God and Man at Yale

In point of fact, the argument I shall advance does not even require that free enterprise and Christianity be “good,” but merely that the educational overseers of a private university should consider them to be “good.”

“No aspect of my administration [President Seymour has written] has brought deeper satisfaction than the devoted and fruitful service of Mr. Lovett in the maintenance of religious values on our campus. Not merely as pastor of the church and as Woolsey Professor of Biblical Literature, but in his personal contacts and with his genius for stimulating cooperative effort, he has unobtrusively and effectively brought religious interest into the center of college life” (Report of the President of Yale University to the Alumni, 1949–1950, p. 32). Mr. Seymour here pays tribute to Mr. Lovett in two distinct senses. The first acknowledges his devoted service and personal interest, and I cannot see two points of view about this; the other applauds his religious influence and the results it has had on the Yale campus. This is, as I hope to point out, another thing entirely.

I make no apology for defining “religion” in the Christian sense, and eschewing the nebulous, personalized definitions given to that term by so many latter-day psychologists, sociologists, et al. Here and elsewhere, along with Webster, I mean by religion a belief in a Supreme Being, “arousing reverence, love, gratitude, the will to obey and serve, and the like.” Other definitions, perhaps more topical and specifically relating to Christianity, are the World Council of Churches’ “a belief in Jesus Christ as God and Saviour,” and the Federal Council of Churches’ “Jesus Christ as Divine Lord and Saviour.” In February 1951, Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, a prominent Protestant spokesman, addressed the Yale University Christian Association, and was unequivocal: “Christian faith stands or falls on the proposition that a character named Jesus, in a particular place at a particular time in history, is more than a man in history, but is a revelation of the mystery of self and of the ultimate mystery of existence.”

It is important to bear in mind that what is relevant to this survey is the teacher’s attitude as it is understood by his students, even if this be, at times, at variance with personal convictions that the teacher keeps to himself.

The figures are for the academic year 1950–51, which list 472 persons as enrolled in the Department. These figures are themselves deceptive since many students take more than one course and are thus counted twice, or three times.

There has been serious discussion, at least in undergraduate Yale, of the advisability of a requirement in the field of religion. One student submitted a concrete set of proposals to the Aurelian Honor Society, which voted them down by a narrow margin in the fall of 1949. President Seymour was at least not shocked when the proposal was informally made to him that such a requirement should be instituted if there are to be any requirements at all. But he cited financial difficulties and a number of additional technical obstacles.

There is no question that the scientism and ersatz objectivity that characterize the teaching of many courses in natural sciences can lead to doctrinaire secularism; but by and large, the student is less prone to formulate a religious orientation on the basis of attitudes in the pure sciences than he is in those where values are more urgently relevant.

The relationship of sociology and religion is discussed at greater length in Appendix A.

Although it was classified as among the strongest departments at Yale, academically speaking, by President-emeritus Charles Seymour in his final Report to the Alumni, distributed in December 1950.

For a more extended analysis of psychology and religion, and a résumé of Professor Gordon W. Allport’s research into religion in psychology texts, see Appendix D.

I.e. White Shoe, i.e., Long Island polo set.

In February 1951, Dwight Hall sponsored a series of lectures by Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr as the principal feature of its Religious Emphasis Week. Until something better comes along, the Yale Daily News’s editorial comment on the Conference will stick in my mind as the ne plus ultra of contemporary liberalism: “‘In these tragic times we are all faced with reevaluating our beliefs.’ So reads the Christian Mission’s brochure on the Niebuhr talks. But now that they’re all over, we fail to see how they have helped in this search. The next time a Religious Emphasis Week rolls around, we would propose the following: let’s have a forum in which we’d hear, as well as the Christian, the Taoist point of view, the Buddhist, the Mohammedan, the Jewish, the Hindu, and so on. Here would be some real meat for thought: here would be a real basis for re-evaluation of beliefs. . . .” This was too much even for the Yale student carefully nurtured in tolerance and relativism. Sample reply: “Today’s editorial is a bogus and a phony, pretending to the merit of honest criticism but really possessing only the false splendor of irrelevance and condescension. . . .”

The American Council on Education, the Edward W. Hazen Foundation, and the National Council on Religion in Higher Education.

Published after vast research and seventeen months of study, in March 1947.

It is seen here, and throughout, that I look upon economics as a science of adjustment between the appetites of man, which are limitless, and the resources of nature, which are limited. I am, further, committed to the classical doctrine that the optimum adjustment—private property, production for profit and by private ownership, and regulation by a free competitive economy—brings not only maximum prosperity, but also maximum freedom. I therefore consider any infringement upon the component parts of the free economy to be unsound economics. It goes without saying that I consider such infringements as militating against maximum freedom.

No mention is made of the fact that in many activities in Russia today, the realities of economics have prevailed upon the classless society, to the extent that the disparity in incomes is far more accentuated than in the United States. Twenty years of failure have brought about almost total desertion of the Marxian motto, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

I am careful not to imply that large-scale government spending will not relieve unemployment. It is indisputable that it will—for the short run. “All I know about the long run,” Keynes once quipped, “is that we are all dead.” One of Keynes’s most distinguished critics, Professor Ludwig von Mises, retorted that this was “the only correct declaration of the neo-British Cambridge school.” But it must be realized that unemployment is never a problem if freedom is to be the sacrificial offering; unemployment is unknown to the Soviet Union. We can, then, distinguish more clearly the line that divides the individualist and the collectivist, for the latter sets full employment as the first goal of any society, and its realization is not to be obstructed by any consideration of private property, freedom of production, freedom of investment, or freedom of job selection. The former recognizes that some fluctuations in employment are inevitable in the free, expanding economy. It is the price one has to pay for a secular trend toward maximum freedom and greater and greater prosperity. The individualist insists that drastic depressions are the results of credit inflation (not excessive savings, as the Keynesians have it), which at all times in history has been caused by direct government action or by government influence. As for aggravated unemployment, the individualist insists that it is exclusively the result of government intervention through inflation, wage rigidities, burdensome taxes, and restrictions on trade and production such as price controls and tariffs. The inflation that comes inevitably with government pump-priming soon catches up with the laborer, wipes away any real increase in his wages, discourages private investment, and sets off a new deflationary spiral which can in turn only be counteracted by more coercive and paternalistic government policies. And so it is that the “long run” is very soon a-coming, and the harmful effects of government intervention are far more durable than those that are sustained by encouraging the unhampered free market to work out its own destiny.

“Here is one clear answer, Professor Tarshis,” wrote Rose Wilder Lane in her review of the Tarshis book for the National Economic Council, August 1947. “There is a limit to debt, fixed by the debtor’s ability to pay it. This limit operates on private debt, because private borrowers have no means of compelling lenders to lend them money. . . .”

It is ironic that this debonair attitude about inflation has come home to roost. The purchasing power of the 1932 dollar now wavers at forty cents. If Yale’s capital funds, a substantial portion of which are invested in fixed income-bearing securities, had kept pace with inflation, they would today be worth well over $275 million, and yield, at prevailing returns, $12,375,000 yearly. Instead, the University must struggle along with a $141 million endowment with its $5,038,000 return. This has necessitated drastic educational curtailments and, ça va sans dire, desperate appeals to the alumni, who are, it seems, to make up the difference, and to continue to support Yale’s economic professors and texts in their cries for more and more inflation.

These economists might well have quoted Lord Keynes in one of his more sober moments. Fifteen years before he published his General Theory he wrote, in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, “There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing bases of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

See Appendix G for a partial list of American colleges and universities that have adopted the texts of Samuelson, Tarshis, Morgan, and Bowman and Bach.

The Course Critique of 1950, published by the Yale Daily News as a consensus of undergraduate opinion on the various courses in the curriculum, says of the Economics of the Business Firm: “. . . Mr. Saxon was criticized [by his students] for his very opinionated point of view. His ideas represent those of the last century and are generally considered out-dated. . . . Mr. Hastings also is very conservative and his interpretation of the material covered reflects his biased thinking. Most of his ideas are considered out-dated.” I know of no more eloquent testimony to the success of the collectivists and the thoroughness of the basic course in economics than this bland dismissal of individualism as “out-dated.”

Simons’s pamphlet is now (1950–51) also being used in the basic economics course.

L. S. Lyon et al., Government and Economic Life (Brookings, 1939); Arthur R. Burns, Decline of Competition (McGraw-Hill, 1936); H. Leslie Purdy, Corporate Concentration and Public Policy (Prentice-Hall, 1942); John M. Clark, Social Control of Business (McGraw-Hill, 1939); Corwin D. Edwards, Maintaining Competition (McGraw-Hill, 1949).

This marked a dramatic departure from notions about economics that Mr. Furniss once held, as witness the textbook, Economics (New York: Macmillan Co., rev. ed., 1940), which he coauthored, and its adherence to the classical line.

See, for example, Economic Council Review of Books, August 1950.

In answer to one critic of the use of the Tarshis text, President Seymour wrote, incredibly, “I do not understand that it is advocating the doctrines of Keynes as desirable for the American economy.” In his book, Tarshis admits himself to be a disciple of Keynes in so many words (p. 346).

The University Council is discussed later in this book.

Governor John Davis Lodge, for example, is a Harvard man. Yale president James Rowland Angell, 1921–37, was not a Yale graduate.

In the past, the Nominating Committee occasionally came forth with only one nominee. This blatant imposition on the alumni aroused so much criticism that the rules were changed to forbid fewer than two nominees.

I picked Mr. Stevens’s name at random. The Magazine’s biographical sketch of any other member of the Corporation would have served as well.

In point of fact, although to my knowledge this is unusual, the president of the Alumni Board, Edwin Blair, is also a member of the Corporation.

In the circumstances, it is not difficult to understand the incredible ignorance of Corporation members themselves about the Yale scene. As an example, one member of the Corporation, who has sat with that body for thirteen years, and, as a “successor to an original trustee,” will do so until retirement age, assuming good behavior; a man whose curiosity and knowledge are well above the Corporation mean, told me in February 1951 that Professor Blanshard, chairman of the Yale Department of Philosophy, was a “good Quaker.” I am sure he found it hard to believe me when I told him Mr. Blanshard was an atheist, though the professor has never made any secret of this, even from the Corporation members.

1951’s columnist, Henry B. Hager, made his first appearance in the December issue of Y.A.M. He confessed disappointment with President Griswold’s inaugural address and with a freshman rally. He lasted one issue. His successor appears to be better disciplined.

I refer here, and in succeeding chapters, more often to the policies and pronouncements of President-emeritus Charles Seymour than to those few that President A. Whitney Griswold has made during the short period since he went into office. It is impossible to make significant generalizations about Mr. Griswold’s policies at this early date, or to assume that they will differ substantially from that of his predecessor.

The Yale Corporation By-Laws (Article 56) stipulate that “Committees of the Council shall study the aims and needs of particular areas in the University; they shall submit their findings and recommendations to the Council as a whole, where the reports of all committees shall be coordinated and presented to the President and Corporation for action.”

The address appears in full in Appendix F.

Although it was ironic that the principal alumni speaker, W. Stuart Symington, then secretary of the air force, must have done his share of “upsetting” the guests who were to attend the War Memorial Dedication Services. Mr. Symington painted a stark picture of Russian might, and indicated that a world struggle might not be indefinitely postponed.

This committee consisted of Mr. Lucius F. Robinson, president of the Council, Mr. Frank Ashburn, Mr. William Sheffield Cowles, Mr. John Hay Whitney, and Mr. R. S. Holden, secretary (and assistant to the president).

I do not mean to imply that simply because my viewpoint was not energetically circularized, the Council proved itself ipso facto ineffective. The Council clearly must screen out patently absurd ideas and recommendations. But I believe there are enough people interested in the ideas I presented to have warranted some public examination of their merits. If not this, I should think that the Council would at least itself have pursued these ideas, which could not possibly have been adequately discussed in the course of one afternoon. And anyway, what issue have they considered of sufficient general interest to refer to the alumni at large?

The reader is no doubt weary of seeing quotation marks around “academic freedom.” Hereafter, I shall mostly dispense with them, except occasionally, so that they may serve as a reminder that I am at sword’s point with the common usage of the term, as I shall explain later.

Professor Kirkland excoriates General Eisenhower for stating in his inaugural address as president of Columbia, that universities should teach “the American Way of Life.” His patience is also short with the President’s Commission on Higher Education for drawing up specific educational objectives for American colleges and universities. With regard to the non-Communist oaths that are increasingly required in so many educational institutions, Kirkland waxes wrathful and echoes Emerson on the Fugitive Slave Act: “This filthy enactment was made in the nineteenth century by men who can read and write. By God, I will not obey it!” “Personally,” Kirkland adds hastily, “I recoil from this alternative.”

“This test might have validity if the individual were compelled to sign the subscription [the Communist Party oath] and forbidden to depart from it. By and large these conditions do not prevail in a democratic society. Men give allegiance to creeds because their reason convinces them these creeds are sound; they are equally free, at the same dictate, to withdraw from them” (Freedom and the University, p. 10).

I recognize that having classified democracy and totalitarianism as values rather than as truth and error I am taking a liberty in saying that truth did not vanquish in Italy or in Germany. But I am assuming that the relativism that guides most of our academic freedomites is not so rigid as to impel them to state that truth did indeed vanquish in Germany and Italy. I recognize also that truth is supposed to emerge “over the long turn.” But aside from the pragmatic refutation of this theory, revealed by historical persistence of error at so many times and in so many places, “the triumph of truth over the long turn” is logically indefensible, as a series of “short turns” can be of indefinite length.

I am in hearty disagreement with this type of suppression, as will be made clear later when I seek to analyze the function of education and the function of the teacher.

The extent to which relativism has conquered the thinking processes of the academic freedomites would, on reflection, I believe, astound even the most emphatic of their number. For they proceed on the proposition that the more education, the more visible the truth. This itself gives one pause. The philosophical issues that divided the Greeks in their quest for truth were far simpler and less divergent than those that divide us today after twenty-five hundred years of education. And as a corollary, described above, they believe that the more education, especially of the sort which pleads the cases of all values, the more certain it is that man will be induced to embrace the truth. But the implications of this theory are nothing short of anarchistic. Two students, with equal equipment and training, will often graduate with markedly divergent opinions about what is truth. If they continue with their studies, one may become a Dewey, the other a Maritain. Or one may affirm democracy, the other totalitarianism. Which of the two is in fact closer to the truth? The academic freedomite finds himself hard put to commit himself here if his propositions are to stand up. Truth, their argument on behalf of laissez-faire education compels them to admit, is whatever each individual considers truth to be. Otherwise, the educational overseer would be privileged to arrive at conclusions as to what is truth (or the nearest available thing to it) and what is error. And having done this, he would surely feel compelled to instruct his faculty to discourage the one and encourage the other.

As I should bitterly contest an effort by the court or by the legislatures to outlaw any school that sought any change whatever in national policy, provided such change were to be brought about by constitutional process.

While still in search for a president to succeed Charles Seymour, Mr. Lewis recited the requisite qualifications: “He must be a leader—not too far to the right, not too far to the left, and of course not too much in the middle. He must be a magnificent speaker and a great writer. He must be a good public relations man and an experienced fund raiser. He must be a man of iron health and stamina, a young man—but also mature and full of wisdom. He must be married to a paragon, a combination of Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale, and the best dressed woman of the year. He must be a man of the world, and yet he must also have spiritual qualities—a great administrator who can delegate authority. He must be a Yale man and a great scholar—also a social philosopher who has at his fingertips a solution to all world problems, from birth control to Formosa.” Added Mr. Lewis: “I don’t doubt you have realized that there is only one who has most of these qualifications, but—is God a Yale man?” An impious friend remarked to me that this would have been impossible: “God couldn’t have graduated from Yale. His moral code is far too corny.”

Corporation members are the Rev. Arthur H. Bradford, Irving S. Olds, Lewis H. Weed, the Rt. Rev. Henry K. Sherrill, George Van Santvoord, the Rev. Morgan P. Noyes, Dean G. Acheson, Charles D. Dickey, Morris Hadley, Wilmarth S. Lewis, Robert A. Taft (1954), F. Trubee Davison (1953), Juan T. Trippe (1955), Robert T. B. Stevens (1956), Edwin F. Blair (1952), and Jonathan B. Bingham (1951). The year when the term of each Alumni Fellow expires is printed after his name.

The Yale Corporation By-Laws (Article 16) outline as follows the activities of this Committee: “The Committee on Educational Policy shall consist of not less than five members of the Corporation. It shall deal with educational policies and plans; it shall inform itself as to conditions in the different Schools and Departments and as to measures needed to make the most effective use of the resources of the University for educational purposes. It shall advise and assist the President and his associates in the development and carrying forward of the educational program of the University.”

Professor Murdock made clear in preliminary remarks that his observations were “exclusively scientific,” that they were based on a study of sexual attitudes of 250 different societies, and that he realized that there exist cultural and ethical standards of morality. Thus he sought immunity as a scientific investigator. But rather than content himself with personal observations as to the social damages of premarital abstinence, he explicitly advocated a change in the Christian moral code to accommodate his “scientific conclusions,” thereby advocating societal rejection of divine laws. By so doing, he aligned himself with the secularists, who diagnose the problems of the world and put forward measures toward their solution without any reference to limitations imposed by religious ethics.

But Yale stubbornly persists in decorating much of the literature she distributes to alumni with the following obsolescent message: “In answer to many inquiries from alumni and friends of the University who plan to remember Yale in their will, the following forms are suggested. . . .”

I do not imply, of course, that scholars are always successful in shedding their own prejudices when they embark upon research projects. Nor do I believe that the researcher’s autonomy in any way implies a duty on the part of other persons to subsidize him in his work. This I shall elaborate later.

In the case of the father, such supervision is imperative if he acknowledges responsibility for the education of his son. It is impractical for the parent to administer education himself; in the circumstances, he delegates his responsibility to someone else, and pays him for services rendered. He cannot delegate the responsibility to educate his son to someone he considers unqualified by reason of bad judgment or incompetence or false values. The parent is thus himself the indirect consumer of teaching, for it is he who is exchanging his money, which represents his goods and services, in exchange for the teacher’s services.

A recent article about another private educational institution, in Holiday (May 1951), is illustrative: “A wistful respect for the unorthodox is ingrained in the Vassar mentality. . . . The effect of this training is to make the Vassar student, by the time she has reached her junior year, look back upon her freshman self with pity and amazement. When you talk to her about her life in college, you will find that she sees it as a series of before and after snapshots: ‘When I came to Vassar, I thought like Mother and Daddy. I was conservative in my politics.’ . . . With few exceptions the trend is from the conservative to the liberal, from the orthodox to the heterodox.” Typically, the author of this article, while extensively describing and analyzing Vassar education and young alumni attitudes, never inquires whether Mother and Daddy, whose support keeps the college operating, approve of the trend from the conservative to the “liberal,” from God and man to nature and the state.

Minority discontinuance of support is no disparagement of majoritarianism; the minority would have to accede to the wishes of the majority in respect of the values to be taught at Yale, but they would no more be impelled to contribute to Yale than a defeated Republican would feel he had to donate funds to the Democratic Party.

My views here are qualified in Chapter Four.

The circumstances surrounding this speech are described in Chapter Three.