Man needs God at Yale

William F. Buckley

From Peter Berkowitz:

God and Man at Yale Turns 60 

By Peter Berkowitz

Yesterday the William F. Buckley Jr. Program, a fledgling student run organization at Yale University, held a one-day conference and gala dinner featuring distinguished conservatives—including a keynote address by William Kristol and remarks by Henry Kissinger, James Buckley, Priscilla Buckley, and Christopher Buckley—to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the publication of God and Man at Yale. This unusual happening suggests that much has changed at Yale since 1951 when the brash and brilliant twenty-five year old Buckley burst upon the national scene with his eloquent polemic against his alma mater’s educational policy. It also reveals how little has changed.

Buckley's seminal book laid bare the leftist and atheist indoctrination of students at Yale in the middle of the 20th century. He was quite specific, naming names, naming professors who took a hammer to Christianity and to traditional values of intellectual freedom and respect for reasoned discourse. The problem has certainly worsened since then, and of course not just at Yale.


At Columbia (my alma mater), the hard left/atheist ideology is still very much the default worldview. I was fortunate to have several wonderful humanities professors who took a balanced view of things, but a serious Christian (which I was not at the time) would have had quite a difficult time if he expressed his views in class. I was mocked in class for expressing conservative views (I was a serious conservative)-- my view that it was not morally right for Romans to kill sickly newborns was met with laughter from my classmates, and I was called "Rockefeller" for suggesting that the use of money was preferable to a barter system. This mockery of course came from students with trust funds. I was attending college on the G.I. Bill.


I can only imagine what the response would have been to a student who professed his faith in Jesus Christ, or who made an argument from an explicitly Christian viewpoint.


Berkowitz:

At the same time, it is a measure of how far liberal education at Yale must still be reformed that the Buckley program is entirely a student organization, that if it weren’t for Noble and a few other undergraduates, conservative voices would remain hard to hear on campus and conservative ideas would still be difficult to find in Yale’s curriculum.

Like their predecessors in 1951, the Yale faculty and administration in 2011 have been derelict in their duty to present students a well-rounded view of economics, morals, politics, culture, and religion. “The problems raised by God and Man at Yale, “as Buckley wrote in 1976 in the Introduction to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary edition, “are most definitely with us yet.”

Those problems, then as now, stem from Yale’s promulgation of an overweening but unacknowledged progressive orthodoxy. It is entrenched in the curriculum, promoted by unwritten but strictly enforced norms concerning what may and must not be said, and inscribed in the rules and regulations governing student life.

Much like Yale today, the young Buckley’s Yale was a place where it was easy to elicit outrage by proclaiming barely right-of-center conservative opinions, and difficult to raise eyebrows even by vociferously championing fringe left-wing claims and causes.

For contending that liberal education at Yale should be devoted to advancing the principles and practical foundations of liberty, Buckley was accused by his elders of fascism, compared with the Ku Klux Klan and Stalinists, and generally regarded as subversive by the Yale establishment. Inasmuch as he wished to overturn the established order at Yale, this last charge contained an element of accuracy.

Buckley’s critique of academic orthodoxy at Yale was all the more powerful—and all the more baffling to the zealous guardians of Yale’s academic orthodoxy—for his defense of freedom. How could one who condemned the relentless atheism of the curriculum, who lamented that “the University does not recognize religion as an indispensable field of study for an educated man,” and who wanted the university to sympathetically expound Christianity be anything but a religious reactionary?

And how could one who found in the Yale economics and political science departments a dogmatic commitment to collectivism or the centrally planned economy, who regarded the devotion to Keynes and the omission from the curriculum of Von Mises and Hayek as evidence of spectacular one-sidedness, and who believed that Yale had an obligation to teach appreciation of the achievements of capitalism and limited government be seen as other than an apologist for fat cats and an enemy of progress?

Nor did those exhaust Buckley’s sins against Yale’s academic orthodoxy. He deeply offended faculty sensibilities by insisting that alumni should play a major role in academic affairs, envisaging them as “ultimate overseers of Yale’s educational policy.” According to Buckley, Yale alumni—who, as they do today, footed a good deal of the cost of Yale—had the right, the power, and the duty to ensure that Yale lived up to liberal education’s proper goals.

Buckley knew that he would be accused of ignorance of or disdain for academic freedom. His powerful reply remains powerful today. A “laissez-faire education” that allowed professors to teach whatever they wished and students to study whatever they wanted, he declared, represented an abdication of standards. And the inculcation of secular and progressive values under the guise of the openness to all ideas constituted educational fraud.

Academic freedom, according to Buckley, was not license to do as one pleased in the classroom but liberty in the pursuit of the truth and in the attainment of an education for freedom. The pillars of freedom in America, he believed, were the free market economy, which encouraged industriousness and self-reliance by protecting private property, and Christianity, which provided the only secure foundation for belief in the dignity of the individual.

Buckley's masterpiece provides as much insight today as it was 60 years ago. We are further down the road of liberalism socialism progressivism and atheism in academia, and in many ways the fight to restore good traditional education is even more difficult. But conservatives and Christians are taking more focused and organized measures to improve education, and we owe much to Buckley for his eloquent plea.

This is a literary and ideological anniversary to celebrate.