Bill Buckley was one of the first to suggest there was trouble brewing on campus when he published God and Man at Yale in 1951. He argued that Yale University was doing more to strengthen students’ belief in godlessness and Communism than in Christianity and capitalism. It was an early warning.
That became clear in the 1960s and 1970s, when universities were the churning center of the anti-war movement, with students rioting against campus police and occupying administrative buildings. Those struggles, which focused in part on accusations of American oppression in the Third World, fed directly into the conflicts of the ’80s and ’90s over the proper role of the Western canon in undergraduate education. It was in 1987 that Jesse Jackson led Stanford students in a protest of a then-required course in the literature and philosophy of the West, chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture’s got to go.”
Throughout these battles, Yale has been both the breeding ground for and the adjudicator of higher education’s challenges — from the Buckley-instigated debate over whether universities should hire Communists to Yale’s heavy-handed attempts to maintain order in the Vietnam era to the debate in the ’90s over a $20 million donation for a course in the study of Western civilization that was ultimately rejected by the university. All these episodes were subjects of national headlines — and all reflected larger national struggles.
In the debates over free speech that raged in the 1960s and 1970s, however, Yale bucked the national trend, issuing a report that stated unequivocally the centrality of free expression to the purpose of the university. The Woodward report — as it was called after C. Vann Woodward, the eminent historian who chaired the committee that wrote it — came in response to a series of events in which speech had been stifled. The report concluded that while certain speech might cause “shock, hurt, and anger” — consequences not to be dismissed — the right to free expression was more important. If the university was to serve its central purpose — to foster “free access of knowledge” — nothing could supersede that right.
With campus activism warming up once more, events at Yale are again providing a window onto the national scene. Last fall, the school was engulfed in a months-long scandal over an e-mail about Halloween costumes that ended with the resignation of two liberal professors, Nicholas and Erika Christakis, from their administrative posts. At root was the collision between the Christakises’ deeply held belief in free speech — for which they have a long record of advocacy — and the university’s devotion to cultural diversity, particularly when student protesters are armed with their emotions.
