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In October 1951, over twenty thousand Yale University alumni opened their mail to find an unusual piece of advertising. It was a message about the current state of their alma mater. The flyer presented some alarming news: “Do you know that the Yale undergraduate is being drilled in the virtues of unlimited taxation, price-control, paternalistic government and ‘all the things that have been brewed out of Keynes, the Fabians, and Karl Marx himself’?”1 The advertisement went onto explain that Christianity was no longer respected at Yale; instead, professors openly mocked it in their classes. The flyer, from Regnery Press, urged alumni to band together to return their university to its rightful place as the “citadel of conservatism triumphant.”2 The place to turn for solutions, it announced, was William Buckley Jr.’s soon-to-be-published God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom”. The book was an exposé of “collectivist” and antireligious bias at Yale. In it, Buckley called for a restructuring of higher education in which parents, alumni, and trustees, rather than professors, would set the educational agenda.3
A New York Times best seller that launched Buckley's career as the nation's leading conservative pundit, God and Man at Yale was only the most visible example of a much broader right-wing attack on postwar higher education, one sustained by a perceived sense of victimhood. Historians have examined how colleges and universities dismissed dozens of scholars for their supposed ties to the Communist Party during the postwar Red Scare.4 What has received less attention is that activists on the right believed that the only casualties of a politically targeted campaign on campuses were people like themselves. Right-wing radio programs, periodicals, and books regularly lashed out at colleges and universities as bastions of anti-American subversion where patriotic voices were silenced. While attacks on the loyalty of specific groups of American professors had flared up intermittently since the late nineteenth century, never had a movement risen up that accused the entire educational establishment of being in thrall to a foreign power.5 In this conservative discourse, “academic freedom” operated as smokescreen for left and liberal dominance. Conservatives, even as they called for a dramatic purge of the nation's schools and colleges, portrayed themselves as...