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Buckley launched himself to prominence as a critic of the academy. His 1951 book, God and Man at Yale, established lines of attack that remain resonant to this day. That aspect of Buckley’s legacy is captured in a sweeping and long-anticipated new biography by the journalist Sam Tanenhaus.
I sat down with Tanenhaus over Zoom to discuss Buckley as a creature of the campus, shifts in tone and temperament among conservative critics of higher ed, and what Buckley would have made of the Trump administration’s aggressive pressure campaign against colleges. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Evan Goldstein: Let’s start with Buckley at Yale. Even as an undergraduate he was a remarkable gadfly, raconteur, and provocateur.
Sam Tanenhaus: What Bill Buckley had was a kind of intellectual charisma, and it was something people hadn’t seen. I talked to his classmates, and one of them said that Bill was a kind of cosmic presence. Many of these guys — and it was all guys; Yale didn’t go co-ed until 1969 — had been in the military, including Buckley, though he’d not served in combat. They were a new generation. They were confident and at ease on campus. But Buckley was different. He would sit in class and raise his hand and challenge the professor — you didn’t do that back then. He was there to declare war right from the start.
He won the competition to be the editor — called chairman — of the Yale Daily News. For Buckley, that meant writing the daily editorial. They’re written with a polish and finesse you almost can’t believe. Buckley was arguably the greatest campus journalist of the 20th century because he made it a platform right from the start. What he does is go after one of his professors. Again, totally against the gentleman’s rules. He calls him out by name, Raymond Kennedy, a sociology professor who was an early proponent of cultural anthropology and told stories in the Franz Boas tradition. If you go to distant countries that seem “primitive,” you will find practices that, in the eyes of social scientists, make just as much sense as, say, the Catholic ritual of the Eucharist where people think they’re eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Christ. Kennedy says this in class. Buckley is shocked. He can’t believe a professor at Yale would denigrate Christianity in this way.
So Buckley’s already got his message, and the message is not that Kennedy doesn’t respect religion enough. It’s that he uses the classroom as a pulpit to say things about religion that if donors and alumni heard, they would stop writing checks. It’s genius. So he wrote God and Man at Yale, and it was a total sensation.
Goldstein: The book comes out only a year after Buckley graduates.
Buckley was in some ways the first of his kind. He made the conservative program sound radical.
Tanenhaus: Yes, and it’s timed to Yale’s 250th anniversary.
Goldstein: In God and Man at Yale, Buckley critiqued anti-Christian attitudes on campus. He critiqued the teaching of collectivist economic policies that he viewed as anathema to the free market. Then there was a third line of attack that feels very contemporary, which is that Yale — and by extension other universities — fostered a homogeneous intellectual environment prone to liberal groupthink and intolerant of dissenting views. This has become a staple of conservative criticism of academe. Did it have much precedent in 1951?
Tanenhaus: While there had been attacks on the Ivy League for many years, going all the way back to the anti-Communist investigations and hearings of the 1930s, Buckley’s attack came from inside the house. That’s what made it different. It gave a muckraking quality to his book. Buckley is telling you what really goes on in the Ivy League.
Goldstein: You write that God and Man at Yale was “more than an audacious performance by a very young man. It contained the seeds of a modern movement.” And from the start, campus organizing was a big part of that movement.
Tanenhaus: “Young conservative” was a contradiction in terms back then, so Buckley was in some ways the first of his kind. He made the conservative program sound radical. He said it in the first issue of National Review: We are “radical conservatives,” another term that might seem like an oxymoron. If you’re conservative, don’t you want to preserve? Well, if you’ve decided the opposition is really the enemy, then you’re going to oppose them radically. Buckley embraced it, believing that the only way to pull the next generation to the right was to infuse them with the same radical spirit that the socialists had early in the 20th century, and that filtered through to the New Deal. To accomplish that, you need to do a magazine. You have to take over campuses. If Buckley was invited to a campus and they had no fee to pay him, he would go anyway because he thought it was worth it. Not because he was a charitable man but because those were minds he wanted to mold and shape.
Goldstein: Let me drill down, Sam, on something you said earlier about Buckley’s critique of Yale being so resonant because it was coming from inside the Ivy League. This guy with the patrician manner was pulling back the curtain on the elite. This became a durable political template. Vice President JD Vance, Gov. Ron DeSantis, Sen. Josh Hawley, Sen. Ted Cruz — all are products of the Ivy League who then made a large part of their public profile lambasting their alma maters.
Tanenhaus: Some people will say, Look how hypocritical they are. These guys get these fancy, gold-plated educations. They get super well-connected. But you can also say they felt genuinely estranged on these campuses. Not Buckley, who came up through the prep schools. But I love a phrase Buckley came up with when he was starting National Review: liberal monopolists. It captures how anyone esteemed in society is expected to hold a certain set of opinions. I think there is some of that at work. You don’t use the right words. You don’t get the reference. You don’t pick up a cultural reference. And it makes you feel dumb.
Goldstein: For Buckley, as critical as he was of Yale specifically and the academy broadly, he seemed to maintain close ties and even a genuine affection. He taught at Yale over the years. His archive is housed there. He received an honorary degree later in life.
Tanenhaus: Bill’s son, Christopher Buckley, said when he was growing up the expectation was he better get into Yale. Bill was very proud of his Yale connection. And look at the dedication page for God and Man at Yale: “For Yale.” He could not imagine a country without a Yale, without great Ivy League universities. He always accepted invitations to speak at Harvard. He was flattered to be invited to go to Harvard. I think now it feels more foreign to have an institutional attachment even as you’re attacking the institution.
Goldstein: A question about intellectual and activist styles. You’ve read Christopher Rufo. You’re familiar with Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA. From them I detect more of a burn-it-down energy, distinct from the Buckley mold.
Tanenhaus: Buckley had a different reverence for what the life of the mind was about. He wrote a class-reunion speech in 1990, I think, where he talked about the professors he admired, how beautifully they spoke, how they could lecture without notes and every sentence was polished. He remembered the pleasures of the classroom.
Buckley went after higher ed as a kind of amateur. He has many interests — sailing, skiing, writing spy novels. And one of his hobbies is attacking universities. I don’t know Christopher Rufo, and I don’t mean to disparage him. I think he’s quite a clever polemicist and his campaign has been effective. But he feels more like a professional to me, like he’s on a mission. Whereas Buckley is going to take a little time off to tell you about the wines he’s been drinking or a funny thing that happened to a friend of his. He had a more rounded and, as I say, amateurish view — amateur in the classic sense of a lover of life.
I want to emphasize this temperamental difference between Buckley and the new generation, because temperament is really important. We live in a time where opinions are everything. All that matters is what side of the issue you’re on. I understand it. I get why people feel that way. But to question somebody’s goodwill or character on the basis of opinions is a tricky thing to do.
Goldstein: On the topic of temperament, I want to ask about The Dartmouth Review, a notorious conservative campus publication that began in 1980. Buckley sat on its board from its founding until his death in 2008. During that time, The Dartmouth Review became a locus of a certain kind of campus conservatism that also seems temperamentally distinct from Buckley’s. But he defended it.
Tanenhaus: Here’s one basic difference: Buckley was the editor of Yale’s main campus publication, the Yale Daily News. The Dartmouth Review is an alternative publication funded by alumni. That gives it autonomy but also detaches it from the campus. Somebody who edited The Dartmouth Review told me it was all done for the donors. It wasn’t read by students. Most of them weren’t going to read a story that mocked what was then called Ebonics. No, that’s done to please the elders.
It became a kind of conveyor belt to a future in the Reagan years. Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza came out of The Dartmouth Review. They were playing rough in a different way. Yet Bill Buckley supported it, and that’s part of the paradox that I struggled to reconcile. And you can’t reconcile it. People are protean. You end up with a Picasso portrait of different planes of a face rather than a rounded, symmetrical, and integrated one. That’s what made him an extraordinary public figure. He could be so many different people.
Goldstein: You began work on this book decades ago. You never could have anticipated the political environment in which it would eventually be published. But here we are. The Trump administration has pursued an extraordinarily aggressive pressure campaign against higher ed. What would Buckley be saying if he were still writing his column or debating on Firing Line?
Tanenhaus: I think he’d say, I told you so. In the late 1950s, Buckley wrote a column about the National Defense Education Act, a post-Sputnik attempt by the government to pour money into universities to try to catch up in what was then called the arms race and the space war. This was hundreds of millions of dollars, and recipients had to sign loyalty oaths. Some of the universities refused to do it. And Buckley said: If you have a problem with that, don’t accept the money. He made a prediction that sooner or later the government was going to start poking into the admissions process and see who’s being admitted and who is not, and call universities to account for it. And I thought, my God, even before affirmative action was a blink in somebody’s eye, Buckley knows it’s coming. So he’d be asking, Why did you take money from the government in the first place?
