Buckley Attacks University Policy

Former Yale Daily News Chairman William F. Buckley, Jr. has attacked the Harvard Alumni Bulletin and aspects of the General Education project in his "God and Man at Yale." The book is a vigorous indictment of academic freedom, released yesterday by the Henry Regnery Company.

Buckley, who graduated in 1950 and has been called by his classmates everything from a "black" reactionary" to an academic liberal, argues for free enterprise and an educational "orthodoxy."

To support his views, Buckley denounced the Bulletin's handling of the Ober controversy. Frank B. Ober had written to President Conant in 1949 saying that he could no longer contribute money to an institution which was supposedly protecting Communist advocates. The Bulletin, says Buckley, attacked Ober, who "against such a machine...was relatively helpless."

Buckley also decried the University's lack of attention to religion in the GE program. "The GE (General Education report of 1945) emphatically discards religion as a potential source of the desired 'unifying purpose and idea' of education."

The author uses Yale University as the case study in his disparagement of academic freedom. As yet, Yale has given no official pronouncement on the book. The Daily News, however, has attacked it and has listed 26 alleged misstatements of fact which appear in the work.