismay at the apparent hypocrisy of Yale with respect to its alumni. The latter were encourage to shore up the finances of the college with their generous giving but were not to be given much say in the philosophical direction of the school, even though Yale paid lip service to the importance of the alumni in preserving its integrity and traditions. In fact, as Buckley points out, if the largely Christian and Jewish business men who made up the alumni knew that the Yale faculty was in large part atheistic (and sometimes highly scornful of Christianity)and believed that big government (specifically Keynseyism) was the answer to society's ills, there would have been far more calls for accountability. But sadly, the alumni were discouraged from questioning the philosophical direction of the college for fear of breaching the sacred veil of 'academic freedom' and from general apathy and lack of reasonable information. Buckley's book began an important intellectual discourse in the US about the direction of our culture. His wit and mastery of the written word is still fresh and entertaining.

Long before the battles between the Randians, Goldwaterites and Rockefeller wing of the GOP; before the Reagan Revolution and the Contract with America, even before Whittaker Chambers' "Witness", there was young Bill Buckley, Russell Kirk and a few little-known economists preaching conservatism. Lost in the McCarthy rhetoric, the underpinnings of conservatism were drowned out, but Buckley was and continues to be a voice that gives it reason.

The prescience of this book is in its dissection of liberalism on college campuses, and centers on the modernist swing away from God and towards Man. Buckley's best argument throughout the work might be called the "marketplace of ideas," which today conservatives are winning. He points out the political views of many of the families who send their kids to college, particularly Yale. Most of the parents are found to disagree with the new Leftist stridency of Yale and other colleges, but the parents have little if any choice in the matter of getting their children educated within a more balanced environment. This situation has not gotten better over the years. Reading "God and Man At Yale" teaches us that campus radicalism did not begin during the Vietnam War.

STEVEN TRAVERS
AUTHOR OF "BARRY BONDS: BASEBALL'S SUPERMAN"
STWRITES@AOL.COM

In God & Man at Yale, first published in 1951, William F. Buckley stingingly critiqued Yale on two grounds: Its academic departments' failure to uphold the Christian ideals that the university professed, and their tendency to disparage "individualism." (He uses the term "individualism" as an antonym for collectivism, but noted in his 1977 introduction that, were he writing the book in the 1970s, he would have chosen a different term.)

If anything, his critique is truer today than when he wrote this book. While the specter of Communism has receded, institutions of higher learning have become a bastion for trendy anti-Americanism. One need only examine some of the shameful remarks made by academics in the wake of September 11 to understand the truth of this statement. (Examples include the now-infamous "Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon gets my vote," as well as the lesser-known but no less odious pronouncement that the American flag is "a symbol of terrorism and death and fear and destruction and oppression.")

Unfortunately, this book provides a minimal guide to understanding the current problems with academia. Buckley himself recognized that his specific argument about Yale's failings would quickly become dated. As he notes in his 1977 introduction: "For years and years after this book came out I would receive letters from Yale alumni asking for an authoritative account of 'how the situation at Yale is now.' After about three or four years I wrote that I was incompetent to give such an account. I am as incompetent to judge Yale education today as most of the critics who reviewed this book were incompetent to correct me when I judged it twenty-five years ago."

The dated nature of the book is exacerbated by the fact that the information he puts forward is highly specific: There is much discussion of professors who left the school decades ago, and textbooks that have undergone extensive revision since his writing, or more often, are no longer used.

Despite the dated nature of his arguments about Yale, there is much in the book that is worth reading. His new introduction, describing the vitriolic response that the initial publication of God & Man at Yale engendered, is highly amusing. He also puts forward a cogent refutation of the argument for "academic freedom" that was (and is) often advanced when the ideologies promoted by institutions of higher learning are questioned, as well as an appeal to alumni generally to ensure that their values are not subverted by the universities that they support.

Unfortunately, however, the majority of the text deals with dated material of limited utility to contemporary readers.

We may have won the Cold War against Soviet Communism in 1991, but neither Communism per se (e.g., in China's heartland, in Bjelo-Russia or in Cuba), nor any other form of socialism/collectivism (e.g., in India) is dead. The fight just goes on. I've just read the 50th Anniversary Edition of "God & Man at Yale" by William F. Buckley, Jr.. The situation he described at Yale in the 1940s-50s is now completely replicated in most private and public universities in the USA and Europe. Consequently, a lot of our young students (= "the future leaders of the western world)" don't believe in God, they are secular (atheist or agnostic) and collectivist and believe strongly that only Government can safe the People of the USA. That is complete and utter nonsense, as both you and I who have lived in the past half century know (I was born in 1951, when "God & Man at Yale" was published). But it is clear that it is the young "Obama Democrats" who have turned the ideals of the USA upside down.

The 20th century has empirically demonstrated the abject failure of (National, Communist, Welfare, Islamo-Fascist) Socialism as a societal and moral system. No one can ignore those failures, I thought, since we can read the factual history and we can currently observe the resulting financial and moral wreckage of those societies which adopted any form of Socialism around us. Look at the current financial and moral failures of the national governments in Europe and the European Community and, by implication, now, outside Europe in North-Africa . Are we, the Western World REALLY defending our values, in Afghanistan, in East and SE Asia, in the Middle East and in North Africa, or are we just pretending to and make half-hearted attempts? Did all those millions of brave young men die unnecessarily and inconsequentially on the beaches of Normandy and on those God-forsaken little islands in the Pacific? Did we really earn our way of life? (Yes, I also just saw on Monday, June 6, 2011, "Searching private Ryan" again).

Look at the current financial and moral failures of the US Federal Government and of States like California and New York. Why, then, did young Americans adopt in 2008 the socialist Obama as their President is almost beyond comprehension. Except, of course, when you realize that they were and still are being educated to be secularist and collectivist in almost all our institutions of higher learning.

How what then works? Start by re-reading "God & Man at Yale," compare that with your own experiences in college and universities as students and as professors. The enemy of Collectivism is the ultimate mole which over the past century has deeply and perniciously dug its way into the Western World's academic curricula and professorships under the pretense of "academic freedom." Did we REALLY win the Cold War, or have we actually lost it, in the way Carthago won the war against Rome, but then vanished from the international historical scene? Are we going to win the north-African-Middle_eastern-Afghanistan war(s) in the same fashion? This abomination of surreptitious infiltration of collectivist and secularism into the curriculum of our institutions of higher learning and the slow, but very methodical undermining of our Western value system of enlightened, rational, but ultimately charitable, non-secular thought, has to be exposed, IF we want the Republic of the United States of America to survive as a free nation, representing and inhabiting True Liberty under God.

You were wondering why your college or your university has become so "leftist"? Because we, the Alumni are not speaking up and protesting enough against this surreptitious trend. We have been giving and still give money to our Alma Maters (Columbia University is my Alma Mater), without any conditionality, without any strings attached. We should give money with the expression of our protestations against the secularization and drift towards collectivism. or withhold our money.

That was the reasonable advice of William F. Buckley, Jr. We observe now the dire consequences of not adopting this excellent advice. A man who does not stand in the way of evil and allows it, becomes an accomplice of that evil...So (re-) read "God & man at Yale" and draw your own conclusions.

This great book changed me from a conforming liberal in the 1970s to a free-thinking conservative. Buckley's expansive vocabulary and exquisite use of language is an education in and of itself. The principles of open-mindedness and conviction-based living are an important reminder for modern Americans struggling with issues of education against indoctrination, selflesness against self-centeredness, and freedom of thought against institutional group-think. If you have not read this definitive work of a great mind, read it now. If you, like me, read it long ago, you will find Buckley's words as renewing and refreshing as ever.