In the fall of 1951, Yale University, proud member of America’s higher education elite, prepared to celebrate the 250th anniversary of its founding. Members of the Yale community looked forward to a joyous, yet placid, celebration. Little did they know that Yale was about to be rocked by a book that would begin the process of launching the American conservative movement.

William F. Buckley Jr. entered Yale in the freshman class of 1946. He had been brought up to be a free-market, individualist conservative. But things were different at Yale. There, Buckley battled what he saw as the pernicious liberal orientation of its students, faculty, and administration. Buckley did his best. He became a well-known student advocate of the conservative viewpoint and won a reputation as a skilled and witty debater. In addition, by 1949 Buckley won election as chairman of the Yale Daily News; his editorial blasts against liberals inside and outside Yale outraged and amused the university community. Buckley appreciated and enjoyed his opportunities. Yet he was troubled that liberalism seemed so dominant at Yale, which had a reputation for being conservative.

Yale also affected Buckley in another way. There he came under the influence of Willmoore Kendall, a brilliant and eccentric political scientist who promoted a theory he called “absolute majoritarianism.” Kendall argued that a society’s survival depended upon the existence of a “public orthodoxy,” which it must enforce and to which its members must adhere. If ideas were simply left to compete with each other, goodness and truth need not automatically emerge victorious. Instead, Nazism or communism might triumph, as the twentieth century demonstrated. Hence, society must protect itself against such dangers, even if that meant repressing the freedom of speech of (for example) communists. This theory proved to be a powerful influence upon Buckley, especially since he believed liberalism to be, in its own way, dangerous to America’s survival in a communist-infested world.

So, irritated by liberalism’s seeming domination, and under the influence of his mentor Kendall, soon after graduation Buckley began to write God and Man at Yale. Through quotations from Yale textbooks and classroom anecdotes, he argued that Yale was abandoning God and man and instead was inculcating its students with the equivalent of atheism and socialism. This was directly opposite to what Yale’s orthodoxy should be. The truth of Christianity and free enterprise, Buckley argued, had been established by history and tradition. Furthermore, God and economic liberty were clearly what the alumni of Yale desired as Yale’s “public orthodoxy.” And did not the alumni have a right to decide Yale’s destiny?

Buckley was challenging one of academia’s most sacred beliefs: academic freedom. But he wrote that academic freedom was only a “superstition.” Yale already had an orthodoxy—liberalism. Buckley was not urging the imposition of new standards, but rather the narrowing of those already existing. The alumni, as the purchasers and consumers of Yale’s product, and as the supporters of Yale through their contributions, deserved the same sovereignty as did the consumer in the marketplace. Thus, Buckley urged Yale to hire only those academicians who would teach this “orthodoxy.” Socialists and atheists could remain, provided that they taught what the alumni stipulated. If they would not, then Yale had the right to fire them. As Kendall might have said, the majority of alumni should rule Yale, not the liberal establishment in the faculty and administration.

The book was published by Henry Regnery of Chicago, one of only three recognizably conservative publishers in business in 1951. Regnery was barely solvent and only able to publish with the financial aid of Buckley’s father, William F. Buckley Sr. The book caused a sensation. It not only challenged academic freedom; it also championed individual liberty and the traditional value of religion and excoriated liberalism—ideas with great appeal to a growing conservative constituency in America. Hence, the book sold out its initial printing and within a few weeks reached sixteenth place on the New York Times bestseller list. While winning praise from most conservatives, God and Man at Yale received bitter denunciations from Yale’s administration, its faculty, and assorted liberals. Some dismissed the book as a manifestation of Buckley’s “militant Catholicism.” Others raised the specter of fascism. Yale trustee Frank Ashburn likened it to the “glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night.”

Yet its real importance lay in the book’s impact upon Buckley himself. It made William F. Buckley Jr. a leader in the conservative movement in America, sought out and respected by all on the Right. Within four years, he had founded National Review, assuming the role of becoming conservatism’s great popularizer. The reception of God and Man at Yale demonstrated to him that he could succeed in that task.

• Bramwell, Austin W. “The Revolt against the Establishment: God and Man at Yale at 50.” Intercollegiate Review 37, no. 1 (2001): 40–44.
• Macdonald, Dwight. “God and Buckley at Yale.” Reporter 6 (1952): 35–38.
• Nash, George. The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945. 2nd ed. Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 1996.