Sex, but not God, is welcome on campus.

• Author: Harden, Nathan
• Position: American Thought

IN 1951, William F. Buckley Jr., a graduate of Yale University the year before, published his first book, God & Man at Yale: The Superstitions of "Academic Freedom". In the preface, he described two ideas that he had brought with him to college and that governed his view of the world: "I had always been taught, and experience had fortified the teachings, that an active faith in God and a rigid adherence to Christian principles are the most powerful influences toward the good life. I also believed, with only a scanty knowledge of economics, that free enterprise and limited government had served this country well and would probably continue to do so in the future."

The body of the book provided evidence that the academic agenda at Yale was openly antagonistic to those two ideas--that Buckley had encountered a teaching and a culture that were hostile to religious faith and that promoted collectivism over free market individualism. Rather than functioning as an open forum for ideas, his book argued, Yale was waging open war upon the faith and principles of its alumni and parents.

Liberal bias at American colleges and universities is something we hear a lot about today. At the time, however, Buckley's expose was something new, and it stirred national controversy. The university counterattacked, and Yale trustee Frank Ashburn lambasted Buckley and his book in the pages of Saturday Review magazine.

Whether God & Man at Yale had any effect on Yale's curriculum is debatable, but its impact on American political history is indisputable. It argued for a connection between the cause of religious faith on the one hand and the cause of free market economics on the other.

In a passage whose precise wording was later acknowledged to have been the work of Buckley's mentor Willmoore Kendall--a conservative political scientist who was driven out of Yale a few years later--Buckley wrote: "I consider this battle of educational theory important and worth time and thought even in the context of a world situation that seems to render totally irrelevant any fight except the power struggle against Communism. 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."

This idea, later promoted as "fusionism" in Buckley's influential magazine National Review, would become the germ of the Ronald Reagan...