Christianize Dartmouth?

I WAS both pleased and grateful when Dartmouth’s Hillel group last week voted to co-sponsor my appearance tonight, and honored that the Roth Center has planned a reception for me after my talk.

I begin, in part for my own sake, by reviewing the circumstances of my visit here. It happens that my talk tonight is only the most recent—who knows, perhaps the last—in a series of occasional appearances on this campus that began in the mid Fifties, bespeaking a common disposition, Dartmouth’s and my own, to endure pain. I am especially anxious to move step by step because I have felt the need to clarify my own thinking on the subject of Christianity and higher education. The invitation from Mr. Parker was to expand on a short piece I did for the New York Times in November. It was triggered by the inauguration of the Roth Center here and attendant revelations about Dartmouth’s past. Had I, Mr. Parker asked me in his letter, weighed sufficiently the implications of what I wrote on that occasion? I had written that in seeking to amend past injustices to Jewish students, Dartmouth ought not to feel any need to forswear its own traditional mission, which is (was?), to use the freighted word I so innocently used a few weeks ago, to Christianize its students.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review magazine in 1955.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

I WAS both pleased and grateful when Dartmouth’s Hillel group last week voted to co-sponsor my appearance tonight, and honored that the Roth Center has planned a reception for me after my talk.

I begin, in part for my own sake, by reviewing the circumstances of my visit here. It happens that my talk tonight is only the most recent—who knows, perhaps the last—in a series of occasional appearances on this campus that began in the mid Fifties, bespeaking a common disposition, Dartmouth’s and my own, to endure pain. I am especially anxious to move step by step because I have felt the need to clarify my own thinking on the subject of Christianity and higher education. The invitation from Mr. Parker was to expand on a short piece I did for the New York Times in November. It was triggered by the inauguration of the Roth Center here and attendant revelations about Dartmouth’s past. Had I, Mr. Parker asked me in his letter, weighed sufficiently the implications of what I wrote on that occasion? I had written that in seeking to amend past injustices to Jewish students, Dartmouth ought not to feel any need to forswear its own traditional mission, which is (was?), to use the freighted word I so innocently used a few weeks ago, to Christianize its students.