![]() ![]() I reread GAMAY this fall to try to understand why American universities so reliably disappoint conservatives, decade after decade after decade. The perceived persecution of white men and commitment to feminism and anti-racism that addle Buckley’s intellectual offspring didn’t touch him in the 1940s, as there were no other races or sexes at Yale to offend, mistreat, envy, or fear. Nor would he, in 1951, have stood with those who opposed diversity, political correctness, or “wokeness,” if only because the Yale of his time was almost uniformly white and eminently male, an institution that wouldn’t admit substantial numbers of Black men for another 15 years and women for another 20. It’s hard to imagine he ever knew the anguish of so much as a Maidstone Club snubbing. He was popular with the liberals of his caste, who loved to debate him (many won see: James Baldwin). He achieved blockbuster success, first with GAMAY, then with some 60 other books his long-running TV show, Firing Line and National Review, which he founded in 1955. The casting call seems to be for self-styled outlaws with lively online newsletters or massive fortunes, along with credible claims to having been canceled.īuckley wouldn’t have qualified. Then, just this month, the college administrator and Shakespeare scholar Pano Kanelos announced that he and a cadre of renegade ideologues are starting a school in Texas expressly to exorcise from academia the nameless ghosts that have spooked conservatives since GAMAY. GAMAY has since inspired seven decades of tribute acts by more and less debonair conservatives. Chagrin pervaded GAMAY, as Buckley later branded the book, but it also stung in a satisfying way-a high-handed swat at the Ivy League by a debonair twerp who’d only recently graduated. ![]() published his keening lament for American higher education, God and Man at Yale.
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