Notes & asides

* WFB's remarks recorded for Hillsdale College's gala dinner launching the Founders' Campaign and celebrating the unveiling of Buckley Online (www.hillsdale.edu/Buckley).

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: Dressed as you are in your finery, as if for opening night at the Metropolitan Opera, you might be voicing the fugitive thought that I, sitting in my office in Stamford, Connecticut, am more comfortable than you. If that is your fleeting thought, please know that only a very painful accident affecting my mobility keeps me away from your distinguished and lively company. I say "lively company," confident that you have in reach a glass of wine. Please note that I do not, even though there are no rules on this subject, operative in this little place, that aren't of my own devising.

So ... welcome to my innermost sanctum, where, decade after decade, I write the material Hillsdale has done me the honor of memorializing. I don't know whether the camera is giving you a generous view of my own private pandemonium, but I do hope you have spotted my stained-glass windows. They are here to elevate my thoughts, when this is not achieved by what I write down. And they console me now, deprived as I am of your company in real time.

Many of us, especially those who recall when they were young in the unique sense in which freshman college students are young, have marveled at the offerings of the information age. When I was a freshman, we had dictionaries and encyclopedias, and I remember discovering something called Facts on File. This service abridged the week's news in an 8-page bulletin. At the end of every month, subscribers received a summary, with autocratically worded instructions to throw away the anachronized weekly bulletins.

And then every quarter, we received a three-month round-up with--once again--hortatory instructions to discard accumulated monthly issues. And finally, you guessed it, at year's end you received a bound volume incorporating the news for the entire year. Oh yes! With instructions to throw away everything from Facts on File other than the year's collection.

Facts on File survives, but of course for much of the research people do there is no longer any such phenomenon as printed matter, unless you take it into your head actually to print something you have read on the screen. And you can read all about everything on your screen.

There are, for instance, numerous entries under the heading "Hillsdale College." One of them even gives the campus location as "north of College Street." The site does not tell you what's located, in Hillsdale, south of College Street. The researcher no doubt exists--or if not, is a spark in the eye of his mother--who will look into the question and provide the information.

Meanwhile you are free to poke about, exploring other aspects of Hillsdale College. I found such listed in one entry which began with "Tuition & Financial Aid." Then on to "Ranking," "Transfer Students," "Services and Facilities," "Campus Life," "Sports," "Academics," "International Students," "Student Body," "Extracurriculars," "Disabled Students," ... and finally--lo and behold--"Mission."

However resourceful are the facilities of the Internet, they are insufficient to define the mission of most modern universities, inasmuch as the very idea of a collegiate mission is held to be discriminatory. You see, in order to have a mission, you are required to acknowledge the existence of antimissions, even as to include-requires that you exclude, as the late Mr. Derrida spent a lifetime pointing out. And to do this--a point I tried to make in a book published in 1951 about Yale--is a transgression on academic freedom. Academic freedom holds implicitly that all ideas, when exposed to student eyes, should start out "even in the race"; so that to encourage freedom, let alone to encourage the proposition that there is a correlation between freedom and decentralized government, is profane.

Concerted academic thought designed to illuminate such insights is held to be corrupting. Corporate academic aims impose upon the student by trying to conscript him to aims other than those that float up in that student's pure, deracinated mind, unfreighted by empirical history or pondered thought. And so we have the contemporary absorption with alien and disparate ideas, which, happily, are pursued mostly with nonmissionary zeal.

This is hardly to suggest that a college that professes a mission therefore excludes the expression of alien ideas or even the germination of them. Ideas of many kinds are expressed on this venerable campus, for instance. At a base political level, I remember debating here with Senators Hart and McGovern, the resolution before the house being that government is not the solution, but the problem. Thanks to Hillsdale's epochal new information service, "Buckley Online," I have been able, even in my incapacitation, to pull up the transcript of that televised debate. I quote from my opening statement: