January 12, 2019
God and Man at Yale,
William F. Buckley, Jr.’s first book, was written in 1951, shortly
after he graduated from Yale University.
It has been the blueprint for conservative criticisms of
higher education ever since.
And it is a terrible book.
It is awful not because I disagree with his conclusions
(though I fervently do), but because of the intellectually
deplorable ways in which he arrives at them.
Buckley is guilty of some of the worst crimes of rhetoric
over reason, logical malfeasance, and purposeful manipulation of his
readers, in other words, sophistry, as I have ever experienced in a
book of its reputation.
Buckley has two main thrusts.
First, that our general support of a liberal education, where
students are taught how to think rather than what to think, is
misguided and should be replaced by a system setting and enforcing a
narrow scope of ideological and theological views as determined by a
majority of the alumni of each specific university.
Second, that Yale should adopt this approach to enforce an
orthodoxy of conservatism and Christianity.
Buckley’s two most cherished views, that Christianity and
conservative economic policies lead to the good life, are simply
given as true. His
readership is assumed to accept these as facts and his goal is to
then lead the reader to his conclusions about educational theory.
How Buckley arrived at his views is never discussed, but we
can examine God and Man at
Yale to see how he tries to steer the sympathetic reader.
Examples of his rhetorical malfeasance are legion.
Gross exaggerations and alarmist language.
Buckley obviously believes that Yale is
serving its students poorly, but he portrays the results of that
education in alarmist terms:
the “desctruct[ion] of the best in civilization” (p. 175), .
As is a favorite of polemicists everywhere, he employs
militaristic language to impress the reader with the importance of
the subjects and to create an “us versus them” mindset (a “battle of
educational theory”, a “duel between Christianity and atheism”, a
“struggle” between individualism and collectivism (p. lxvi)).
The Yale Department of Economics “deifies” collectivism. (p.
89) Further, the
negative consequences of this collectivism in America are “very soon
a-coming.” (p.62)
Anecdotes as evidence.
Buckley admits that his book is not a
scholarly work (p. lxv), a gross understatement, but his reliance on
anecdotes is overwhelming.
Besides his own experiences at Yale, Buckley has “interviewed
several students.” (p. 22)
He provides quotes allegedly made by professors during
lectures, many of them hearsay, that are necessarily without context
and are highly unlikely to give a balanced view of the true
teachings of those profs.
His selective quotations from massive economics textbooks are
not likely to provide a fair representation of their views, though I
certainly am not going to read them to try and find out.
Quotes as evidence.
Buckley frequently quotes like-minded
conservatives, and sometimes a string of such quotes is the only
“evidence” presented to support a particular claim. (p. 32)
He also states, as evidence of the fairness of his depiction
of Yale, that “several friends” have told him that he bent over
backwards to avoid distortion.
Assumptions as facts without evidence.
Buckley makes frequent claims without any
supporting evidence:
Yale alumni are predominantly Christian conservatives (p. lxv).
Tuition pays for academic research (p. 166), though at most
institutions tuition is not sufficient to pay the costs of teaching,
let alone research.
Since he apparently couldn’t get former Yale President Charles
Seymour to comment on the topics of his book, Buckley simply puts
words in his mouth. (p. 149, 151, 152)
Labeling and name calling.
Buckley employs labels such as
individualist, collectivist, and socialist (and my favorite,
“freedomite”) that he does not define, and in fact it seems that
Buckley uses them in ways that are starkly different than their
common usage (then as well as today).
It seems I am a socialist because I support a graduated
income tax and an inheritance tax.
He is quick to apply the pejorative label of collectivist
especially, but socialist as well, to anyone who is not as
stridently conservative in their economics as he is.
Some textbook writers are even “professional socialists”. (p.
44) When he quotes von Mises’
definition of a collectivist in a footnote (p. 62), it is clear that
most of the people he labels as collectivist do not deserve it.
Code words.
Buckley frequently (though certainly not
always) uses the word “religion” when he clearly means Christianity.
Would he support the inculcation of “religious” values in
Yale students if the religion was Islam?
He also uses “individualism” when he means “conservativism”,
or at least capitalism as it was practiced before 1932, but since it
would be unseemly for a university to actively promote a sectarian
political philosophy, he disguises his desire through the code word
“individualism”.
“Collectivism” means socialism, or Keynesian economics (which to
Buckley is the same thing), or even just a modern liberal view, or
really anything that isn’t Buckley’s strident version of
conservative capitalism.
Bait and switch.
Buckley will start an argument by using a
certain term, and then switch the term midway to reach his desired
conclusion. For example,
in the preface (p. lxvi) he starts a paragraph as about Christianity
and “individualism”, then individualism morphs into capitalism, and
finally, by the end of the paragraph his subject is described as
Christianity and “freedom”.
Later, an argument that a university is free to hire whomever
it likes (p. 166) is used to justify being able to fire whomever it
likes (p. 168). But the
biggest “bait and switch” comes from his description of the
governance of Yale. Like
almost all universities, Yale is governed by a board of trustees
(the Corporation) that can hire and fire the President, approve
budgets, and set educational priorities.
Buckley mentions that most of the appointed board members are
Yale alumni (p.105). He
then says that Yale is run by alumni, a true statement in the sense
that most of the trustees are alumni.
He repeats this statement, however, changing the meaning of
alumni to be the entire alumni community. (p. 120, 122, 145, 156)
False dichotomies.
Throughout, the battle lines are drawn
between two starkly different viewpoints:
Christianity vs. atheism, and individualism versus
collectivism (by which he means a conservative capitalism versus
socialism, or any brand of capitalism that is not as conservative as
he likes). Very little
room for gradations between extremes is allowed.
One must choose one over the other.
Yale either “fortifies or shatters” the student’s respect of
Christianity. (p. 3). If
one is not overtly pro-Christian, then one is hostile to religion
(p. 11), for example, by not mentioning it.
Views are biases.
When someone expresses a view that Buckley
disagrees with it is almost always described as a bias, the easier
to reject it without reasoned consideration.
It is true that in the Preface he describes his own viewpoint
as a “bias”, but that hardly makes up for its overwhelming use
throughput the book to disparage the views of others.
He suggests that his economic views are sound and supported
by many economists (p. 53), without acknowledging that the views of
the textbooks he criticizes are supported by many more economists -
they are simply biases.
When it comes to atheism, biases become bigoted. (p. 12)
Repetition makes it true.
Once Buckley makes a false statement that
he wants to be true (“alumni … are the ultimate overseers of
university policy” (p. 156)) he repeats it frequently and without
qualification so that the less discerning reader might forget that
it isn’t so (p. lvxiv, 145).
My straw man is “fair”.
Rhetorical arguments almost always begin
by creating a “straw man” opponent which is then demolished through
the writer’s wit and logic.
Buckley frequently insists that his straw men are rendered
fairly (p. 127), and then proceeds to provide ones with gross
injustice to the opposing view.
Consider this description of a “plank of the academic freedom
platform” (p. 131):
“Scholars must be selected to staff the faculty without
consideration of their personal convictions, “even those regarded as
erroneous by a majority of learned colleagues.””
I can’t imagine a university administrator in a hiring
situation that would agree with that statement.
He also describes academic freedom in teaching as encouraging
students to “select the side that pleases him most.” (p. lxvii)
No professor I know of would ever say such a thing.
Hiring and firing.
Buckley repeatedly ignores what every
employer knows: the
criterion used to hire someone is not the same as the criterion used
to fire them. When
hiring, one looks for the best person available for the job.
Why would they hire otherwise?
But to fire, an employee must be below some minimum standard.
In a logic that I couldn’t follow, Buckley uses this
difference to claim that Yale does not in fact practice academic
freedom. Further,
Buckley ignores and does not mention tenure, and an example of a
professor that is not granted tenure (p. 134) is used somehow as
evidence of Yale’s hypocrisy on this topic.
Students are and are not gullible.
Students at Yale are described as
“impressionable” (p. 12), gullible and insufficiently intelligent
(p. 14), cruising through “without learning very much” (p. 29), and
“insensate and tractable” (p. 100).
But the students at Buckley’s hypothetical new Yale will
simply be “steered … toward the truth”. (p. 162)
Category error:
truth and values.
Possibly Buckley’s most egregious
rhetorical misstep is to make the category error between truth and
values. (p. 142, 150)
I’m not sure if he is doing this on purpose, or if he is just that
poor a student of philosophy.
Academic freedom is described as the pursuit of truth, where
honest people can disagree.
But Buckley seems to think that means any set of values held
by a professor must be allowed, in the name of academic freedom.
Buckley attempts to paper over this category error by stating
simply that his values are the truth, or most closely approximate
the truth. (p. 143)
Thus, if education is about teaching the truth, it must be about
teaching values (Buckley’s values, that is).
The square root of a negative number is
demonstrably an error
(p. 132)
I’ll forgive Buckley his lack of mathematical acumen.
Chris Mack is a writer in Austin, Texas.
© Copyright 2019, Chris Mack.
More essays...