Acorn to Oak

It is some ten years since William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale exploded a good-sized charge of TNT within the complacent purlieus of the Liberal academy. It was a shame and a scandal. By 1951, after decades of embattled effort, it must have looked to the Liberal professor, surveying the American academic scene, that his orthodoxy was firmly, securely, and finally established. If an occasional voice was raised from outside against his dogmatic monopoly of American education, it was soon silenced by the massed and indignant outcry of the entire academy. Now a defiant trumpet note rang out from the very center of the fortress.

Life in the groves of academe has never been the same since. Both portent of coming events and a powerful causal factor in their development, God and Man at Yale inaugurated a conservative movement in the universities. Its publication was the first of a series of events which have transformed the political map of the American campus, creating a widespread and militant student movement which has been in the forefront of the American conservative revival.

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Frank S. Meyer

Frank S. Meyer was a senior editor of National Review.

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Frank Meyer

William F. Buckley Jr.

It is some ten years since William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale exploded a good-sized charge of TNT within the complacent purlieus of the Liberal academy. It was a shame and a scandal. By 1951, after decades of embattled effort, it must have looked to the Liberal professor, surveying the American academic scene, that his orthodoxy was firmly, securely, and finally established. If an occasional voice was raised from outside against his dogmatic monopoly of American education, it was soon silenced by the massed and indignant outcry of the entire academy. Now a defiant trumpet note rang out from the very center of the fortress.

Life in the groves of academe has never been the same since. Both portent of coming events and a powerful causal factor in their development, God and Man at Yale inaugurated a conservative movement in the universities. Its publication was the first of a series of events which have transformed the political map of the American campus, creating a widespread and militant student movement which has been in the forefront of the American conservative revival.