Ever since the publication of William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale in 1951, conservatives have had a strong love-hate relationship with universities and higher learning.
On the one hand, they have railed against the constant drift of universities away from their religious and elitist roots. From the increasing epistemological agnosticism in Buckley’s time to the cultural radicalism of the sixties, from the (ultimately lost) canon wars of the eighties to the fight against “wokery” and political correctness in our time, a whole cottage industry of jeremiads and critiques has poured forth from conservative magazines and books to point to a laundry list of problems in higher education.
On the other hand, most conservative elites — especially traditional conservatives, who fight for more than just free markets, and the dreaded neocons of old — have always treasured learning and knowledge. It is no accident that most conservative thinkers and authors are university-trained, many of them with advanced degrees — often from some of those same universities they afterwards attack. Nor have they shunned making use of knowledge procured by university scholars when it supports their arguments simply because it came from the ivory tower.
Thus, for decades, conservatives tried to maintain something of a balance — cherishing the knowledge produced by universities while reproaching them for failing to live up to traditional standards of learning and enlightenment, sometimes more temperately and sometimes less so.
Until now.
Read Full Article »
