Note from the Publisher: Back to School
Regnery, Alfred S.
noTe fRoM THe PublIsHeR Back to School by alfred s. Regnery T T he superstitions of academic freedom” was the subtitle Bill Buckley used when he published God and Man at Yale...
...Finally, we call your attention to the return of economist Brian Wesbury, whose presence in our pages has been missed, who writes on the state of the economy (not as bad as you thought), and who will again be a regular contributor...
...Bundy’s was only one of many such reviews expressing the outrage of the American left for having one of its dirty little secrets exposed, and it helped to launch Buckley’s long and illustrious career...
...McGeorge Bundy, a Yale graduate and Harvard professor who would subsequently help plan the Vietnam war and later head the Ford Foundation, artlessly accused Buckley, in the Atlantic, of being an “ignorant and twisted young man” whose book was “dishonest in its use of facts and its conclusions...
...The point is to give students both sides of the story and, in the process, develop a discerning sense of what is true...
...Using Manhattan as its campus, King’s provides some 300 exceptionally talented students (and its leaders anticipate substantial growth) an education of “faith and consequences...
...Citing examples and naming names of those responsible for the oppression by the left in the name of political correctness, George eloquently makes the case that the freedom of inquiry is—or should be—a critical 6 THe aMeRIcan sPecTaToR sePTeMbeR 2008 part of university life in the search for truth and for academic excellence and knowledge...
...In a word, The King’s College is very good news for Evangelicals, for education, and for the future of our country...
...One of these bright spots, which our regular contributor Shawn Macomber introduces this month, exists in the unlikely heights of the Empire State Building in central Manhattan...
...But there are exceptions...
...The socalled recession, according to Wesbury, is more state-of-mind than fact, and reflects the negative attitude of the pundits more than the actual situation—pundits educated, no doubt, at those secular mainstream universities where the truth is so hard to come by...
...Scarcely a week passes without some offense being committed by a university or its administrators or faculty against intellectual or academic freedom,” George writes—the victim almost always being somebody who has challenged some aspect of leftist dogma so prevalent on American campuses...
...The King’s College, a new Evangelical school committed to seeking out the truth—and not to indoctrinating students—regularly brings in proponents of exactly what Evangelicals are not supposed to believe...
...Yale, he charged, and more broadly most colleges and universities, “do not practice, cannot practice, and cannot even believe what they say about education and academic freedom...
...One would think that the battle over academic freedom, after all these years, might have subsided a bit...
...noTe fRoM THe PublIsHeR Back to School by alfred s. Regnery T T he superstitions of academic freedom” was the subtitle Bill Buckley used when he published God and Man at Yale in the fall of 1951...
...alfred s. Regnery is publisher of The American Spectator and author of the new book Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism (Threshold/ Simon & Schuster...
...But Princeton professor Robert P. George reminds us, in the latest installment in our series on individual freedom, that this is hardly the case...
...Buckley cited cases, named names, and, as would become his wont, made a case so convincing that Yale and the rest of academe could only criticize him via ad hominem attacks...
Vol. 41 • September 2008 • No. 7
