{"id":147805,"date":"2026-10-06T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=147805"},"modified":"2026-10-06T15:12:05","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T19:12:05","slug":"pd-god-and-man-at-yale-at-75","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=147805","title":{"rendered":"(PD) Elizabeth Matthew–God and Man at Yale at 75\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The late conservative icon William F. Buckley released God and Man at Yale<\/em> 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 \u201csuperstition\u201d; 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\u2019s system of limited government while instigating admiration for collectivism and ultimately, socialism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the time I was enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania in the 2000s, the notion that the \u201ctenured radicals\u201d comprising an ivy league faculty would so much as pretend to conceal their investment in secular orthodoxy\u2014or profess anything other than collectivist economics (which they, of course, do not practice)\u2014seemed implausible on its face. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

By then, the venal bargain that Tyler Austin Harper lambastes in his recent essay<\/a> in The Atlantic<\/em> had long since been made, albeit in a less extreme form: influential faculty in the humanities and social sciences \u201cdiscover\u201d and \u201cstudy\u201d wild theories about race, sex, and gender\u2014the crazier and more inexplicable to normal people the better\u2014all while ratcheting up student debt and outsourcing ever more teaching to poorly paid adjunct instructors without benefits.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet meanwhile\u2014at least during my time at Penn\u2014most 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.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>

\u201cI 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.\u201d\n\nWilliam F. Buckley Jr., God and Man at Yale [1951] https:\/\/t.co\/ciHjFOkJZU<\/p>— Mark W. (@DurhamWASP) October 2, 2026<\/a><\/blockquote>\n