I’m grateful to Robert P. George for bringing before us the famous book by William F. Buckley, God and Man at Yale, and in particular for pointing our attention to its often overlooked subtitle, The Superstitions of Academic Freedom. I have heard of this book all of my life, but I have to admit that I’ve never read it. In the spirit of rational ignorance, I don’t intend to read God and Man now, but will rely on George’s account of its position on academic freedom.

　　I agreed with most of George’s points, especially the all-important point that indoctrination, in the sense of presenting dogmas for unreflective belief, should never be practiced by any university, Christian or not. A university education is not a catechism class. Buckley apparently held the view that the truth could not be guaranteed to win out, and ought to be backstopped by university authorities. Steps should be taken so that the truths held by the larger Yale community, including its students and alumni, would prevail over the efforts of Yale’s liberal faculty to undermine them.

　　Though I suspect I’m more of a Burkean than George and believe that private universities have real obligations to the generations of graduates who have supported their university’s mission, I agree that requiring professors to promote some ideas and “deflate” others is a terrible idea. It would lead to a system of monitoring and ideological assessment of professors that is incompatible with liberal education. The way to strengthen true ideas over false ones is to ensure that a wide range of credible opinions are represented on the faculty.

　　To argue for what is now called viewpoint diversity, we don’t need to appeal to J. S. Mill‘s skeptical strategy of regarding all inherited beliefs as suspect, the musty relics of an unscientific past, unworthy of our loyalty as rational beings. Mill’s framing of intellectual freedom in fact stacks the deck against traditional beliefs. Aristotle’s position in the Rhetoric is simpler and better. He maintains that in a properly ordered debate, truth has the advantage. The art of rhetoric, when correctly practiced, should yield truth, “because the true and the just are naturally superior to their opposites, so that, if decisions are improperly made, they must owe their defeat to their own advocates” (1.1.1355a). Rhetoric can argue for both sides of a question (as Plato complained in the Gorgias), but, generally speaking, that which is true and better is naturally always easier to prove and more likely to persuade.

　　Aristotle places the responsibility for the triumph of truth on its advocates. How can we ensure that the university has faculty members willing to act as advocates for the truth, even in cases when the vast majority of faculty members may be hostile to it? The best way to do this is surely not to rely on current methods of faculty recruitment, which rely on the principle of cooptation—faculty organized into departments replacing themselves. Cooptation is notoriously a conservative practice, designed to prevent change. I believe that, in the current environment, the most effective strategy is the one George mentions: the founding of interdisciplinary civics centers, where civics is broadly understood to include not just training in American politics, citizenship, and public institutions, but the history and civilization of the West.

　　I’ve written about these institutions here and here, and won’t repeat myself now. Among other things, in civics centers, if established prudently, there is real hope of achieving Buckley’s vision for the university. He believed that universities owed it to their wider inter-generational communities and to the public to do more than transmit knowledge. They should aim to produce graduates who respect American traditions and institutions. I believe he would approve of the founding principles of the civics center where I now teach, the Hamilton School of Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. By a statute of the Florida legislature, our purpose is “to support teaching and research concerning the ideas, traditions, and texts that form the foundations of Western and American civilization.” We are to “educate university students in the principles, ideals, and institutions of the American political order,” and “in the foundations of responsible leadership and informed citizenship.”

　　He lived a beautiful life, and he lived it beautifully, in a way that spoke well of the liberal education he had received in Europe as a boy and, yes, at Yale too.

　　At Hamilton, we also uphold (despite what critics have claimed) George’s principle that any semblance of indoctrination should be avoided. We too aim to train students in the arts of rational persuasion and debate, which requires possession of the relevant facts and command of the criteria for valid argument. George’s revealing thought experiment dramatizes his loyalty to this principle by defending it even in cases where “appropriation” of beliefs through rational argument produces the “wrong” result. Even when teachers believe passionately in the opposite view, George argues, they must respect the conclusions their students reach.

　　Here I would add only that what the teacher should be teaching and demonstrating, in addition to rigorous techniques of rational argument, is a commitment to honesty with oneself. The modern term for this is “authenticity”; the classical principle is gnothi seauton, “know thyself.” If students acquire this intellectual virtue, along with the allied virtue of intellectual humility, there remains a good chance that later in life, when they acquire more experience of affairs, the world, and its history, they will change their minds about false beliefs they acquire in college. A good education will implant virtues that give Truth a second chance.

　　Since this is a forum to assess, retrospectively, Buckley’s view of American universities and their failings, it’s appropriate, I believe, to draw attention to another side of his contribution to education, namely, the model he himself gave of a liberally educated man. This is also the aspect of Buckley’s legacy that I myself valued the most as a young conservative many years ago. Though I’ve never read God and Man at Yale, I grew up watching Firing Line and reading Buckley’s essays in National Review. I couldn’t help noticing the kind of man he was—a liberally educated gentleman. I found his example immensely comforting. He was a one-man refutation of the prejudice of the time that all the most refined intellects were presumptively to be found on the liberal side of the political spectrum.

　　As far as I can tell, St. John Henry Newman’s idea of a liberally-educated gentleman, as presented in The Idea of a University, was never a major reference point for Buckley. In modern universities, that ideal seems to be completely dead. Neither the right, with its concern for virtue, patriotism, and tradition, nor the left, preoccupied with scientific progress and progressive activism, have any time for Newman’s gentlemanly ideal. Yet Buckley fitted like few men today Newman’s description of the liberally educated man who pursued knowledge for its own sake, independent of any utilitarian payoffs. 

　　For Newman, liberal education should not be instrumentalized either to serve public purposes, like teaching civic virtues, or for private ones like increasing one’s future earning power. Buckley clearly did not agree with this principle, but he nevertheless exemplified it. He lived a beautiful life, and he lived it beautifully, in a way that spoke well of the liberal education he had received in Europe as a boy and, yes, at Yale too. He had the largeness of mind that Newman admired, a mind that displayed “the force, the steadiness, the comprehensiveness and the versatility of intellect,” a connected grasp of things, “the power to discriminate, arrange, and judge.”

　　He grew up fluent in Spanish and French, and his early environment was more that of a country squire than an intellectual. He was an accomplished harpsichordist and yachtsman, taught himself celestial navigation, and wrote four books on sailing. Both accomplishments, in music and sailing, involved serious work, not dilettantism, and so matched Newman’s description of liberal activities. On Firing Line he behaved with elaborate courtesy and as a rule treated his guests with polite respect, even as he skewered their arguments. I’m not sure he met Newman’s definition of a gentleman as one who “never willingly causes pain,” but I imagine that, if accused of enjoying too much the humiliation of his rivals, he might reply that Instructing the Ignorant is one of the Seven Spiritual Works of Mercy. Liberal education perfects human nature, but so does Grace, and Buckley never forgot that.