Vanity Fair: Ron DeSantis wants to turn college campuses into ideological battlefields (again)

Brett T. | 4:00 PM on September 04, 2023

It's happening across the state, but the main focus is on New College, where Florida. Gov. Ron DeSantis has named Christopher Rufo to the board of trustees to turn the school into a real college that gives students a classical liberal education; the "Hillsdale of the South" they're calling it. DEI departments and gender studies programs are out.

Now Vanity Fair is saying that DeSantis wants to turn campuses into ideological battlefields. As if they're not now? Students kidnapped Riley Gaines and kept her locked in a room for hours because she dared mention that biological men are not women.

It's actually a look back at how William F. Buckley Jr. started the fight to make universities "peach American principles."

Decades before Ron DeSantis became the nation’s education warrior-in-chief, William Buckley Jr. said the right needed its own scholars to “preach American principles and natural rights and divine sanction.” https://t.co/1hRDwkYKue
— VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) September 3, 2023

Sam Tanenhaus writes:

It was only later, in 1973, after a woman’s right to choose became the law of the land, that Catholic conservatives and evangelicals formed an alliance. Opposition to abortion “was a godsend for leaders of the Religious Right,” the historian Randall Balmer recently pointed out. And it was Catholic intellectuals, writers, and jurists who framed the main arguments, crowned by the Dobbs opinion, which last year overturned Roe v. Wade, written by Justice Samuel Alito, one of six Catholics on the Supreme Court, the most conservative in modern history.
Alito has said that National Review and its founding editor, William F. Buckley Jr., were among “the greatest influences on my views.” The staunch conservative ideas Alito was referring to are inseparable from a vision of higher education in which universities would become citadels of faith and dogma, or would be depicted as such. And the first to grasp this in the full potential of its meaning was, indeed, Bill Buckley, three-quarters of a century ago.