Christianize Dartmouth?

National Review, March 23, 1998 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Mr. Buckley is an NR editor-at-large.

I was both pleased and grateful when Dartmouth's Hillel group last week voted to co-sponsor my appearance tonight, and honored that the Roth Center has planned a reception for me after my talk.

I begin, in part for my own sake, by reviewing the circumstances of my visit here. It happens that my talk tonight is only the most recent -- who knows, perhaps the last -- in a series of occasional appearances on this campus that began in the mid Fifties, bespeaking a common disposition, Dartmouth's and my own, to endure pain. I am especially anxious to move step by step because I have felt the need to clarify my own thinking on the subject of Christianity and higher education. The invitation from Mr. Parker was to expand on a short piece I did for the New York Times in November. It was triggered by the inauguration of the Roth Center here and attendant revelations about Dartmouth's past. Had I, Mr. Parker asked me in his letter, weighed sufficiently the implications of what I wrote on that occasion? I had written that in seeking to amend past injustices to Jewish students, Dartmouth ought not to feel any need to forswear its own traditional mission, which is (was?), to use the freighted word I so innocently used a few weeks ago, to Christianize its students.

The response to my summons in the New York Times was at several levels. The first was silence. A silence here amused, there awestruck. The critical reaction was two generations more wizened than when I made my first onward-Christian-soldiers charge. That was done in my book God and Man at Yale. Back then (1951), the dismay of college spokesmen was that anyone should think there was any need to issue any such summons. The religious orientation of Yale, they insisted, was under way, uninterrupted; all flags flying. A committee was deputized to explore the question. Its chairman reported that "there is today [at Yale], more than ever, widespread realization that religion alone can give meaning and purpose to modern life."

But the reaction now is of a very different kind. My teaching assistant at Yale -- in November I was teaching a seminar there in English composition -- is himself a Yale graduate, son and brother of Dartmouth graduates. He wrote to me asking whether I could seriously envision the Jewish president of Dartmouth uttering distinctively Christian preachments on life and manners to Dartmouth's student body. His position was not entirely antagonistic. The young Jewish scholar derided what he labeled the "cartoonishly politically correct" practices at Dartmouth of in effect eliminating "Silent Night" as a Christmastime Glee Club offering. He deplores the contortionist lengths, as described in my current book, that my own prep-school alma mater, the Millbrook School, goes to to conduct one hour's Christmas ceremonies without a single reference to Christmas, let alone to Christ.

At another level, the questions that arose were fundamental questions. The first was the sheer inconceivability that a university with feet so solidly encased in the concrete of secularism could be born again. Sure, one correspondent observed, it is true that as recently as in 1946 Dartmouth President Ernest Martin Hopkins reiterated his understanding that the continuing obligation of Dartmouth was to encourage Christian (Protestant) belief in its students. But since then, everything has changed. Yes, that's true. Almost everything has changed.

About the attitudes and conduct of universities that once hewed to the Christian line quite a lot has been written. There is Professor George Marsden, whose title tells the story of his book: The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief. And there is Dan A. Oren's Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale, which tells of flat-out exclusion of tenure for Jewish faculty in the social sciences and the humanities in those benighted days.

But a trend in the multiculturalist direction was under way. Admissions policies broadened, as if to reflect internal reorientations. In my book on Yale I had remarked the dilution of the Christian tradition. It was no longer the institutional lifeblood at Yale. I quoted from the inaugural address of the scholar who served as president of Yale during my undergraduate years. Charles Seymour had said in 1937, "I call on all members of the faculty as members of a thinking body, freely to recognize the tremendous validity and power of the teachings of Christ in our life-and-death struggle against the forces of selfish materialism." Could any president of a major American university today, even assuming he privately nursed the convictions Mr. Seymour expressed, use such language at an inaugural ceremony? Just imagine hearing such formulations from the next president of Dartmouth. The repercussions would be immense: perplexity and even outrage among the faculty; almost certainly a lawsuit backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, complaining that 15 per cent of Dartmouth's budget was being sent in by the Federal Government, some of it wrested from the pockets of honest and hardworking skeptics, incensed now by their involuntary subsidy of that swinging evangelical, freshly installed as president of Dartmouth by a sleepy board of trustees ignorant of modern times.