When William F. Buckley Jr. wrote God and Man at Yale in 1951, it became an instant, albeit controversial, classic. At the time, Yale was supposedly a bastion of conservatism in the academic world. It “held fast to old and solid principles,” Timewrote. “In the best and truest sense of the word, Yale has stood from its earliest beginnings for conservatism triumphant.”

God and Man at Yale destroyed that perception. Drawing on his many experiences and interviews with students and faculty while attending Yale in the late 1940s, Buckley exposed what he called an “extraordinarily irresponsible educational attitude” that encouraged students to reject God and His authoritative Word and to embrace relativism—the belief that there are no absolute or eternal truths.

It was a provocative and shocking accusation to make about a school that was founded as a Protestant institution. According to its first charter, the school’s purpose was to prepare students for public employment, both in the church and the state. The clergymen who controlled the college gave faculty members the charge of teaching youths in the arts and sciences, but from a theological perspective.

Even as late as 1937, Charles Seymour, during his inaugural address as Yale’s new president, urged administrators and faculty members to freely “recognize the tremendous validity and power of the teachings of Christ in our life-and-death struggle against the forces of selfish materialism.”

But as Buckley argued in 1951, God’s teachings had been rendered powerless by the forces of secularism. Today, of course, it’s much worse. Secularism’s rout has been so decisive, Austin Bramwell wrote to introduce the 50th anniversary edition of God and Man at Yale, “that anyone under the age of 50 now can hardly imagine how Buckley’s book could have caused as much controversy as it did, much less why Buckley should have become at the time the object of such intense vituperation.”

The Final Frontier

Topics debated on campuses today have “progressed” far beyond the existence of God or the immutability of absolute truth. Just this week, the Boston Globewrote about the growing popularity of mixed-gender student housing on campuses. “In the Woodstock era,” Peter Schworm wrote,

the advent of coed dorms caused a stir, with Life magazine proclaiming the development “an intimate revolution on campus.” Coed floors came along over the next two decades, giving college students immediate proximity to each other. The next step, coed suites and bathrooms, brought the sexes even closer together.Now, some colleges are crossing the final threshold, allowing men and women to share rooms. At the urging of student activists, more than 30 campuses across the country have adopted what colleges call gender-neutral rooming assignments, almost half of them within the past two years.

Three Ivy League schools are leading the charge in coed room assignments—Pennsylvania, Brown and Dartmouth. Student activists at Harvard are also lobbying school officials to lower the gender-neutral standards. One Ivy League administrator said there has been “strong demand” for coed room assignments and only a handful of protests against it.

The brave souls who dare stand up to resist the rampant spread of sexual depravity on campus will undoubtedly come from the student body. “Those days of colleges monitoring students’ relationships have long passed,” Dartmouth’s associate dean told the Globe. Yet, even as university officials pride themselves in tolerating all forms of behavior, the unadmitted truth is that they use their positions of power and influence to endorse the most godless of lifestyles. As a young William F. Buckley learned in surveying the content of Yale courses during the 1940s, it’s the college administrators and classroom teachers who push hardest for more extreme, anti-God behavior!

Hookup Culture

Last Sunday, the New York Times had a lengthy piece on sexual-abstinence groups at Ivy League schools. Harvard’s “True Love Revolution” began in 2006 with the intention of providing students with scientific research showing the many dangers of premarital sex. “We found a huge body of scholarship that suggested conclusions that nobody on our campus was making,” says the club founder. According to the Times,

They posted the conclusions on their website—the belief that “‘safe sex’ is not safe”; that even the most effective methods of birth control can fail; that early sexual activity is strongly associated with all manner of terrible outcomes, from increased risk of depression to greater likelihood of marital infidelity, divorce and maternal poverty. Premarital abstinence, on the other hand, is held up by True Love Revolution as improving health, promoting better relationships and, best of all, enabling “better sex in your future marriage.”

True Love Revolution has an active core membership of about a dozen people working to get their message out. Harvard professors and administrators, of course, are shamefully silent when it comes to educating their students about the dangers of fornication.

Each year, in my Principles of Living college course at Herbert W. Armstrong College, I have my students read a 1981 Esquire article titled, “The Trouble with Harvard.” Timothy Foote, who graduated from Harvard in 1952, wrote, “Many students drift through Harvard with a nagging sense of failure and anxiety.” They “are turned loose in a system practically without discipline, or order, or viable requirements, or supervision, or even advice” (emphasis mine throughout). Foote quoted one professor as saying, “On any given night, the odds are against finding anyone in his or her own bed.”

“Few people seem to disagree,” Foote continued. “By the standards of the age, there’s nothing wrong in that, either. Except that it tends to produce large amounts of emotional exhaustion, domestic squalor, and sheer noise.”

That was in 1981, when steady dating often resulted in promiscuous sex. Today, the deviancy standard has degenerated to a jungle-like “hookup” culture where dating is now obsolete. According to a 2001 study, 40 percent of college women admitted to hooking up for casual sex. Ten percent had done it more than six times. Some 91 percent said hookups occurred “very often” or “fairly often” at their school.

Janie Fredell, the current co-president of True Love Revolution, arrived at Harvard in 2005 and quickly discovered that she was in “a culture that says sex is totally OK.” She told the Times, “The hookup culture is so absolutely all-encompassing. It’s shocking! It’s everywhere!”

Friends from her hometown had warned her about life at Harvard. But Fredell wants to be a lawyer, and “people take you more seriously as a Harvard student,” she says. As Foote noted in his 1981 piece, “In a society more preoccupied with the labels on the suitcase than with what’s inside, Harvard is still the best label in town.”

But, in more ways than one, that label comes with a heavy price.

Credibility Gap

From what I could tell, all of True Love Revolution’s core members are deeply religious. But their sexual-abstinence message is presented from a purely secular standpoint. They have to preach this way, they say, in order to gain “credibility” within the university environment. The club’s former president urged its founding members to “shy away from arguments with religious premises.”

If only John Harvard, a Puritan minister, could have foreseen what his theological seminary would turn into. The founders of America’s oldest educational institution inscribed this on the gates of the university: “After God had carried us safe to New England, and we had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God’s worship, and settled the civil government; one of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning, and perpetuate it to posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers lie in the dust.”

Ten clergymen who graduated from Harvard during the late 1600s later founded Yale University in 1701. They wanted to establish a school with a stricter form of theology than Harvard taught. Thus, for 250 years, Yale was seen as the more traditional, conservative of the two Ivy League schools. But both institutions were built on theological foundations.

William F. Buckley concentrated his exposé on the academic sector he knew best—his alma mater. And by identifying the hostility toward God imbedded in America’s most conservative institution, it revealed how far education in general had drifted away from God, down the dangerous course of relativism, materialism and collectivism.

Today, God is so far removed from scholarship and higher learning that even when one defends a biblical principle or law, all references to God must be omitted from the argument. At Harvard and Yale, nothing destroys a scholar’s credibility quite like God and the Bible.