What about William F. Buckley Jr.’s first foray into the political scene remains relevant to us today?
William F. Buckley Jr.
Jack Ehlert
Staff Writer, The Buckley Beacon
Seventy-five years ago, when God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom” was first published, its author was barely a year out of Yale College. As a member of Skull and Bones, the Chairman of the Yale Daily News, and a debater in the Yale Political Union and Yale Debate Association, this Yalie was destined to make a splash in the public scene. But no one could have predicted just how immediate and far-reaching that splash would be.
The man in question is, of course, none other than William Frank Buckley Jr., YC ‘50, namesake of both this publication and the Buckley Institute.
Born in 1925 in New York City the son of a wealthy oil developer and one of ten children, Buckley moved around frequently during his adolescence, coming of age in America, France, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. After a few years serving as a second lieutenant during World War Two, Buckley arrived at Yale in the fall of 1946.
Aside from engaging in what his biographer Sam Tanenhaus called “extracurricular hyperactivity,” as an undergraduate, Buckley studied political science, history, and economics. His acquaintance with these subjects in Yale’s undergraduate curriculum would go on to inform the central arguments of God and Man at Yale.
In the book, Buckley argued that his alma mater, a historically Christian and American university, has become an institution that actively subverts Christianity and free market individualism, and instead promotes secularism and economic collectivism under the guise of “academic freedom.” Buckley’s response to the crisis he perceived at Yale is to encourage her alumni, the majority of whom Buckley presumed to be Christians and supporters of free market economics, to withhold financial support of their alma mater until she course-corrects.
“If the majority of Yale graduates believe in spiritual values and in individualism,” Buckley wrote, “they cannot contribute to Yale so long as she continues in whole or in part to foster contrary values.”
In making his argument, Buckley pulled no punches. He opens the book by going through each department at Yale and commenting, professor by professor, on the values being promoted in the classroom. Of one professor in the Sociology Department, for example, Buckley wrote, “To my personal knowledge, he thus subverted the faith of numbers of students who, guilelessly, entered the course hoping to learn sociology and left with the impression that faith in God and the scientific approach to human problems are mutually exclusive.”
Buckley critiques “academic freedom” as illusory, in spite of the Yale administration’s claim to eschew orthodoxy of any form. “In short,” Buckley wrote, “I maintain that sonorous pretensions notwithstanding, Yale (and my guess is most other colleges and universities) does subscribe to an orthodoxy: there are limits within which its faculty members must keep their opinions if they wish to be ‘tolerated.’”
To illustrate this point, Buckley observes that in no world would Yale hire a sociologist “who lectured about the anthropological superiority of the Aryan” or a political scientist “who openly scorned democracy as a weary, unintelligent, untenable, pernicious political system.” Buckley’s point is not that Yale should hire academics such as these, but rather that Yale, already in its hiring practices, does not subscribe to the absolute academic freedom it purports to champion.
“My task becomes, then, not so much to argue that limits should be imposed, but that existing limits should be narrowed,” he wrote. For Buckley, this narrowing should lead to the hiring primarily of Christians and economic individualists to the Yale faculty.
Understandably, Buckley’s message was not well-taken by everyone, particularly those working in Yale’s administration.
Yale’s then freshly-appointed president, the history professor Alfred Whitney Griswold, formed a committee to investigate Yale’s “intellectual and spiritual welfare” that expeditiously pronounced that faculty were in no way trying to “indoctrinate students at Yale with subversive theories.”
Despite neither President Griswold nor the committee officially calling Buckley out by name, the administration’s staunch opposition to Buckley’s indictment, and his proposed solution, was more than clear. As Neal Freeman, former director of the Buckley Institute, later remarked, “Bill quickly became, with the publication of God and Man, Yale’s designated apostate.”
Even some conservatives, despite perhaps agreeing with Buckley’s moral and economic convictions, criticized Buckley’s methodologies. Writing in the pages of The Atlantic, McGeorge Bundy, who would go on to become Harvard’s youngest Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and later a National Security Advisor during the Vietnam War, opined, “God and Man at Yale… is a savage attack on that institution as a hotbed of ‘atheism’ and ‘collectivism.’ As a believer in God, a Republican, and a Yale graduate, I find the book is dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory, and a discredit to its author and the writer of its introduction.” Citing Buckley’s use of “quotations and misquotations” and his over-reliance on anecdotal evidence, Bundy proclaimed, “This method is dishonest.”
Bundy further criticized Buckley for “urging alumni control of Yale’s educational policy,” comparing the devout Catholic’s stance to the position “that the religious teachings of the Roman Catholic Church should be dictated to the Pope by the Roman Catholic laymen who pays his bills.”
Ultimately, whether or not one agrees with Buckley’s position, it cannot be denied that God and Man at Yale marked the beginning of an enormously influential career. Between founding the prominent conservative magazine National Review in 1955 and hosting more than thirty seasons of nationally televised Firing Line debates, Buckley’s career would go on to reshape American conservatism in the second half of the twentieth century.
In the words of the American writer and political commentator George Will, “Without Bill Buckley, no National Review. Without National Review, no Goldwater nomination. Without the Goldwater nomination, no conservative takeover of the Republican Party. Without that, no Reagan.”
So, seventy-five years later, where does Buckley’s God and Man at Yale leave us today?
The Buckley Institute’s self-described mission is “to promote intellectual diversity and freedom of speech at Yale University.” After reading God and Man at Yale, I have to wonder what Buckley would have thought of this. Certainly, Buckley would have approved of the Buckley Institute’s “aim to… provide a home for enlightened conservative thought” at Yale, but would he have supported the Buckley Institute’s commitment to what he might call “the superstition of ‘academic freedom?’”
Yale’s April 2026 Committee on Trust in Higher Education report references both God and Man at Yale as well as the Buckley Institute, calling the free speech organization an “exception” to the rule of “classes and communities at Yale where [conservative students] felt their perspectives were not welcomed or respected.”
Presumably, Buckley would be pleased to see the Yale administration recognizing the issue of left-leaning “intellectual and ideological conformity,” but, at the same time, it is difficult to say whether Buckley would oppose ideological conformity per se. Suppose, for instance, that Yale had become a hub of conservative, rather than liberal, conformity; I doubt whether Buckley would view this as a problem at all.
While most people today, myself included, will likely find Buckley’s opinions on academic freedom uncomfortable— after all, Yale is no longer a Christian university but a secular one— there nonetheless remains a Buckley-esque argument to be made in support of increased undergraduate course offerings that engage with the Christian tradition at Yale.
As has been brought to recent national attention by Slate, and First Things, Yale’s most popular history course last spring was Professor Carlos Eire’s “The Catholic Intellectual Tradition,” and his seminar this fall, “Readings in the History of Christian Thought,” far exceeded its capacity for enrollment during registration.
But, as Jeth Fogg noted last month, the future of Christian, and particularly Catholic, intellectual life at Yale is nonetheless uncertain going forward. “Eire will be on leave during the Spring 2027 semester,” Fogg wrote, “and one must wonder what Catholic intellectual life looks like at Yale after his retirement.”
Clearly, student demand exists for courses such as those taught by Eire, but the question remains— how will Yale respond?
Buckley’s argument about alumni influence, meanwhile, has taken on new relevance amidst the ongoing battle between our nation’s elite universities and the federal government.
As Greg Fournier recently observed in The Dispatch, “[God and Man at Yale] provides an intellectual blueprint for the recent Republican campaign against higher education.” Rather than alumni threatening to withhold funding on ideological grounds, as Buckley envisioned, it is instead the federal government.
Though Yale has been largely, but not entirely, immune to federal funding cuts thus far, the federal government continues to put pressure on the Yale administration. After issuing a letter condemning the use of race in the Yale School of Medicine admissions process, the Department of Justice has expanded its investigation to include both Yale Law School and Yale College.
While the future of this investigation remains uncertain, one might imagine Buckley supporting the federal government’s skepticism towards America’s elite institutions of higher learning. At the same time, however, it was alumni’s private donations, not the federal public money, that Buckley urged to take action.
It is not clear whether Buckley, a lifelong and fervent advocate for limited government, would support an intervention from Washington, despite sharing the Trump administration’s goal of promoting a greater conservative presence among university faculties.
While we can’t really know what Buckley would have said about Yale today, his question— what is an elite university really for, and who gets to decide?— remains as alive now as it was seventy-five years ago.