Buckley and Academic Freedom
What is Education for?
In a recent article “Universities are Not the Enemy” at National Review, Buckley fellow Kayla Bartsch writes despairingly about the attack on the University by the National Conservatives and Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance. She references the “vitriol spewing from the New Right” as a “dangerous trend,” arguing that National Conservatives are “more interested in demagoguery and authoritarianism than in the preservation of liberal education.” Liberal education is defined here as “true liberal education — ‘liberal’ as in ‘the basis of a free society’ — fosters critical thinking, the ability of an individual to think for himself, while it familiarizes the student with the underpinnings of Western civilization.”
In that article, Bartsch references the founder of National Review, William F. Buckley Jr., and his first book, the bestseller and controversial God and Man at Yale (missing the all important subtitle to the book, The Superstitions of Academic Freedom). She summarizes Buckley’s purpose in God and Man at Yale as criticizing his “alma mater for embracing leftist ideas at the expense of real education,” but only being an incrementalist who wanted his college reformed “because he still loves the essence of the place and his experience there.” Bartsch contrasts what she calls “Buckley’s paternal concern for Yale” from the “right -wing wrath of the NatCons, who believe our elite universities are beyond repair and must be dismantled.”
Bartsch quotes Vance’s speech from the November 2021 National Conservatism conference, entitled, “The Universities Are the Enemy:”
“That is the fundamental problem of American truth and knowledge. Today we have created a system where to work in the modern economy, to live a middle-class life, you have to go to a university. That is what our elites tell our young people. And yet, at those universities, they are told that working with your hands is looked down upon. They are told that America is a fundamentally racist and evil country.”
Vance’s argument was that the universities are a key institution in our society which control what we call truth and falsity, provide research, and give “credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas” in our society. Vance too provides a definition of the purpose of the University, saying that they provide for the dissemination of knowledge and truth in our society and to train “young minds to think in innovative and thoughtful ways about the problems we’ll experience because no society can fully anticipate or appreciate what’s about to come around the corner.” He believes that “we must aggressively and honestly attack the Universities in the United States.”
The National Conservative critique of the university is not anti-intellectual anymore than Buckley’s. For one, other National Conservatives do not merely call for “dismantling” by “right-wing wrath,” but a deep reformation of education and its purposes in American society. Take, for instance, Scott Yenor, who argues that Leo Strauss showed decades ago the faults of progressive and liberal education and how they spurred American students towards nihilism, decadence, and oikophobia. He recommends in its place classical, Christian education, suggesting that liberal education
“culminates in a concern for enduring questions, while Christianity answers many of those questions, dogmatically. Liberal education culminates in philosophy, something arguably in tension with how citizens and believers live. Liberal education as it often appears in the West today is not consistently an enemy of the open society that is nothing but modern nihilism with a happy fact and a tweed coat or skirt.”
The general tenor of thinkers among National Conservatives is not reprobate and pugilistic attacks, but well considered ruminations on the Crisis of the West and the need for classical and Christian education. Ben Dunson’s observation that much of the crisis was brought on by the Supreme Court’s 1960s decisions to remove school prayer and basic Christian moral teaching in the classroom is entirely in line with the long-held views of Buckley and his magazine who spent decades decrying the removal of school prayer.
As to Buckley, he did not merely criticize Yale, but called for Yale alumni to withhold financial support until Yale stopped undermining student faith in Christianity. Buckley famously made clear that, in words suggested by his Yale mentor Willmoore Kendall, that 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.” As his subtitle suggested, academic freedom was a particular target, with Buckley writing that he believed it to not be a sacred value, but a “hoax,” as it was an
“indisputable fact that most colleges and universities, and certainly Yale, the protests and pretensions of their educators and theorists notwithstanding, do not practice, cannot practice, and cannot even believe what they say about education and academic freedom.”
Further, academic freedom he thought was used as a tool when advantageous, but otherwise decisions about what to teach and publish was the product of an orthodoxy of acceptable opinion and any proclaimed toleration for opposing points of view was a “sonorous pretension” to hide the orthodoxy which was biased against Christian conservatism.
The counter-revolutionary character of Buckley’s screed against his alma mater was made clear by the contemporaneous reaction by Yale. Yale employed the services of one of its most famous contemporary intellectuals, McGeorge Bundy, to take down Buckley. Bundy was unsparing, calling Buckley a “violent, twisted, and ignorant young man,” while also calling attention to what he deemed the “honesty” of Buckley’s methods and the “measure of his intelligence.” Yale also put together a blue-ribbon committee chaired by Sloane Coffin, a former president of Union Theological Seminary. Coffin represented the anti-Catholic reaction, suggesting Buckley should have “attended Fordham or some similar [Catholic] institution.”
Frank Ashburn of the Brooks School called Buckley “Torquemada, reincarnated” and charged that the book “stands as one of the most forthright, implacable, typical, and unscrupulously sincere examples of the return to authoritarianism that has appeared.” Ashburn went on: “Under the guise of liberty it attacks freedom; under the guise of knowledge it denies the privilege of free investigation and dissent; under the guise of defending capitalism and religion it uses the technique of Dr. Goebbels.”
A reason for the charge of authoritarianism was Buckley’s attack on academic freedom. He not only suggested Yale alumni should exercise control over the teaching at Yale but argued pure academic freedom did not exist and truth did not always win out in the “marketplace of ideas.”
Buckley’s response was not to placate his most fervent critics. National Review launched on November 19, 1955, and one of Buckley’s earliest columns in December was on academic freedom, concerning a defense of it commissioned by Columbia University. Buckley suggested that given the sneering tone of the professor’s defense of academic freedom, the community may “well begin to challenge much more than the ideological orientation of some of our academic elite. The community may ask, reasonably, just where the evidence lies that our elite are equipped to discipline themselves even with respect to technical matters involving the canons of sound scholarship.”
Soon after, National Review launched its own research project aimed at determining whether academic freedom, defined as the “sense of an objective recitation of facts and value alternatives,” is in fact practiced in American Universities or whether “academic freedom” was serving “as a cloak behind which indoctrinators in contemporary Liberalism take cover.” Buckley and his editors received data from all over the country and shared the results in the magazine, which suggested that Buckley’s findings in God and Man concerning the purposeful teaching of socialism, economically and politically, as a positive good over Christianity and the free enterprise system were widespread.
In October 1957, the magazine’s Editors argued as to academic freedom, Americans had to understand that there were two kinds: the liberal sense and the traditional one. They noted that,
“The former, which insists that a university is a place where all points of view can be accommodated, where no one can get into trouble for what he thinks unless besides thinking it he “conspires” on behalf of it, is what Plato called a ‘true falsehood’—that is, a lie in the soul about reality. There can be no such place, and even if there could be such a place it ought not be allowed to exist. The educational theories that underlie the ‘academic freedom’ appropriate to such a place are both wicked and false. By insisting that all ideas must be tolerated, a situation is automatically generated in which true ideas get persecuted as a matter of course; by wedding the untruth that no man has any business calling another man wrong, those theories render inevitable the university’s divorce from all men who love the Truth.”
Around the same time, in a column entitled, “Here Lies the Empty Mind,” Buckley himself made a similar argument, stating simply that the broad question before us was, “What should be our attitude toward Communists in the classroom, under a system of Academic Freedom? That question cannot be answered without asking the prior question. What is the purpose of education, in which academic freedom figures only procedurally (education, not academic freedom, being the important thing)? It is my view that so long as academic freedom takes the implied position that all ideas are equal, or that all ideas should, in the student’s mind, start out equal, it is a dangerous and essentially anti-rational concept.” Buckley’s argument makes clear he rejected the Holmsien-libertarian view of freedom of speech broadly. As he put it towards the end of his life in 2005,
“At a non-academic level, the doctrine of the absoluteness of free speech is running into the community that wishes to restrain the incidence of smut on TV….A confinement of the First Amendment to civilized standards depends, ultimately, on compartmentalization.” True freedom required the acknowledgement of limitations.
In an address to the Council for the Advancement of Small Colleges in September 1966, Buckley discussed the “Aimlessness of American Education.” He opened by noting that most of our educators did not know what education is, even if they knew what it was not, and the “principal reason why they do not know and cannot know is that they are restrained from seeking educational ends by a mystique, academic freedom” which was as anti-intellectual and destructive as the “precepts of progressive education.”
Buckley reiterated 15 years after the publication of God and Man the need to reject the “superstitions of academic freedom” by understanding that there was a difference between a right of the researcher to pursue knowledge without legal hindrance and the notion that it constrained institutions from firing teachers who devote themselves to “undermining the premises of the school at which he teaches, or the society in which he lives.” Buckley, as he had in his columns and God and Man, attacked the liberal notion of “neutrality,” calling the idea “voodoo” because the “aims of education are to forward knowledge and right conduct–at the expense of some points of view.”
The liberal idea of academic freedom was conceived, he said, as a “permanent instrument of doctrinal egalitarianism: it is always there to remind us that we can never know anything for sure–which I view as another way of saying we cannot really know what are the aims of education.” All this, Buckley understood, was “intellectual and moral futility,” as standards were required to have any real theory of education and purpose in life. The conservative vision of education was one in which educators “pass on the truths that have been discovered and endow students with the knowledge of the processes by which these truths are recognized as such.” Buckley understood that to do so was to endow students with the “powers of ethical and rational discrimination by which to discern and give their allegiance to the great certitudes of the West” and to “discharge truly the responsibilities that face them as the result of changing conditions.” Finally, he rejected the notion that this conservative theory of education advocated “indoctrination,” which he saw as a “devil word, with lots of power left in it to tyrannize over any discussion of academic theory.” It was used, Buckley said, to avoid the reality that it was nearly impossible for individuals to be entirely neutral, just as it was for any college department or college itself, and thus “indoctrination” in the sense of urging one doctrine over another was a constant reality.
Bill Buckley at 40 does not sound much different from Vance at 37. Neither did the younger Bill who debated James Wechsler in April 1959 on the question, “Should Liberalism Be Repudiated?” Buckley was succinct and biting:
“Democracy has no eschatology, no vision, no point of arrival, Neither does academic freedom. Both are merely instruments, the one supposed to induce a harmonious society, the second supposed to advance knowledge. But let me say that I, for one, would not willingly die for ‘democracy,’ any more than I would willingly die for ‘academic freedom.’I do understand the disposition to die for the kind of society democracy sometimes ushers in; and I do understand the disposition to die in behalf of some of the truths academic freedom may have been instrumental in apprehending. There is the difference.”
Buckley was joined by others at National Review in this scathing critique of the academy and academic freedom, pursuing a conservative pedagogy in the university, including his mentor at Yale Willmoore Kendall and NR contributor and NYU professor Ernest van den Haag. Van den Haag, along with the NR editors, defended faculty and student loyalty oaths in the 1960s. They advocated for legislation which would prohibit attendance by anyone engaged in attempting to destroy the institution he or she attends, believing this would protect true academic freedom. Van den Haag wrote that this must be done “without relying too much on the academic authorities, who have demonstrated a remarkable suicidal bent.” He added that while “Institutions that wish to keep students who try to destroy them should remain free to do so,” the government should not be compelled to continue subsidizing them.
The recommended legislation was broad–it would have required that any institution receiving federal aid must suspend “any student found guilty, by any court of law, of any violation intended to interfere with the normal activities and procedures of an instructional institution—e.g. unlawful entry or occupation of offices, grounds, buildings or classrooms; sequestration of property or persons; assault; disruption or obstruction of classes, research activities or office activities.” Were such a proposal floated by National Conservatives today, one can easily imagine how aghast and bewildered right liberals would be, seeing federal overreach and “authorianism” rather than the just use of authority to save American universities from their suicidal impulses.
This is just a sampling of the rich discourse from the best thinkers the mid-century conservative movement had to offer, many of whom have now reduced and flattened into useful prisms for a right liberalism more interested in halting any defense of a true conservative vision of education by defending institutions whose rot goes back as far the post-war period if not earlier. American conservatives should feel no mission to save liberal education anymore than they should feel conservatism must be attached to liberalism itself. If the universities, creatures of the community and state, are determined to no longer defend Western civilizations and its Christian traditions, morality, and ontology, but to programmatically and pedagogically assault them, then the war was started long ago. Mr. Vance and the National Conservatives were, like their forebears Mr. Buckley and his intellectual allies, merely recognizing who the enemy was and is.
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