I started following American politics only in 2010/2011, which is two years after his [Buckley’s] death, and I was in India at that time.
Plus, I was very liberal at that time.
Around 2018-19ish, I was pushed into a centrist stance because I was appalled by wokeness, especially on campuses. I was in graduate school in the US at that time. Although I didn’t experience wokeness advocacy in the classroom except two or three incidents, I saw signs of wokeness on campus a lot. But even then, I was quite libertarian on how universities ought to handle campus politics.
I picked up God and Man at Yale around this time because wokeness was my primary concern.
I’ve always known that conservatives love that book. I assumed it would be a defense of free inquiry and against universities having a preferred ideology.
However, to my surprise, in the book, he argued explicitly that Yale was neglecting its true mission and it should uphold its “foundational values,” as he put it. I assumed he would be promoting a libertarian outlook on campus politics, but he was arguing the opposite.
He said Yale and other elite universities should incorporate free markets and traditional perspectives directly into the curriculum because they are betraying a contract that the current alumni and the administration have with the founders of the universities. It was a pretty shocking advocacy of conservatism being imposed on the students, and I didn’t like that at all.
But later on, around 2020-ish, I became a conservative (thanks to you; more on that in the link below). But even as late as early 2023, I still held a libertarian view on academic freedom and campus politics.
(You may be interested in a comment I left on your ‘Why Young People Are Socialist’ post yesterday, in which I shared how I was once a liberal, then turned centrist, and how I finally turned conservative. You are a major influence.)
But after Oct 7, all of that changed quite fast. Watching the pro-Hamas protests on campuses that started the very next day after October 7, before even one IDF soldier set foot on Gaza, I immediately thought about God and Man at Yale. I wanted to go back and re-read God and Man at Yale.
Everything I’ve witnessed after Oct 7 — Harvard defending Claudine Gay, Harvard explicitly stating they’re an “international institution” and not an American institution, DEI, anti-White, anti-Asian discrimination, etc. has convinced me that WFB Jr. was right.
Elite universities ought to be promoting free markets and pro-American, pro-Western views. I don’t believe we should have a completely libertarian approach to academic freedom. That’s untenable in this day and age. (Again, demographics is destiny, even within organizations.)
I’ve become significantly less libertarian on a wide range of issues compared to where I was just two years ago, and not just on academic freedom/university direction.
So yes, WFB Jr. has influenced me on this idea.
The post Naveen Nvn’s ideological migration (from my email) appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
