Picked up Buckley’s work while dropping off my son. Feel I should try to understand where the roots of the collegiate conservative movement started and digest some of the arguments. Anyone have any insights into a reading of his work? How it may relate to Yale today?
@tonymom - I’m a parent of a first year and asked my husband, who read a lot of Buckley in high school(!), if he could answer your question. Here’s his response:
“God and Man at Yale,” Buckley’s book about his experience as an undergraduate, is all but unreadable today. He seemed to have been upset that Keynesian economics was included in the economics curriculum and that atheists were tolerated by the administration. In the 60s and the 70s his contrarian views gained currency among students who found liberal/leftist political conformity to be stifling and humorless. (An understandable reaction.) In the 70s and 80s his traditional Catholic conservatism was turbocharged by the rise of libertarianism as an intellectual challenge to liberalism. And, of course, the outside money that has showered down and the post-college network positions that have been promised to talented campus conservatives hasn’t hurt. Whether traditional conservatives (read Catholics) and libertarians can continue their alliance on campus and elsewhere is an open question.
@worriestoomuch
THANKS! I’m only a few chapters in but I’m taking it more as a specific glimpse, historically speaking, of one man’s perceptions.
Your hubby’s take seems on point. Thanks!