Source: Law & Liberty
by Robert P George
“The 25-year-old William F. Buckley Jr. wrote God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom’ with an appreciation of the contributions made by leading universities in the United States, Great Britain, and elsewhere in the building of our civilization. His special concern was with the civic order, and the role of institutions of higher education in forming citizens of a constitutional democratic republic. As James Madison said, a ‘well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.’ But is there not a tension between two ideals: that of education for citizenship (especially in a republic—that is, a regime in which government is not only of and for the people, but also by the people themselves), and that of liberal education: the unrestricted pursuit of truth, understood not as a means to other ends, but as an end-in-itself?” (10/01/26)