The Road to Yale’s Free-Speech Crisis

by Eliana Johnson @elianayjohnson

 

 It began in the ’60s. 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.”....Read more