In 1951, William F. Buckley, Jr.—then a newly minted 25-year-old Yale University graduate—published his historic God and Man at Yale, an indispensable founding document of modern American conservatism. In this, his first book, he argued that his long respected alma mater had, unbeknownst to the majority of its alumni, undergone a silent ideological revolution, while still presenting itself as the same institution it had been for generations. Yale performed this legerdemain, Buckley wrote, out of fear of alienating its alumni base, which was largely conservative and religious—an alumni base which had, for so long, been the university's institutional and economic support.
Yale, he said, had quietly compromised its long-held moral and religious convictions in the pursuit of fashionable, progressive philosophies, and in the process had betrayed its alumni who, per the Yale charter, were the ultimate oversight authorities of the university. The alumni were being surreptitiously duped, Buckley argued, into supporting a liberalized, secularized college administration that did not share their fundamental convictions.
An “extraordinarily irresponsible educational attitude,” in his words, had undermined an institution that was still customarily viewed as a redoubt of “triumphant conservatism,” as Time magazine had described Yale not long before God and Man at Yale went to print. Once the very image of Ivy League traditionalism, the university had changed since even 1937, 14 years before God and Man was released, when incoming president Charles Seymour, in his inaugural address, confidently called upon “all members of the faculty, as members of a thinking body, freely to recognize the tremendous validity and power of the teachings of Christ in our life and death struggle against the forces of selfish materialism.” Buckley's book, conversely, recounted numerous instances of radicalized professors mocking Christianity or excluding conservative economic ideas from the classroom in favor of Keynesianism.
Seymour's sentiments were echoed by Buckley himself, in what proved perhaps the most enduring, and controversial, line in his book. In the introduction to God and Man at Yale, Buckley famously declared: “I myself believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.” Encapsulated in that line was the philosophical alliance between social and economic conservatism that was to characterize the post-war Right for the next several decades. It expressed a basic conservative perspective on the “culture war” that still persists unabated in the West today, notwithstanding the shifts that have taken place in contemporary conservatism during the intervening decades.
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