God, Man, and Academic Freedom

The 25-year-old William F. Buckley Jr. wrote God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom” with an appreciation of the contributions made by leading universities in the United States, Great Britain, and elsewhere in the building of our civilization. His special concern was with the civic order, and the role of institutions of higher education in forming citizens of a constitutional democratic republic. As James Madison said, a “well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.”

But is there not a tension between two ideals: that of education for citizenship (especially in a republic—that is, a regime in which government is not only of and for the people, but also by the people themselves), and that of liberal education: the unrestricted pursuit of truth, understood not as a means to other ends, but as an end-in-itself? Doesn’t the latter ideal require unrelenting questioning of everything, including the nation’s civic ideals and institutions?

Is the teacher supposed to train his students to be loyal patriots? Or should he form them to be unrestricted truth seekers, questioning everything, being careful not to bias students in favor of particular viewpoints, including ideas about, say, democracy, capitalism, individual rights, and religion?

Buckley argued that, at a private university such as Yale, the faculty and administration are ultimately responsible to the institution’s alumni. Since Yale’s alumni are (or then were) mostly Christian and anti-collectivist (or, to use Buckley’s own favored term, “individualist”), the university ought to conceive itself as having something of a catechetical mission: advancing the principles of Christianity and individualism by encouraging students to embrace these principles. What motivated Buckley to write his book was a perception that Yale was doing the opposite, namely, biasing its students towards skepticism and collectivism.

In Buckley’s view, Yale was hiding behind an unattainable ideal of “academic freedom,” treating honesty and professional competence as the lone standards to which its faculty were held. The substance of their views—whether pro-or anti-Christianity; pro- or anti-democracy; pro- or anti-capitalism—was regarded as irrelevant. Since true academic freedom was impossible, the university’s rhetoric masked a liberal bias. In God and Man at Yale, Buckley did not argue that Yale should remove its biases to allow for a greater diversity of perspectives among its faculty.

Buckley was, in my opinion, on the mark in speaking about the hypocrisy or bad faith of Yale’s claim to neutrality. Even in his day, the claim to neutrality was masking a massive leftward tilt. But his vision of the purpose of a university education, though accurate on this point, was misguided in other ways. Or so I shall argue.

Institutional Hypocrisy

Buckley offered a compendium of evidence in defense of his claim that Yale’s curriculum and student life were biased against Christianity and individualism. Numerous citations from syllabi, campus newspaper articles, and speeches proved his point. While Yale maintained a veneer of Christian identity, largely for the benefit of alumni donors, it was merely a veneer. The university’s bureaucratic machine moved to create an illusion that the only problems that alumni needed to worry about were financial. 

Christianity was an afterthought for most students, many of whom did not take any religion classes at all. Those who did encountered skepticism, if not outright atheism. Sociologists presented religion as a mere cultural phenomenon. Psychologists, supposedly concerned with the human mind, did not even mention religion, at least implicitly adopting stances of “relativism, pragmatism, and utilitarianism.” Purportedly Christian student organizations mostly focused on social work and did not even restrict their leadership positions to Christian believers.

Similarly, individualism was routinely dismissed across campus. Buckley indicted his classmates for being much more interested in “security” than freedom. Textbooks presented collectivism as more advanced than outdated free market economics. Individualists were rarely represented in the editorial page of the Yale Daily News (Buckley himself serving as the lone exception) or the resolutions of the Yale Political Union. The Republican Club declined while the Democratic and Progressive clubs flourished.

The university’s justification for hiring secularist and progressive faculty was that it needed to respect the academic freedom of professors and students. As his subtitle makes clear, Buckley thought this was a “superstition.” Defined by Buckley, academic freedom’s central tenet was: “Truth is probably not apprehendable. Since it is not, it is folly to try to indoctrinate the student in any specific formula. Rather, the teaching community must be left free to approach truth as best it can.” He did not believe that one could with integrity affirm objective truth about the values of religion and American democracy while failing to advance it in the classroom.

The Truth About Academic Freedom

I question three of Buckley’s assumptions about academic freedom. The first is the right of the alumni to determine the content of the curriculum based on what a majority of them believe at a given time. Speaking of economics, but with application to all disciplines, he said: “I have cause to object to current Yale policies only if there exists a disparity between the values the alumni of Yale want taught, and those currently being taught in the field of economics.” He later makes the implications of that view explicit: “If the alumni wish secular and collectivist influences to prevail at Yale, that is their privilege.”

In recent years, we have been living in that hypothetical circumstance. I cannot agree that certain beliefs should be promoted by the university simply because they are held by a majority (be it of alumni, faculty, or students), even if they are my own. At universities such as Yale and Princeton, the mission is getting to the truth of things, and the pursuit of truth is vitally served by considering, and exposing students to, the best arguments and evidence for competing views on contested questions. This in turn requires that no particular view be given privileged status. Each should stand or fall on its merits, as researchers and students honestly assess them. 

I quoted Buckley’s second assumption above: academic freedom assumes value neutrality and relativism and requires only professional competence. But this is a much too simplistic account of what academic freedom is and what it entails. A sound understanding of academic freedom does not assume that there is no such thing as objective truth, including moral truth. Nor does it require the abandonment of standards appropriate to the pursuit of truth, such as the requirement that business be conducted in the proper currency of academic discourse: a currency consisting of reasons, arguments, and evidence. Academic discourse presupposes that truth exists and that it is knowable. It also assumes that human beings are fallible. While we all know that we have at least some false beliefs in our heads, we don’t know which of our beliefs are false. If we are to swap out as many false beliefs as possible for true beliefs, we’ll need to allow our beliefs to be placed into question, we’ll have to be exposed to evidence and arguments that challenge our beliefs.

Buckley recognizes the importance of “diligence, humility, insight, intelligence, and industry” in seeking truth. Yet he claims that, in the case of the goods of religion and democracy, we have already accomplished this goal and must now go about the task of teaching these values to future generations, refining rather than questioning them. Because of our fallibility, I do not believe that this is a posture we should take with any of our beliefs, including our most deeply held beliefs.

Buckley’s third assumption was that truth is not as knowable as we might think. He pointed to many examples throughout human history when the truth has not won out, and evil has triumphed over good. Here we have a rare case in which I not only disagree with William F. Buckley, but actually agree with John Stuart Mill, who in chapter 2 of his essay On Liberty makes the case that there is nothing to fear from the competition of good ideas and bad ideas. Like Mill, I believe that intelligent people, when confronted with the truth, will tend to be brought closer to it. This is not to claim that truth will always or inevitably win out in a true marketplace of ideas; rather, it is, in effect, to bet that the chances of truth prevailing are better where there is such a marketplace than where there is indoctrination or coerced belief. 

Buckley and I share a commitment to a diversity of perspectives on syllabi, which should feature the best that has been thought and said on all sides of contested questions. He, however, argued that the teacher should then move to explaining why certain writers on the syllabus are right and attempting to “deflate” others. A better approach, in my opinion, is to avoid biasing students in one direction or another—avoid even subtle indoctrination. In fact, if a student expresses a viewpoint that I happen to hold, I make a special effort to challenge it. My objective, of course, is not to deflect the student from believing what I myself believe to be true, but rather to ensure that the student has genuinely thought his way to his conclusion by confronting serious challenges to it.

A couple of years ago in an undergraduate seminar on the purpose and mission of universities, I detected what turned out to be a revealing disagreement among my students. I asked them a question: 

Choose one of these two options:

Option A: I will present to you a fallacious argument for a true proposition about a very important matter that it would be good to know the truth about. Despite the argument’s being fallacious, you will find it convincing and will as a result believe the true proposition.

Option B: I will present to you a sound argument for the same true proposition. However, despite the argument’s soundness, you will not find it persuasive and will therefore not affirm and believe that proposition.

The class divided right down the middle on which option to choose. I then presented a third option:

Option C: I will give you a pill which will cause you to affirm and therefore believe the true proposition.

None of the students who had taken Option A were willing to take Option C. My question for them was: Why not? Options C and A are substantively identical. The only difference is that the means proposed to induce the (true) belief are more efficient in the case of C than they are in A. As a teacher, I would no more be willing to, in effect, trick a student into believing a truth by giving him a fallacious argument than I would be willing to give the student a pill to induce him to believe the truth.

Certainly, from the perspective of an educator, Option B, though it does not result in the student affirming a truth, is superior to Options A and C. Option B respects the student as a thinking human being, whereas options A and C do not. What’s more, Option B recognized that truth-seeking is not simply a matter of holding beliefs that coincidentally happen to be correct. It is not a matter of checking the right box on a true/false or multiple-choice test. It is about reasoning—and in that sense appropriating truth, not simply affirming the right propositions. And appropriating truth means affirming sound propositions for reasons that genuinely support them.

It is, after all, one thing to know that something is the case—what I call merely “notional” knowledge. But it is another thing—and a deeper thing, a better thing—to know why it is the case, or how it is the case, and how it might relate to, or fit in with, other things that are the case. Knowledge, in other words, is not mere information. From my perspective as an educator, it is better for students to think their way to unsound conclusions, than to be tricked (or drugged) into endorsing sound ones.

But let’s return to Buckley’s views about how professors should present materials related to, for example, individualism and collectivism.

Is it enough to have the writings of collectivists on the syllabus and not have the ideas of collectivists reported (in an unbiased way) at the lectern, as Buckley suggests? Certainly, great professors can fairly present the views of those with whom they disagree, just as students should strive to do. However, other things being equal, it is actually beneficial for students to learn about different perspectives from people who hold, or at least have some sympathies with, those perspectives.

Over the years, I have taught several seminars with my friend Cornel West. Professor West is a democratic socialist. I am a traditional conservative. Despite our political differences, we have the same philosophy of teaching and the same beliefs about the truth-seeking mission of the university. Both of us, when teaching on our own, assign readings by authors we deeply disagree with and strive in our lectures to present the views of those authors fairly and even sympathetically. But there is something interesting I’ve observed when we teach together. Often, he makes arguments in defense of a progressive viewpoint, or in criticism of a conservative one, that simply would not have occurred to me, no matter how many of his books I have read. He tells me he has the same experience in teaching with me. From this, I can only conclude that even people doing their best to be fair to perspectives they personally reject typically cannot present those perspectives as effectively as people who actually hold them.

But one might ask, what about a university’s administrative leadership? Buckley argues that an institution like Yale needs to be led by an individual who personally believes in Christian and individualist principles. Indeed, he questions whether a university, even if it aspired to neutrality on such matters, could realistically avoid taking a prospective president’s political, religious, and moral beliefs into account.

But if the mission of the university is not to inculcate Christianity and individualism, then an administrator need not necessarily hold to them (though, of course, there should be no bias against Christians and individualists for leadership positions, as there too often is in academia today). Those responsible for hiring presidents for non-sectarian colleges and universities should, in my opinion, look for two important qualities: First, a president must honestly uphold the values of the university: the pursuit, advancement, and transmission of truth. Second, he or she must be competent in running the institution and hiring subordinates. These criteria can be fulfilled by people representing a fairly broad spectrum of ideological views.

Educating for Citizenship

Buckley observed that, as alumni bear responsibility for the curricula of private universities, legislators play an analogous role at public institutions. In recent years, more state legislatures have taken an interest in what goes on in public colleges and universities. This has led to the reform of existing institutions like New College Florida and the formation of interdisciplinary centers and schools, mostly focused on civic education. Are these “civics centers” following Buckley’s preferred model: inculcating in students conservative political principles? At their best, that is not what they are doing—at least not directly or self-consciously. They are, to be sure, forming citizens for a democratic republic. But well-informed citizens do not simply accept what experts—be they of the left or the right—tell them. They consider the best arguments on all sides of contested questions and think for themselves, confident in the knowability of truth but also cognizant of their own fallibility. Genuine education, including civic education, is formation, not catechesis. 

One critic of God and Man at Yale said that Buckley should have gone to Fordham, a Catholic institution, rather than Yale, if he wanted a religious education. But Yale was indeed preaching a religion of skepticism and progressive ideology—which was Buckley’s point. While the critic was wrong to suppose that Yale was ideologically or religiously neutral, Buckley’s vision of a catechetical university does reflect the approach of religiously affiliated universities.

I myself believe in institutional pluralism. Some institutions (Benedictine College, Calvin University, Yeshiva University, Brigham Young University, Zaytuna College, and others) are committed to certain religious doctrines. That will make a difference in how those institutions handle free speech and faculty hiring issues. They have a dual mandate: 1) forming students to be truth-seekers, and 2) passing on a tradition of religious faith. In arguing for a certain model of academic freedom at nonsectarian institutions, I do not mean to suggest that confessional institutions are illegitimate. At the same time, I would urge teachers at all universities, religiously affiliated and nonsectarian, to fulfill their responsibility to expose students to the best arguments on competing sides of contested questions. So, in the case of religiously affiliated colleges and universities, their students should be exposed to critics of religion and of their own religious tradition. I would urge the philosophy department at Notre Dame or Yeshiva University, for example, to make sure that students confront the thought of important critics of biblical religion, such as Friedrich Nietzsche. They needn’t fear doing that.

To educate American citizens, we should welcome both non-sectarian and religiously affiliated institutions. We also need public intellectuals who, with the benefit of their academic training, speak to people outside academia. Students, especially those whose professors are public intellectuals, may very well know what their professors think about certain topics. But professors should not preach their view; they should confront students with the best reasons, arguments, and evidence on the competing sides. The goal should be ideologically impartial truth-seeking.

Buckley and the University

Even at a young age, Bill Buckley perceptively spoke the truth about his alma mater, which feigned neutrality while presenting both traditional Christian belief and individualism as backward points of view. With some notable recent exceptions, this bias at Yale and many other institutions has grown worse in the ensuing 75 years.

I agree with Buckley that American universities have a special responsibility to educate citizens for a democratic republic. My challenge is that those future leaders should not be catechized in the college or university classroom. Non-sectarian universities like Yale and Princeton should teach neither conservatism nor progressivism. They should empower their students to assess the evidence and arguments for the competing points of view and think for themselves.

College should be a place where students are encouraged—indeed expected, even required—to wrestle with the most important questions of human existence, face challenges to their own deeply held beliefs about those questions, and make their best judgements about where the truth lies. In our destabilized age, we need well-instructed people who, instead of following a leader or ideology, think for themselves, as they were given a mind to do.