What is going on at American colleges and universities? A lot—is of course the easiest and safest answer. At one level I speak with devastating authority. The college in America with a visiting lecturer’s program, an auditorium, and three conservative students with mischief in their eyes that has been spared a speech by me during the past ten years can count its irenic blessings. But now, as I undertake a program of three newspaper columns per week, I am, like Liszt, closing my piano (the rueful difference being that in his case the majority of people were made very sad, in my case they are made very glad). I am through with public speaking, except occasionally, and thought to take the opportunity presented by the serene interlude between Christmas and New Year’s to do as Bernard de Voto did in Harper’s a few years before his death, and speak some thoughts on my experiences lecturing at colleges.
Buckley Texas Sojourn
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