The late conservative icon William F. Buckley released God and Man at Yale in 1951, at age twenty-four. This polemic, released as Yale turned 250 years old, wielded the unique knowledge of a recent graduate to contend that that the Yale faculty were actively inculcating students in secularism while dismissing religion as “superstition”; that this malfeasance went far beyond mere open-mindedness (and that it would be undermining even if relativism were its end); and that Yale faculty were simultaneously indoctrinating students in an anti-capitalist economic ideology that threatened America’s system of limited government while instigating admiration for collectivism and ultimately, socialism.
By the time I was enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania in the 2000s, the notion that the “tenured radicals” comprising an ivy league faculty would so much as pretend to conceal their investment in secular orthodoxy—or profess anything other than collectivist economics (which they, of course, do not practice)—seemed implausible on its face.
By then, the venal bargain that Tyler Austin Harper lambastes in his recent essay in The Atlantic had long since been made, albeit in a less extreme form: influential faculty in the humanities and social sciences “discover” and “study” wild theories about race, sex, and gender—the crazier and more inexplicable to normal people the better—all while ratcheting up student debt and outsourcing ever more teaching to poorly paid adjunct instructors without benefits.
Yet meanwhile—at least during my time at Penn—most of the students, even the ones majoring in the humanities, intended to go into business or some other lucrative field anyway. The real goal was not self-sacrificial do-gooding or a restructuring of society to better serve the poor, but fluency in an esoteric, elite language in which to express the most sophisticated brand of virtue-signaling available.
“I believe that if and when the menace of Communism is gone, other vital battles, at present subordinated, will emerge to the foreground. And the winner must have help from the classroom.”William F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale [1951] https://t.co/ciHjFOkJZU
— Mark W. (@DurhamWASP) October 2, 2026
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