“A CONSPIRACY SO IMMENSE”: THE NATIONAL COUNCIL FOR AMERICAN EDUCATION AND THE EDUCATIONAL REVIEWER

The ideas in God and Man at Yale evolved from, but shifted and mainstreamed, a conservative claim that America's educational system had been overrun by a treasonous conspiracy. These conspiratorial attacks had roots in a countersubversive tradition, developing since the late nineteenth century, which saw progressive and socialist ideals as an apocalyptic threat to the American way of life.Footnote ¹⁵ The most important leaders in the postwar attack on academic “subversion” were Allen Zoll, who ran the NCAE, and Lucille Cardin Crain, who edited the Educational Reviewer. Zoll and Crain found their base of support in an overlapping coalition of anti-New Deal businesspeople, fervent American nationalists, and anti-secular religious activists. This coalition is reflected in the NCAE's vaunted supporters, which included Robert Lund, former president of the National Association of Manufacturers; the Reverend Harllee Bordeaux, general secretary of the fundamentalist American Council of Christian Churches; and Marion Mansur, president of the Daughters of the American Revolution.Footnote ¹⁶ The CASBO, which lobbied against economic regulation, sponsored Crain's Educational Reviewer. Conservative Congressmen, Senators, and deep-pocketed benefactors offered support to Crain and Zoll's quest to expose educational subversives and overthrow the legacy of the New Deal. The NCAE and the Educational Reviewer, in their numerous publications, portrayed academic freedom as a scheme concocted to protect professors who aimed to destroy the nation from within. While the conspiratorial right's actual targets were typically liberal scholars upholding the social order that had emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War, the movement couched its calls to expunge textbooks and dismiss professors as part of a Cold War campaign to combat Communist subversion.

Zoll's National Council for American Education took it as an article of faith that subversive teachers and professors, acting on behalf of the Soviet Union, had infiltrated the American educational system on a mass scale. The organization's 1950 pamphlet How Red Are the Schools? presents an excellent example of such rhetoric. It paints a frightening picture of the “giant cancer” of educational “traitors” “threatening the life and security of every American.”Footnote ¹⁷ The conspiracy was subtle, organized, and poisonous. As its anonymous author observed, “the Marxist attempt to subvert our schools is the most dangerous force in America.”Footnote ¹⁸ The pamphlet blamed subversive educators for everything from rising rates of juvenile delinquency to declining social manners to, most ominously, a tidal wave of support for economic “collectivism.”Footnote ¹⁹ This latter threat was the worst because it risked destroying the free-enterprise system that had “made America great.”Footnote ²⁰ According to the pamphlet, the conspiracy's reach was massive. So much so that patriotic teachers were terrified to speak out. Given this reality, immediate “housecleaning” was necessary in both the schools and colleges. This political scrubbing of the nation's education system was to be deep and thorough. The aim was “to cause to be removed from the nation's schools and colleges all teachers, administrators, textbooks and supplementary reading that are un-American.”Footnote ²¹ Rather than harp on the country's supposed flaws or point out areas for reform, educators needed to teach about the greatness of American institutions. To this end, “Alien propagandists must be replaced with those who believe in and love America.”Footnote ²² The citizenry needed to rise up. Given the seriousness of the threat, which could lead to a worldwide totalitarian takeover, “effective measures must be taken at once to stop this trend, lest we be too late.”Footnote ²³ This provided the rationale for the many local campaigns to cleanse local school boards and colleges of material dubbed un-American.

One major roadblock for the NCAE was academic freedom. For this reason, the organization developed numerous attacks on the concept. The cover for its pamphlet, Three Important Articles on Academic Freedom, depicted a wild-eyed professor holding a massive Soviet flag.Footnote ²⁴ “Academic freedom” was written in large letters underneath the hammer and sickle. The word bubble coming out of the professor's mouth reads, “It is an outrage to ask any teacher to affirm his loyalty.”Footnote ²⁵ Besides its stark imagery, one of the pamphlet's approaches to undermining academic freedom, which Buckley would pick up in God and Man at Yale, was to argue that professors were simply employees, as in any other field. Their employers, who in the case of public universities were taxpayers, could fire them at will. As business expert W. H. Conant explained,

Conant, presaging a claim in God and Man at Yale, mocked the idea that presenting all sides of an issue – as professors sometimes defended their inclusion of controversial material – should be tolerated. In a section of the pamphlet that Buckley underlined, Conant argued that this would mean professors could say anything they wanted in their classes, including teaching their students how to lie.Footnote ²⁷ This proved, he believed, that high-minded ideas about professors’ freedom to teach as they saw fit were nonsensical. In an additional passage that Buckley highlighted, which prophesized a core argument of God and Man at Yale, Conant stressed that parents and community members had their own liberties that so-called academic freedom could not infringe upon. He speculated, “Perhaps we need an Anti-License League to resist the encroachments on OUR freedom to have our own offspring educated as we desire. Let us hope it will not require a great hue and cry of propaganda in behalf of Parental Freedom.”Footnote ²⁸ Apathetic citizens, the NCAE warned, must stand up to ensure that patriotism was taught in the schools, nothing less, nothing more. Academic freedom would no longer serve as a valid reason to promote “antireligious and anti-American falsehoods.”Footnote ²⁹ The taxpayers and sponsors that footed the bill for the country's schools and colleges would have their rights respected once more.

In 1949, the NCAE distributed its muckraking report, Red-Ucators at Yale University.Footnote ³⁰ The report was part of a series of guides that also targeted Harvard University and the University of Chicago. It claimed to provide evidence that thirty-five Yale professors had “157 affiliations with 62 communist fronts.”Footnote ³¹ Buckley carefully read the Red-Ucators report, underlining several sections, while preparing his own critique of Yale. The pamphlet illuminates the way that Buckley continued in the conspiratorial tradition, but also broke with it in subtle and consequential ways. He took the report's stated reluctance to go after liberals and leftists as his opening. As he prepared God and Man at Yale, he highlighted the following passage:

It was exactly those “other members” – liberals and socialists who supposedly disdained the American system of freedom – that Buckley would make the center of his book. The Cold War political climate made charges of subversion in Red-Ucators dangerous, but they could also be disproved.Footnote ³³ By focussing on the dangers of liberalism rather than Marxist subversion, Buckley avoided the most common pitfall of the conspiratorial argument – its obvious inaccuracies – while simultaneously exposing the liberal professors who were typically the actual targets of the populist right. The only other passage Buckley underlined also reveals how he would go beyond the earlier exposé. The Red-Ucators report observed that for all its flaws, Yale was probably the university doing the most to fight subversion. It noted, “In all fairness, it should be pointed out that, more than almost any other president of a large university, President Seymour of Yale has seemed to oppose un-American teachings.”Footnote ³⁴ This may be a reference to Seymour's famous declaration, “there will be no witch-hunt at Yale, because there will be no witches. We do not intend to hire Communists.”Footnote ³⁵ Buckley, by contrast, made it a central point of his book that Seymour was a major part of the problem. According to Buckley, Seymour provided a traditionalist “front” for the collectivist and irreligious reality of what was really happening in Yale's classrooms. It was figures like Seymour, more than a Communist plot, which threatened to corrupt the nation's college students from within. Buckley, by avoiding the “subversion” charge to instead focus on the dangers of academic liberalism, both widened the scope of the attack on higher education and made it seem more credible.

Like the NCAE's pamphlets, the Educational Reviewer provided a template and a built-in audience for the attacks Buckley would launch on academic freedom in God and Man at Yale.Footnote ³⁶ Published between 1949 and 1953, the journal examined textbooks for “collectivist” bias. Contributors presented themselves as valiant heroes struggling against an implacable foe that justified its transgressions through appeals to academic freedom. As the editors declared in their inaugural statement of principles: “The Educational Reviewer welcomes the hue and cry of ‘academic freedom’ … It will maintain that there is no right, under academic freedom, to work toward its destruction.”Footnote ³⁷ The journal ran articles by scholars, judges, and students, but its funding came from economic interests fundamentally opposed to the social order ushered in by the New Deal. The Conference of American Small Business Organizations served as its sponsor. The journal proudly noted that it was a “unique enterprise. It is the cooperative project of the business and academic worlds, initiated by a business group.”Footnote ³⁸ The Educational Reviewer’s secretary and editor, Lucille Cardin Crain, elaborated that the publication had been founded after an anonymous businessman from the Mid-west came home horrified to discover that his daughter, just returned from college, was full of “un-American doctrines.”Footnote ³⁹ This was in large part due to the economics textbooks she was assigned, which provided a “general condemnation of the system of which he is a part.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The opening issue quoted a resolution passed by CASBO, which claimed that a conspiracy of “Frontier Thinkers” had infiltrated the education system to promote economic collectivism.Footnote ⁴¹ The journal promised to scrutinize and expose textbooks for their un-American content.

In its reviews, any scholar who supported government intervention into the economy was pilloried as un-American. The same went for authors who drew attention to the need to combat economic or racial inequality. “Contemporary liberalism,” the Educational Reviewer warned, was “rooted historically in tyranny and slavery.”Footnote ⁴² Reviewers made it clear that professors should not be allowed to disparage the Constitution, call attention to class or racial inequality, show evidence for the viability of Keynesian economics, or make positive reference to the United Nations. The Educational Reviewer called for high schools and colleges to remove such content because of the way it supposedly followed Communist thinking. This was not “guilt by association,” but “guilt by collaboration.”Footnote ⁴³ In a review of Frank Magruder’s American Government, titled “Broadcasting Collectivist Propaganda,” for instance, economist Edna Lonigan noted that the text's “treatment of race and inequality of income follows the Communist party line. Poor people are always ‘underprivileged’ and ‘unfortunate.’”Footnote ⁴⁴ This was part of a “skillful ‘build-up’ … by propagandists for the Absolute State.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The Educational Reviewer provided many such examples of collectivist conspiracy, including works that downplayed the positive contributions by businessmen in American history; that argued that crime was not entirely determined by biology; that neglected to mention that child labor was often caused by lazy parents rather than greedy factor owners; that presented a mural painted by painter Diego Rivera in a discussion of Mexico; or even that included a drawing of a crowd, rather than individual faces, when explaining political-science concepts.Footnote ⁴⁶ One article, Roger MacBride's “What They Are Teaching Us,” directly foreshadowed Buckley's approach by reporting on what he considered the liberal indoctrination he recently experienced at his Westchester high school.Footnote ⁴⁷ MacBride complained that his teachers had cut him off from his Republican parents. They had instructed him to value collective bargaining and government programs such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, and to show respect for the “masses of underprivileged.”Footnote ⁴⁸ It took him strength, he explained, to turn back toward individual freedom. As other reviewers in the journal noted, only a firm hand could address the educational crisis represented by such teachers. Samuel J. Kornhauser, counselor of law, expressed sympathy for the ancient Athenian solution of the “hemlock cup,” but concluded that at the very least, subversive educators “should be driven from the teacher's platform.”Footnote ⁴⁹

In contrast to the un-American concepts that the Educational Reviewer claimed had overtaken the nation's schools and colleges, its contributors argued that students needed to be indoctrinated into a normative vision of America. This was made clear in its first issue, in which one reviewer proclaimed,

The superiority of American political institutions and its free-enterprise system needed to be continually instilled. To support this mission, the journal reported that Mr. W. T. Donkin, the president of Quality Springs, a manufacturing company in Michigan, had launched a competition for high-school students to write an essay on “What's Right with America?”Footnote ⁵¹ Donkin observed that with so much “negative” said about the United States, students should now be reminded that a much more accurate way to “sell” America to themselves and the world was the slogan of a “certain well known brand of soap” that had “advertised the fact it is 99 and 44–100 percent pure.”Footnote ⁵² The stakes were high. As one reviewer worried about contemporary college, “Those who enter humbly and with open minds come out bent upon ‘social control’ and their ‘learning’ will obliterate freedom from the earth.”Footnote ⁵³ The Educational Reviewer aimed to stop this conspiracy in its tracks, save liberty from destruction, and imbue students with respect for America's greatness.

The Educational Reviewer served as one of the most vocal supporters of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose anticommunist crusade also relied on the conspiratorial critique of academic freedom. In 1952, Crain reprinted a passage on education from McCarthy's autobiography that exemplifies the urgency of the conspiratorial analysis.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the editorial, McCarthy claimed that Communists in the United States government, and even the Soviet Union itself, posed less of a threat to “American and Western Civilization” than did the subversive educators who converted thousands of students into “wild-eyed radicals.” He claimed that Communist educational influence would only disappear if it was “scrubbed and flushed and swept clean, if the mothers and fathers, and the sons and daughters, of this nation individually decide to do this job.” He warned of the dangers inherent in this mission: “the task will not be a pleasant one. When you detect and start to expose a teacher with a Communist mind, you will be damned and smeared. You will be accused of endangering academic freedom.” He justified these attacks on academic freedom with an appeal that could have come right out of Zoll's pamphlets:

Crain's Educational Reviewer and Zoll's National Council for American Education achieved notable successes. Edna Lonigan's review of Magruder's American Government helped convince a number of school boards to remove the book, in use for decades, from their curriculums.Footnote ⁵⁵ The FBI, obsessed with the question of academic loyalty, carefully studied their publications.Footnote ⁵⁶ The men and women who sponsored, distributed, and contributed to the right-wing attack on academic freedom laid the groundwork for McCarthyism. They helped create a political movement that would have a lasting impact on American life long after the Senator for which it was named stepped down.

At the same time, the conspiratorial critique faced setbacks. In 1951, the Educational Reviewer suffered harsh criticism from the House Committee on Lobbying Activities, which asserted that the periodical's entire mission “smacks too much of the book burning orgies of Nuremberg to be accepted by thoughtful Americans without foreboding and alarm.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Financial difficulties forced Crain to cease publishing in 1953.Footnote ⁵⁸ The national press, meanwhile, began to report on Zoll's sympathy for Nazism, which led his influence to wane.Footnote ⁵⁹ In 1954, the Senate censured Senator McCarthy himself. The legacy of Crain, Zoll, and McCarthy's attacks on academic freedom, however, lived on. With a few modifications, William Buckley Jr. stepped in to fill the gap.

WILLIAM BUCKLEY JR. AND THE SUPERSTITIONS OF “ACADEMIC FREEDOM”

In God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom ”, Buckley built upon the conspiratorial critique but tweaked it sufficiently to make it accessible to a much wider audience. Published in 1951, the book launched Buckley's career as a conservative polemicist, set off a critical maelstrom, and unexpectedly made its way to the New York Times best-seller list. Scholars have noted Buckley's foundational impact on postwar conservatism, but tend to neglect way that the conspiratorial attacks on academic freedom helped frame God and Man at Yale. Not only did Buckley carefully read Crain and Zoll's work, his basic arguments – on the profound dangers of tolerating liberalism, skepticism, and academic freedom – were also nearly identical to their own. The only substantive distinction was that Buckley dropped the pretense that universities needed to be purged because of a foreign conspiracy. Instead, while keeping the same targets for firing as the hard right, he acknowledged that the true threat to higher education was academic liberalism. For all of God and Man at Yale’s exaggerations, Buckley's assertions appeared more reasonable because he dropped the conspiratorial account of massive Soviet educational infiltration. On a rhetorical level, unlike the conspiratorialists, whose language sometimes betrayed an unhinged quality, Buckley's patrician voice made the same claims sound merely provocative. Civil libertarian and Nation magazine contributor Carey McWilliams once accused liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. of speaking “the language of McCarthy with a Harvard accent.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Whatever the merits of that claim, much of the reason behind Buckley's success was that he was able to speak McCarthyism with a Yale accent.

One of God and Man at Yale’s central arguments was that the people who financially supported universities, rather than professors, should determine what was taught in them. This argument was a staple of the conspiratorial literature. It was Buckley's academic mentor, political scientist Willmoore Kendall, who helped provide it with intellectual heft. Kendall played an important role in guiding Buckley's thinking as he wrote God and Man at Yale.Footnote ⁶¹ By the time Buckley met him, Kendall was a conservative populist who disdained liberal intellectuals as elitists, fundamentally at odds with democratic principles.Footnote ⁶² This had not always been the case. Kendall, who had grown up poor in rural Oklahoma before earning a Rhodes scholarship, had once been a left-wing supporter of the Spanish republic, sympathetic to Trotskyism.Footnote ⁶³ He turned dramatically against the sectarian left after visiting Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. Combatting political vanguardism of any kind – whether Soviet, liberal, or even libertarian – became one of his chief intellectual missions.Footnote ⁶⁴ In his academic work, Kendall argued that majorities had values and interests that they had a right to protect against minorities who risked undermining them. This was the only way societies could reproduce themselves. While Kendall never completely dismissed individual rights, he did go so far as to argue that the ancient Athenians were essentially correct in executing the “revolutionary agitator” Socrates because his teachings threatened to undermine their “way of life.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Kendall argued that communities had the duty to limit individual liberties such as freedom of speech in the name of social cohesion.Footnote ⁶⁶ If one supports the liberal ideal of “viewpoint tolerance,” as did John Stuart Mill, Kendall argued, then, in the name of “rights,” one must logically allow for such nefarious ideas as anti-Semitism to proliferate.Footnote ⁶⁷ Kendall believed that majoritarianism, which he saw as the only legitimate way to make political decisions in a democratic context, was sure to offend intellectual elites who would see it as a threat to their authority.Footnote ⁶⁸ The attack on vanguards and the view that societies must maintain some sort of positive dogma against liberal tolerance, developed by Kendall, profoundly influenced Buckley's critique of academic freedom in God and Man at Yale.

In his autobiography, Buckley tells a story of a Yale faculty meeting in the early 1950s that illustrates Kendall's political temperament and how it related to his views on academic freedom. As his colleagues discussed McCarthyism's menace to academic freedom, Kendall sat silently for two hours until he stood up to recount a talk (in a vulgar attempt at African American dialect) he had had that morning with the black janitor:

Kendall made the case that even uneducated African Americans, whom he did not see fit for full citizenship rights, had a better sense of what to do regarding the Communist threat on campus than did most academics at Yale.Footnote ⁷⁰ This kind of majoritarian antielitist sentiment, which tacitly relied on white supremacy, would do much to inform Buckley's own work.Footnote ⁷¹

Buckley famously confessed (in a line that strongly suggested Kendall's influence) that he “should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”Footnote ⁷² Urbane, wealthy, and sophisticated to the point of caricature, Buckley repurposed the claims made by William Jennings Bryan during the Scopes trial that local communities, not educators, should determine educational content.Footnote ⁷³ Earlier conservative writers such as Albert Jay Nock and Irving Babbitt, who were disdainful of mass culture, had influenced Buckley, but unlike them he embraced populist rhetoric.Footnote ⁷⁴ Buckley's key insight was to recognize that conservatism could gain traction by positing a liberal elite – housed in academia, but also government bureaucracies and mass media – that was unaccountable to the whims of the American people.Footnote ⁷⁵

In God and Man at Yale, Buckley sought to undermine academic freedom as advanced by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) since its establishment in 1915.Footnote ⁷⁶ The AAUP's Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, which nearly every major university had signed on to by 1940, posits that academics enjoyed professional rights, most notably freedom of teaching and research.Footnote ⁷⁷ Since administrators, trustees, and parents lack relevant knowledge, these groups should not determine what counts as acceptable scholarship. This same goes for any other kind of outside interest, such as corporations, churches, or unions, who might try to exert influence on teaching and research. Only when universities refuse to establish dogmas, the AAUP asserts, can scholars discover new knowledge from which the public will ultimately benefit.

Building on the earlier populist critique, Buckley claims that the AAUP's definition of academic freedom is antidemocratic and self-serving, and threatens the security of the nation. The professionalism argument made on behalf of academic freedom, he argues, is in reality a self-serving justification for professorial license and the domination of a hegemonic elite. It is not at all surprising, he notes, that professors want total control over what they teach in the classroom because it works to their advantage. Professors simply cloak their self-interest under the guise of “academic freedom” and usurp the rights of parents, trustees, and alumni. The charge that academic freedom was self-serving and that professors should be treated the same as any other employees goes all the way back to the founding of the AAUP.Footnote ⁷⁸ One of Buckley's innovations was to make this critique central to conservative identity.

Buckley's definition of academic liberty was the opposite of the one put forward by the AAUP. He writes, “For in the last analysis, academic freedom must mean the freedom of men and women to supervise the educational activities and aims of the schools they oversee and support.”Footnote ⁷⁹ From this view, academic freedom should be about forcing professors to obey community standards, rather than allowing them the protection to challenge them. Buckley labels academic freedom a pernicious “superstition,” which allows a small coterie of professors to subvert the values of the community that employs them. Those who support universities have a right and a responsibility to control what is taught in the classroom, not a charmed circle of unaccountable university professors.Footnote ⁸⁰ He is convinced that Yale's economic backers have no idea what kind of education its students receive. He finds it amazing that “the institution that derives its moral and financial support from Christian individualists addresses itself to the task of persuading the sons of these supporters to be atheistic socialists.”Footnote ⁸¹ A conservative muckraker, Buckley writes God and Man at Yale as an exposé of the socialism and agnosticism that he claims are predominant not only at Yale, but in most American universities. The book is a call to arms for concerned Americans to take the college back from the unaccountable elite of liberal professors.

In God and Man at Yale Buckley does not defend the merits of Christianity and laissez-faire capitalism against their purported opponents; instead, as was the case with Zoll and Crain, he assumes their validity, and focusses on showing how professors deride them. Since Yale's students go on to exert enormous power in business and government, Buckley claims that the future of the United States depends on the values they learn at school. This is especially crucial during the Cold War because (in a line inserted by Kendall) “the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world … The struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.”Footnote ⁸² As with the conspiratorial critique, it seemed as though the fate of the free world itself hung in the balance.Footnote ⁸³

In his section on religion, Buckley laments the fact that professors refuse to preach the Gospel in the classroom. Religion courses invariably treat Christianity as any other academic discipline, objectively, as literature or ethical philosophy. According to Buckley, this reduces the Christian faith to the level of Greek mythology.Footnote ⁸⁴ He claims that it is unconscionable that the religion department contains agnostics aiming to foster doubt in their students. Buckley goes so far as to argue that all the humanities and social sciences should make their courses explicitly pro-Christian. Unless professors openly espouse the Christian faith, Buckley believes, the next generation of Yale alumni will be composed of committed atheists. He chides Yale's president Charles Seymour, whom Red-Ucators had praised for hunting Communists, for promoting Christianity in his speeches but doing nothing to “Christianize Yale.”Footnote ⁸⁵ In this way, Buckley's attack on higher education, while building on the conspiratorial works, actually goes further than they did in calling for restrictions on professors.

Not only is Yale uncongenial to Christians, but according to Buckley (repeating the concerns of the Educational Reviewer), it also treats proponents of the free market as pariahs. “Collectivists,” whom Buckley defines as anyone supporting government intervention in the economy, exercise almost total control over Yale's economics department.Footnote ⁸⁶ Buckley cites Yale's principal economics textbooks, used in dozens of schools across the nation, to show that they promote limitless deficit spending, steep progressive taxation, a large welfare state, and an end to the capital-gains exemption tax. These textbooks, Buckley complains, take strong “social” positions that have nothing to do with economics. They portray large corporations as predators whose excesses the government must tame. Buckley is convinced that these policies lead to political oppression. He is angered that professors ignore or dismiss free-market thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, whom he believes possess the closest thing to gospel truth that is possible in economics.Footnote ⁸⁷

While criticizing the permissive attitude that supposedly allows collectivism and atheism to flourish at Yale, Buckley simultaneously argues that academic freedom does not really exist. He points out that there are already many restrictions on what even a qualified and honest professor may teach. Since these restrictions are already in place, Buckley contends that the alumni may tighten them. The fact that Yale's president publicly announced that he would not knowingly hire a Communist, Buckley maintains, is obvious evidence of this fact.Footnote ⁸⁸ Racist biologists and antidemocratic political scientists abound in the world, he claims, but their values make them unacceptable to Yale's liberal faculty. Defenders of academic freedom pretend to promote tolerance, but in fact this tolerance does not extend to ideas beyond liberal bromides.Footnote ⁸⁹ Buckley argues that it is inevitable that professors have biases and that there is nothing wrong with espousing them in the classroom; only the content of these values must come from parents and alumni.

Taking on the AAUP's idea that knowledge only advances with open debate, Buckley argues that truth does not prosper in the free marketplace of ideas; instead, following Kendall, it only prospers when societies have it promulgated. The “lie” of fascism, Buckley maintains, took hold in Italy and Germany, even though they had been democracies in which freedom of expression flourished.Footnote ⁹⁰ He argues that forcing students to contend with many points of view promotes skepticism, which leads to inaction or even fascism. He claims that universities have a responsibility to inculcate in students the values that the community believes are closest to the truth. Since Buckley speculates that Yale's economic backers believe overwhelmingly in capitalism and Christianity, professors must encourage these values. Buckley admits that teachers should expose students to capitalism and Christianity's opponents – for example, Weber and Keynes – but only to deflate them. As Buckley suggested in a later essay, “Schools ought not to be neutral … Certain great truths have been apprehended; and those who disregard them fall easily into the alien pitfalls of communism, or fascism, or liberalism.”Footnote ⁹¹ The fact that Buckley lumps liberalism in the same category as communism and fascism is typical of his polemical style and also shows the influence of the conspiratorial worldview.

The upshot of Buckley's position on academic freedom, as he admits, is that Yale should fire many of its professors. According to Buckley, such dismissals would not infringe on professors’ rights in any way. It would only make them suffer the normal consequences of a free-market society; when there is insufficient demand for one's goods or services one is out of a job.Footnote ⁹² Anticipating objections that this system would impede the search for knowledge and entrench orthodoxies, Buckley argues that researchers, not professors, are responsible for discovering new truths. Colleges could open separate research institutes, where the pursuit of knowledge would not risk damaging susceptible college students. If these professors’ research findings clashed with their institutions’ educational dogma, however, Buckley notes that they should not be allowed in a classroom.Footnote ⁹³

Buckley never addressed how his essentially consumerist vision of higher education clashed with his absolutist views on promulgating the “truth.” He acknowledged that he would have no problem with a socialist college that condemned everything he valued – he just thought that those who supported socialism should sponsor such an institution themselves. Since Buckley believed that Yale's economic backers, by contrast, strongly supported free-market capitalism and Christianity, professors must encourage those values instead.Footnote ⁹⁴ This market-based approach, however, seems to support the very relativism that Buckley, following Kendall, is at pains to dismantle. This tension between consumer choice on the one hand, and the need to promote eternal truths on the other, was not a problem for Buckley's conservative readers, though. What they found in the book was vital support in the battle against a liberal academic establishment that systematically discriminated against everything in which they believed.

THE RIGHT REJOICES: CONSERVATIVE RESPONSES TO GOD AND MAN AT YALE

God and Man at Yale received dozens of reviews in media that ranged from newspaper tabloids to scholarly journals. Academic reviews were almost universally harsh. Capturing the tone, the Journal of Bible and Religion’s Vernon McCasland commented that the book was a “startling broadside by a recent graduate of Yale and could become the campaign pamphlet of a totalitarian movement to assume control of all American higher education.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Popular responses, however, were typically much more evenhanded. Even though Buckley's arguments were almost the same as those of Zoll and Crain, his rhetorical gifts helped provide him with much more traction in the national press. While the reviewers typically expressed reservations about Buckley's calls to reshape academic freedom, they also praised what they saw as his insightful contributions to the national conversation on higher education.Footnote ⁹⁶

The book also received mixed reviews from the people Buckley had assumed would rise up to demand change: Yale alumni. While some were “deeply disturbed” about Buckley's assertions of what was amiss at Yale (one complained of “Religious ideas that are nothing short of blasphemous. Economic and political ideas that would delight the heart of Stalin”), many others hated it.Footnote ⁹⁷ As one alumnus explained, Buckley was a “twisted young man – luckily only an unintelligent minority of Yale men swallow this kind of bilge.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Jewish alumni, with memories of Yale's anti-Semitic quotas only recently in mind, were particularly scathing regarding Buckley's proposals to “Christianize” Yale. As Robert Stein, Yale class of 1926, explained, “Frankly, I like a Yale where a Negro can become captain of the football team, where Jews are tapped for Senior Societies, where Academic Freedom is encouraged.”Footnote ⁹⁹ The book allowed Buckley to become an intellectual celebrity and conservative movement leader, but his core assumption that Yale alumni would rally to the causes of Christ and Capital was mistaken.

Buckley's charges against Yale would have a much more profound impact outside the university than within it. The book galvanized conservatives. The conspiratorial movement, with its base of support in local chambers of commerce, Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, and the American Legion, had tilled the ground for Buckley's success. These readers responded ecstatically to Buckley's work. That Buckley had avoided charges of Communist subversion, which helped the book achieve a hearing outside the confines of the hard right, did nothing to dampen support among militant conservatives. In fact, Buckley's supporters on the conspiratorial right often assumed that he had accused Yale of aiding and abetting Communists. One of the most favorable reviews of the book laying out this logic came from the American Legion's Firing Line magazine, which opined,

Buckley never corrected sympathetic reviews that asserted that his book exposed pro-Communist activities. As a supporter of McCarthyism and a political operative aiming to keep postwar conservatives unified, Buckley did not see the need to stress such distinctions.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The letters of support that Buckley received from the book's conservative readers demonstrate the way he helped inspire a movement to action. In response to God and Man at Yale’s publication, Howard Macdonald warned that defending academic freedom played “right into the hands of the evil geniuses in the Kremlin.”Footnote ¹⁰² Adolphe Menjou, the well-known actor, took to the airwaves after reading Buckley's book to attack the “monstrous myth of academic freedom.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Ohio industrialist Robert Donner, who had attended Yale in 1915, sent out hundreds of letters to alumni urging them to take back their university from Marxist professors teaching their students to hate America. For Donner, “those who criticize Mr. Buckley's book are either naive, mentally depraved, or members of the educational conspiracy against our Republic.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Buckley provided conspiratorial conservatives, who had been dismissed as an unsophisticated fringe, with an intellectual champion.

God and Man at Yale’s claim that conservatives suffered as victims of an academic conspiracy mobilized a postwar right that felt politically marginalized in an era of consensus liberalism. The book inspired student leader Bob Andelson to form a national organization of campus “MacArthur Clubs” that would be “ready to be activated at a moment's notice at every sign of left-wing college activity.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Baltimore's W. Fairfield Peterson, a self-declared “student of subversive activities,” distributed five thousand positive reviews of God and Man at Yale to local civic organizations such as the Kiwanis, Rotary Club, and Minute Women.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Frank R. Seaver, president of a company that made oil-drilling equipment, best summed up the rapturous response the book elicited from conservatives. He wrote to Buckley, “It seems to me as though this book has the opportunity to become the new Uncle Tom's Cabin of our second liberation.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Buckley would point conservatives, who felt marginalized by a liberal establishment, towards a promised land.

God and Man at Yale moved conservative Christians to action. Hardline evangelicals loved the book. J. W. Simmons, author of a work that claimed that modern science confirmed the literal truth of the Bible, heaped praise on Buckley for delivering “such ‘body blows’ to the faith-wrecking business going on in our public schools.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ A leader in South Carolina's Daughters of the American Revolution wrote to Buckley to tell him that he was a modern-day prophet. She hoped Americans would follow Buckley's advice by becoming “more intolerant.” This way, they would “have no traffic with these pagan … and new ‘broad-minded’ ideas” being taught in the schools.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Sergeant Lewis, a Yale alumnus troubled by the university's creeping path toward atheism, explained that “it disturbs me that when Christianity is defended at Yale, this same gentry hollers that academic freedom is under attack.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Lewis continued, “Shall Yale return to the aggressive and exclusive indoctrination of Christianity? Will Yale be Christian? I submit arguments why the answer should be yes.”Footnote ¹¹¹ If Yale failed to heed the book's message, one reader even promised that he could help make Buckley, a Catholic, the president of Missouri's evangelical College of the Ozarks.Footnote ¹¹²

This reception among Protestants reveals a shifting religious and academic landscape rife with ironies. Yale's official response to the book relied heavily on anti-Catholicism. In this way, Yale administrators could position their strategic transition towards the secularism of the modern university and its academic freedom as a defense of Protestant values against Catholicism. Yale's president, A. Whitney Griswold, in a typical missive regarding the book, bluntly concluded that Buckley's “attack on academic freedom” arose from the fact that he was a “militant Catholic” who wanted to “control our curriculum in line with papal encyclicals.”Footnote ¹¹³ At the same time, the Catholic press dismissed God and Man at Yale for its free-market proselytizing, which opposed papal social teachings. As one Catholic publication noted, “Now it is surely quite obvious that Christ and Adam Smith have very little in common.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ In their attack on the secularization that had accompanied the development of the modern university, conservative Christians themselves had begun to change. The historic cleavages between Catholics and Protestants, which had long divided American churchgoers, started to seem insignificant compared with the leviathan of the secular establishment and its pernicious doctrine of academic freedom.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Buckley's book opened the floodgates to other conservative works attacking academic freedom, which he would promote after founding National Review in 1955. Two of the most notable, Felix Wittmer's Conquest of the American Mind: Comments on Collectivism in Education and E. Merrill Root's Collectivism on the Campus: The Battle for the Mind in American Colleges, returned to the conspiratorial position that Soviets had deeply infiltrated American higher education. Root argued that the conspiracy was so powerful that even mentioning it opened one up to a “witch-hunt,” “pogrom,” and “inquisition.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ From his perspective, Communist conditioning explained why liberals continued to support causes that benefited the Soviet Union, such as world peace, civil rights, academic freedom, and federal aid to education.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In one analogy, Root asserted that “certain insects lay their eggs in the living flesh of other insects: their larvae, hatching within their hosts, feed on them until they kill them, then break forth to live their own lives. So Communists function in the academic world.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ For his part, Wittmer argued that Communist professors, under the guise of progressive education, had “almost completed the indoctrination of America with un-American concepts.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ As part of his efforts to combat this trend, Wittmer ran a conservative club for students at Montclair State Teachers College, which met weekly to discuss the Soviet threat, petitioned national hotel chains to boycott Communist fronts, and painted signs such as “drive the Communist rats off the campus.”Footnote ¹²⁰ For all the surface distinctions between God and Man at Yale and the conspiratorial critique, Buckley still wrote a generally favorable review of Collectivism on the Campus in the National Review.Footnote ¹²¹ As the magazine's editor, he also gave Root the opportunity to offer glowing praise for Wittmer's Decline of the American Mind (Root compared the book's significance to that of Emile Zola's “J'Accuse”).Footnote ¹²²

Buckley also published the voices of traditionalist conservatives who opposed the idea of repealing of academic freedom, but even these voices, such as traditionalist Russell Kirk, typically despised academic liberalism, philosophical pragmatism, and educational utilitarianism much more than they did threats to higher education from the right.Footnote ¹²³ For all of Kirk's detached elitism, for instance, he supported federal investigations into Communist subversion on campus and had no problem sitting on a committee with Root, chaired by Lucille Cardin Crain, to analyze textbooks for their un-American content.Footnote ¹²⁴ The right was united in their disdain for the postwar university and the liberalism they saw it representing.