A Modest Academic Proposal

...We published many good books after The Conservative Mind ~ Felix Morley's Freedom and Federalism, Richard Weaver's The Ethics of Rhetoric, James Jackson K i l p a t r i c k ' s The Sovereign States, James Burnham's Congress and the AmeriCan Tradition, two books by William lVl...

...was his scandalized reaction to this shameful act...

...Eliot and a book of essays by Ezra Pound, we could feel that we had some connection with the most important group of men writing in English in this century, and writers who had devoted their talent and energy to opposing the disintegration of the values of our civilization...

...Nothing less will suffice...

...After years of failure in lib...

...Anyone who looks at the secular campus today is aware of the great number of liberal and radical students and the tiny number of conservatives...

...It really was time to close...

...garded as intellectual equals...

...but that is i t . relevant when compared to the educational potential from someone who has had the "conservative ex'perience...

...16 The A l t e r n a t i v e O c t o b e r , 1971 Chambers - - devoted the entire book, review section of its 4 July issue to this one book, and mentioned it again in a news...

...A Modest Academic Proposal Gary North Ever since those dark days in March of 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt and his Brain Hustlers took over the greased pig of the American political scene, serious conservatives have been driven from the academic establishment...

...The best way to accomplish this is the establishment of Conservative Studies programs on every major campus...

...The Fillmore's Bill Graham could not meet the fees demanded by singers who sang of purity and love, who belabored the horrors of modern commercial society, who cried in lament over the war...

...This is, in fact, one of the most frequently adduced reasons given for the Fillmore's end...

...We don't need any Uncle Garrys (Garry Wills:, with their fashionable Ph.D.'s and sideburns, to take over our CS programs...

...Those of us who have lived on the Lower East Side (preferentially labeled the "East Village" by the publicity-minded) during these years have seen the deterioration of the rock cult gathered at the Fillmore...

...The conservative student may need special tutoring in his first year...

...Maybe they used to be conservatives, but the Establishment bought them off years ago...

...Everything connected with the program - - grading, admissions, content - - must be under the control of true conservatives...

...The answer is ohvions...

...People should be allowed to drop to pieces in any way they choose...

...A society seemingly characterized by Camelot, the "Playboy philosophy" of Hugh Heffner, Bobble Baker, the drug culture, and the contemptible collapse of our once proud universities in face of demands by "the kids" was hardly a favorable atmosphere in which to publish serious books...

...The only person who truly knows, understands, and shares the love, hate relationship with the liberal intellectualist is the conservative...

...Two authors whom it gave me special pleasure, but no profit, to publish were the South African poet, Roy Campbell, and the English writer, Wyndham Lewis...

...Keynesians control the departments of economics, court apologists rewrite diplomatic history, functional i l l i t e r a t e s rewrite sociology, and some very peculiar people teach English...

...This should be a non-negotiable demand...

...In the final analysis, the modern liberal intellectualist needs the conservative...

...What we do need, I think, is to develop a body of literature of high quality by people of conservative instincts - - what, for example, T.S...

...Drugs are rampant in the neighborhood...

...If anything like fairness is to be restored to the campus scene, there has to be a balancing of opinions on those campuses like Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Eerkeley...

...If I am not mistaken, no less a figure than Frank Meyer strongly opposed the adoption of the name "conservative" for the position he felt he represented, but when National Review began publication a few months later it described itself as a conservative journal of opinion...

...The original exuberance and euphoria of the rock scene gradually lost its pristine aspects in favor of an even greater crassness...

...His re, duced estimate of his own humanity must be eliminated...

...There won't be any money or glory in it, but we have inherited a great and noble tradition, and it is worth fighting for...

...Yet we learned that at least 40 percent of the population is truly conservative in the 1964 presidential election and recent polls have shown similar results...

...The reasons were, of course, multifold -among them drugs...

...There are cafes here advertising "bring your own head," which set aside small hashish dens for their customers...

...Fewer and fewer people see the Lower East Side as a place to live and most often the disenchantment stems from the unsavory street elements that inhibit normal life...

...But the active discrimination that has been directed against conservatives by liberal faculty members over an entire generation has discouraged conservatives from applying...

...Far right onl" [ ] • .Garry North is a Ph.D...

...Unfortunately, the hanger-on could never be classified with the harmless hippie tourist...

...It has only been a heritage that put emphasis on other thin~zs, like thrift, diligence, and deferrei gratification...

...He hustled dope, picked pockets, robbed apartments, loafed on people's stairs, or panhandled in the street...

...The conservative, in asShining the role of the outcast for the liberal, has permitted the liberal to define himself in terms of the man on the lowest rung of academic life, namely, the conservative...

...They - - the rock people, the juveniles -were initially the heralds of success...

...Commercialism was another factor and one difficult to rationalize for the cultists...

...The faded slogans of liberal culture are denied daily by the outcast status of the conservatives who have never been re...

...oral ideology reigns supreme on the major campuses of our time...

...No matter what the critics may say, he is one of the towering figures of this century...

...What this has done is to give the area a rougher atmosphere, a hardness that was missing, say, ten years ago...

...And the streets - - one need not be a "head" to note their effect on the teeming streets of the "East Village...

...But the worshipers of Mecca, the juveniles, were again left in the cold, not realizing, because of their youth, that they had been had...

...vi0us that only true conservatives should be hired to run them...

...tellectualists...

...A few token conservatives lave been picked up by the Ivy League schools from time to time, but tokenism is an insalt to a people with a long cultural heritage...

...with them a Festschrifl for the sixtieth birthday of T.S...

...This is simply propaganda from the offices of liberal in...

...The Fillmore as a symbol of peace and new ideals lost its glitter...

...McGovern, Willmoore Kendall's The Conservative Affirmation, Wilhelm Roepke's The Humane Economy - - but for me, The Conservative Mind, coming as it did after The China Story and God and Man atYale was the high point of my publishing career...

...It was widely read and discussed, for example, in the colleges and universities, and after the reviews came articles--not all, of course, in agreement, but Kirk had launched a concept and established a position which the Liberals recognized as a real challenge, and took seriously...

...Thus, we must demand that his first year be ungraded, as each conservative student seeks to find his place in the academic community...

...Who but Regnery would publish such a book...

...They were never the ones to stand around and wait in lines...

...What the liberals in Cambridge and New Haven are really afraid of is an influx of "undesirables" into their neighborhoods...

...This is no reason to exclude us from the campus in the final third of the twentieth century...

...Writing in 1947, in the disillusionment of post-war London, Wyndham Lewis wondered if his long fight had been worthwhile...

...The hanger-on came here because, "this was where it was at...

...Thus mandatory quotas must be established and enforced on the campus...

...No, most conservatives never learned to takedrugs in their teens, and the American Revolution was the closest thing to anarchy we could ever muster, but this is hardly to say that we have been without a culture...

...The Conservctive Mind had an impact which, in the bored and blase atmosphere of the present, is hard to imagine...

...Despite disclaimers by the management, they had their effect...

...He had been a bareback rider in the circus, fought bulls in Spain and Portugal, served in the Nationalist Army in the Spanish Civil War and the King's Africa Rifles in World Wa/" I I , baited left-wing poets in London,and with all that, had written some of the most beautiful lyric poetry of this century...

...But the critics would have none of him - - he was violently anti-Liberal and therefore for them a fascist, and his books, for all their great quality, have never sold...

...The conservative who has lived on the outskirts of liberal culture has come to know the liberal even better than the liberal knows himself...

...Oh, how they loathed capitalism I They had not in them a touch of gratitude for the Fillmore...

...Modern Age., National Review, The Intercollegiate Review and the conservative student publications all perform an important function in this respect, but we also need a monthly of national circulation and of high quality - - something on the level of the Atlantic or Harper's m their better days...

...Eliot undertook to do in his own writing and in his encouragement of others...

...I couldn't help but feel, who indeed...

...in some places it is an insan~ asylum...

...candidate at the University of California at Santa Barbara...

...As popularity skyrocketed, the entertainers asked incredible fees and the smaller houses like the Fillmore East were hurt...

...The symbol began to crumble...

...The conservative is the only one who has bothered to read liberal balderdash wRha critical eye...

...Lower East residents implicitly agree to this - - the hanger-on has wrought more havoc in this area than any of the hippies...

...Being voguish it also drew the fashionable-minded who invariably stood out from the rest...

...It is a commentary on this area that the closing of the Fillmore East will have little lingeririg effect...

...Report From New York The End of the Fillmore East N i c k o l a s Lupinin On 27 June of this year the great rock haven of the East, the Fillmore, closed with appropriate fanfare, tears, and logic...

...The juveniles were not the only ones to attend the Fillmore...

...T~eir tickets were in hand, and they did not worry about parking their Rolls or Maserati in the no parking zones...

...Admittedly, we may have to settle initially for true conservatives who have not finished the Ph.D...

...But then the old fighter went on to say, " . . . Darwin, Voltaire, Newton, Raphael, Dante, E p i c t e t u s , A r i s t o t l e , Sophocles, Plato, Pythagoras: all shedding their light upon the same wide, welllit graeco-roman.highway, with the same kind of sane and steady rate----one need only mention these to recognize that it was at least excusable to be concerned about the threat of extinction to that tradition...

...The unexpected appearance in the fifties of what promised to be a rational, viable alternative te Liberalism was followed by the dismal sixties...

...I donk mean a conservative magazine...

...it should be edited by a man of conservative h~stincts - - a man, that is, who takes a positive attitude toward the traditions of Western civilization - - but the first consideration should not be Conservatism, but quality...

...In order for a truly conservative CS program to survive on campus, it is oh...

...Lewis was also a difficult author to put over, but his intelligence and the quality of his work are gradually being recognized in spite of the critics...

...One does frequently find it difficult to separate hard rock and drugs -- certainly on the Lower East Side...

...The young English instructor at * Michigan State had become a national figure, and the amorphous, scattered opposition to the overwhelming power of Liberalism had received its identity...

...The threat of extinction is now much greater than it was then: those bent on destroying civilization a r e b e t t e r organized, and the defenses are waker...

...eral students who have had all the advantages of a first-class liberal education...

...The liberals talk a good line, but very few of them would really want to live next door to a police chief...

...To do what is needed to halt the disintegration of our society requires purpose and intelligence...

...Perhaps even with a touch of cynicism, for the audience at this last (all night) fete was by invitation only, while the faithful children milled the streets in an uncalculated display of sentiment...

...But juveniles are juveniles and given to ignoring the play of irony in their lives...

...For a generation conservatives have been relegated to second class academic citizenship...

...This will mean that an active program of junior college recruiting must go into effect at once...

...To deny us the right to participate in academic society any longer is a negation of liberal intellectualism...

...we are all, including Frank Meyer, Conservatives now...

...The latter, by and large, have been peaceful, whereas a check at the local police station will corroborate the claim that, for example, the largest proportion of crimes are committed by transients - - by hangers-on...

...Kirk had won...

...Today," he said, "I should not write such books at all...

...There was opposition to Kirk, and from what became the conservative side, opposition part i c u l a r l y to the designation, "conservative...

...eral-dominated public education, what conservative high school graduate feels prepared to go to Yale...

...Regnery is Chairman of the Board of the Henry Regnery Company...

...A kind of Gresham's Law of scholarship has been in operation for a generation...

...Conservatives want to go The Alternative October, 1971 17 to college just as much as liberals do...

...No one ever denied the rather substantial use of "grass" within the theater...

...It should be obvious even to the most liberal academic intellectualist that lib...

...The ratio of conservative students must be the same as the overall ratio of conservatives within the general population...

...He shouldnot be forced to compete directly with lib...

...The argument runs that academically qualified students are not available from conservative circles...

...His breed was harder, a breed bred on the streets of New York, a breed to whom no form of vice was foreign...

...Conservatives have never had equal opportunity in school...

...it would be the most radical kind of liberal intellectualism to demand that each conservative student be forced to compete directly with liberals at the very start of his academic career...

...These people, though drawing some opprobrium from the blue-leaned and mod, were not a problem...

...When the early influx of hippies came to this area, the number that came to dawdle, to gape, and clog the streets was rather small, but along with the rapid rise of the hippie population (now in decline, inGreat American Series "If you are lucky enough to have lived at a major American university as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for the American university is a movable illness...

...As for the book of essays by Ezra Pound, the reviewer in Commonweat - - a Liberal Catholic, for me, is as much an anathema as a Liberal Southerner - - was outraged...

...These CS programs will renovate all of academic life...

...Herded like animals into midwestern Bible colleges and southern universities, they have feared to apply to Harvard...

...In fact, due to the ridiculously high proportion of liberals to the conservatives on the campus (especially in upper division), a higher proportion of conservatives than 40 percent should be admitted initially...

...To have known Roy Campbell, a free spirit if ever there was one, was a great privilege...

...The problem came from the rather typical "East Village" phenomenon, the hanger-on...

...For this, we need to encourage new talent, and one means, almost the only means, in fact, of doing this, is good periodicals...

...Continuity to the historical process...

...Needless to say, the Fillmore devotees were hurt by these roamers and the theater itself was hurt...

...Conservatives have supposedly learned their place in the rural ghettos, with only a few of them straying close to the cities in olaces like Orange County, California...

...It does not permtt true pluralism, open discussion, and honest dialogue to flower...

...t~eorge Nathan to a college chump cidentally) came a faster growing population of hangers-on...

...I suspect the closing was in order...

...It is a valid heritage...

...And the victim has been everybody from the weekend visitor to the Fillmore, to the local citizenry...

...Perhaps there have been, for the time, enough books about Conservatism itself, and there is certainly no need for more books pointing out the mess the Liberals have made of things - - that should be evident enough...

...The drug culture, the kids, alid Lire state of the universities no doubt symbolize the utter collapse of Liberalism as a philosophy and a body of ideas, but we must face the fact that the Liberals still hold nearly all the positions of influence in our society, and show no sign of being willing to relinquish them...

...The highs made one appreciate the music ( or did they merely help bear it...

...In fact, no one who has not shared the conservative experience can be allowed to teach in the program...

...Coming in vast numbers from all over the country to see and listen, they literally created the rock stars...

...All power to the competent...

...The same people will be floating on the streets of the "East...

...It is provocative to speculate on how much the juveniles themselves are responsible for the very commercialism they so decry...

...It is time to end the hypocrisy...

...An institution was coming to an end and the media were there with effusive eulogies...

...A multitude of rock stations covered the farewell and the airwaves were punctuated with periodic reports on the proceedings...