The opening chapter of the book that launched the modern conservative movement was about God. That is, the first chapter of William F. Buckley’s 1951 book, God and Man at Yale, was about the modern university’s subversion of faith in God. The conservative movement thus arose out of a dispute in the halls of the academy over the nature of ultimate things. This pattern continues to hold.
It has recently been argued that the sharp decline in the popularity of the humanities on campus is the result of a “second secularization,” a collapse of our regard for high culture that parallels and reflects the broader decline of religious faith. The second secularization is not new, however. It entered public consciousness with the modern campus culture wars, the opening shot of which from the conservative side was the publication of Allan Bloom’s 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind. The 1987–88 dispute over the teaching of Western Civilization at Stanford swiftly followed, as did books like Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals (1990) and Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education (1991).
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