In 1951, 25-year-old military veteran and Yale graduate William F. Buckley published his first book, God and Man at Yale. Buckley made the scandalous claim that Yale professors preached atheism and “collectivism” instead of true religion and free-market capitalism. If we’re stuck in a 2024 mindset, we can imagine Yale’s defenders retorting, “So what?”
Indeed, loyal Yale students more or less ignored the accusations of collectivism but rejected those of atheism. McGeorge Bundy, Class of 1941, then teaching at Harvard, argued in a scathing critique of Buckley’s book that “Yale is more religious than the rest of Protestant America, more religious than it was a generation ago.” In 1951, “For God, for Country, and for Yale” was still the university’s guiding principle.
There is an irresolvable tension between education and the free pursuit of truth.
His recent book, “They don’t teach that! The battle for university classroomsProfessor Keith Whittington of Princeton University (soon to become Yale University) echoes University of Alabama Law Professor Paul Horowitz’s argument that “universities are ‘First Amendment institutions’ because of their central role in the creation, research, and dissemination of ideas.”
The history of American constitutional law and religion should make Whittington and Horowitz’s seemingly innocuous assertion skeptical. The First Amendment was enacted at a time when universities had not yet claimed a central role in the creation and exploration of ideas. Universities were founded to spread ideas, but the ideas that American universities claimed to spread were the truth or light of Protestant Christianity. Harvard University’s Veritas, Colombian Lumensand Yale University Lux and Veritas or Urim Ve ThummimThe greatest scientist of the founding era in America was Benjamin Franklin, who helped found a university, though he never attended or taught there. The University of Pennsylvania is the alma mater of two recent presidents, and its motto is more classical than Christian, but still edifying. The law that won’t die — Laws without morals are useless.
Colleges and universities have a crucial role in the original understanding of the First Amendment, not as centers of free inquiry but as religious and educational institutions that prepared young people for adulthood as qualified “bachelors” with strong faith and strong morals, and that trained clergy to become qualified “masters,” teachers who would carry on that faith and morals.
What faith and what morals? One of the geniuses of the First Amendment as originally conceived was that it left that question for the people and state governments of each state to answer for themselves, while Congress protected these institutions by law and even subsidized them with land grants for lands taken from Indians. But the assumption was that whatever the diversity of religious doctrine, men and women who sincerely sought to live and contribute to the same society would agree on workable and justifiable moral principles and practices.
Universities, public or private, are granted privileges by law, and the most valuable privilege is the privilege to attract money in the form of donations and tuition fees. Universities are exempt from corporate taxes, so they receive tax-free income in the form of donations and can build endowments. Universities also have the privilege of accreditation, which is legal recognition that their graduates are worthy of privileges. Accreditation is what attracts students. Without a significant, legally recognized diploma, graduates cannot become dentists, pharmacists, public school teachers, lawyers, or physical therapists.
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Privileges must be justified by obligations, and in a democracy, the role of voters and the officials they elect is to monitor those privileges, reform them when necessary, and hold privileged institutions accountable for the fulfillment of those obligations.
One might argue, as Whittington would probably argue, that among these obligations is the obligation to provide academic freedom. All universities should do this, and according to Whittington, public universities Mustallowing individual teachers to explore truth from their own perspective and teach the truths they determine to be important and useful.
It is true that in the second half of the 20th century, universities became major centers of idea generation and research, and in that role were declared core institutions of the First Amendment, but to understand what the Constitution requires, we should not start with that era.
In the second half of the 20th century, the very concept of constitutionalism was the most controversial and the subject of the most fierce attacks not only from judges and politicians but also from law school professors. Never before or since have so many Americans believed that the Constitution means what the Supreme Court says it means. This, of course, is an act that eviscerates constitutionalism and the rule of law.
Whittington, however, takes a different view. He treats the First Amendment as it pertains to academic freedom not in its original intent, but in the judgments of the Supreme Court, primarily from Robert Jackson’s inauguration until William Brennan’s retirement. Those justices: Dictate There is no discussion of what benefits the freedoms they support bring to society. Whittington wonders which of those freedoms Dictate Even though it is true, it is treated as if it is true enough because of the authority of the person who says it. This may work in courtroom argument, but it has no place in social science, or in the policy debates to which social science should abide.
Pluralism is not freedom. Universities have precious privileges, and they can only justify and preserve them by advancing the cause of “one nation under God.”
“Academic freedom” is simply the American English translation of the German term “academic freedom.” Educational freedomAcademic freedom first received significant expression in the United States with the founding of the American Association of University Professors in 1915. Academic freedom was brought to America during the Progressive Era under Wilson from Imperial Germany, where there was no freedom of speech or freedom of the press and all recognized religions were regulated by the state. German universities at the time were institutions of higher education that only admitted students who were presumed to have completed their secondary education at a gymnasium, and the first degree offered was a doctorate.
American universities offer bachelor’s degree-granting college programs that complete the secondary education that undergraduate students began in high school. Educational freedom It therefore invited a more skeptical response than ever before in our free and pluralistic democracy.
In an age when the academic freedom of individual professors is becoming entrenched as a judge-decided “constitution,” real progress in our understanding of ourselves and the world is slowing and, in some cases, reversing. Steve Saylor writes about Edward Said, the intellectual whose attitude and rhetoric helped drive this year’s campus protests: “Knowledge is power, so he wanted Westerners to be more ignorant about their own countries in order to weaken the power they had over them.”
In fact, there is an irresolvable tension between education and the free pursuit of truth: Those who teach must believe they know what is important and true, while those who research must believe there are things they don’t know that are worth spending time looking into. Whittington repeatedly acknowledges that what the First Amendment protects in the classroom is not free classroom discussion but the right to limit classroom discussion to what teachers deem wise.
Fully realizing that wisdom requires more than scholarship, Christian universities separated their philosophy and theology faculties. The pursuit of knowledge without presuppositions was confined to the philosophy faculty, while the theology faculty formulated and taught doctrine, that is, the teachings of God revealed in the canonical Scriptures. The rulers of the university were, of course, graduates of the theology faculty, either as presidents, deans, or rectors, or external ecclesiastical “visitors” or “overseers” who watched over the university to make sure it did not throw off the yoke of God’s wisdom.
In our pluralistic democracy, where we don’t have a federal church, democracy must take the place of hierarchy to function. The Voice of the People, the Voice of God As the Latin translation of the Hebrew Book of Isaiah declares, the voice of the people is the voice of God, and the only legitimate oracles of that “divine” voice are the men and women appointed to office by popular election and the officials they appoint or elect.
But just as Americans are and always have been religious pluralists, they are and always have been higher education pluralists, and they have wisely left it largely to each denomination, each board, each state board to understand “God and country” in its own way.
This pluralism is not freedom. Universities have precious privileges, and they can only justify and preserve those privileges by advancing the cause of America, “one nation under God.” All American universities are settler colonial universities, and they have been granted precious privileges by settler-dominated legislative, executive, and judicial branches. In exchange for those privileges, they are obligated to advance the cause of the American people, who are themselves immigrants, some forced and some voluntarily.
How should the university advance the American cause? In a pluralistic system of higher education, this is a question that must be answered primarily by university administrators and regents. And indeed, a university president reminded of his duty to advance the American cause, like any other man reminded of his duty, will acknowledge that duty, even if he unscrupulously wishes to pass judgment for himself on the success of that duty.
It is the job of the public and staff to ensure that the University is run by honest, competent men and women who accept the obligations that come with academic privileges. But merely accepting is not enough. We need to demand the best from the University, and when the University repeatedly and consistently fails to deliver, we need to carefully and thoughtfully modify the University’s privileges, modify the mechanisms that monitor the use of those privileges, or both.
America will not survive unless we return our universities to their original mission of cultivating religion and morality. John Adams wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people; it is utterly inadequate for the government of any other.” Or, to quote the motto of Ohio University, the first federally chartered university, founded in part with funds from college land stolen by Ohio Indians: Doctrine of Religion; Pre-Omnibus Virtus — religion, learning, good manners, and above all, virtue.
