Teacher: Willmoore Kendall’s Vision for American Education by Dr. Christopher Owen

Part of a Politics Department conference titled “Willmoore Kendall and the American Political Order,” Dr. Christopher Owen delivered a lecture called “Teacher: Willmoore Kendall’s Vision for American Education,” giving an intimate overview of Kendall’s life and influences. Owen further explained Kendall’s visionary views on education, which have become modern conservative priorities.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Well, good evening, everyone. Uh welcome to the University of Dallas. Uh my name is uh Dr. Richard Doherty. I'm a professor of politics and sometime chairman of the politics department, um where I also serve here as the dean of the Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts. Uh Department is delighted uh to be hosting a conference this weekend devoted to the thought and influence of Professor Wilmore Kendall, the founder of our politics department and of the original graduate program in the Braniff School. Our department obviously owes a large debt of gratitude to Professor Kendall. And I'll note that we recognize and remember his importance in various ways. Most prominently, our department award for our top graduating senior is named in honor of Dr. Kendall. And here I want to read for you the official description of the Kendall Award, or at least it's as f official as I know. I think I wrote it about 30 years ago. It reads as follows The Wilmore Kendall Award in Politics is not an annual award. We don't give it out willy-nilly. But it's only given when the Politics Department considers a senior student's overall performance in the major to be so outstanding as to merit spectral recognition. The Kendall Award has been given by the departments since 1978. The winner receives a personalized plaque at recognition of the award, and his name is engraved on the plaque prominently displayed in the politics department. From 1963 until his death in 1967, Professor Kendall was chairman of the then Politics and Economics Department at the University of Dallas. And Professor Kendall fulfilled in his purpose the twin goals of the UD politics department. A profound student of political philosophy, he was at the same time a vigorous and influential participant in the debates that shaped contemporary politics. The department hosted a conference on Kendall's thought some time ago, which resulted in a collection, uh this collection of essays titled Wilmore Kendall, Maverick of American Conservatives, uh, and and edited by two of his former students here at UD, John Alvis and John Murley, with a forew to the book being written by William F. Buckley, a former student of Wilmore Kendall's. John Alvis, of course, went on to teach for 50 years here at the university. Jack Murley taught all that time at the Rochester Institute of Technology. I myself owe a personal debt to Professor Kendall as I entered the doctoral program here at the university when it was still titled, the Wilmore Kipple Program in Politics and Literature. I had the pleasure of knowing his widow, Nellie Kendall, who valiantly let kept aflame the memory of Wilmore, and who would regularly come to campus events to play recordings of Kendall's classes, where we could hear his booming and inquiring voice and the responses of so many students, including a young John Alvis. Kendall also hired Leopold D'Alvarez in 1964.

unknown 3:04

Dr.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

Dialvarez was a mainstay of the department for 50 years until his retirement and graciously served as my dissertation director and mentor. So if you want to blame anyone for anything I do or say, Dr. D'Alvarez is as likely a candidate as anyone. Now you can also see a representation here of another way we honor Wilmar Kendall, as this bust resides prominently in our department, along with pictures of Professor Kendall and one of the famous or infamous Kendall for King sweatshirts. This picture, in fact, well so you can see, I'll say it's not gonna be later. Uh this picture, in fact, was given to me uh by one of his students, Sister Mary Brian Bowl, um, and she told me that it was the last picture ever took uh of Kendall in the summer of 1967. On the back is a note to Sister Mary Bryan from Nellie Kendall, which reads, For Mary Bryan, with much love uh for she keeps the faith, gods and WKs, from Nellie October 1977. Uh Sister Mary Bryan uh was a school sister, became a school sister of Notre Dame, uh, whose very full cot convent was located where the Highland School now resides. And Dr. Kendall and other faculty members would routinely teach their classes at the convent rather than have all the sisters trekked down to campus. The bust here was actually made from a sculpting done in 1967 by Professor Harry Burt Barsch of our own art department. This is a plaster copy made from the original. Now you may notice, yeah, looking at it from the right angle, um, a slight injury uh to the bust, and that has its own backstory. Uh we hosted a lecture some years ago on Kendall and brought out the bust from the art department for it. But after the event we forgot about it. Well, all right, I forgot about it. And uh then it disappeared, and no one knew exactly where it had gone. About two years later, a graduating senior happened to mention to me that some guys living over at Old Mill across the street had a bust of someone, but they weren't sure where it was or where it had come from, who it was or where it had come from. I told them, look, just get it back to me, no questions asked. Over Memorial Day weekend then, I received a call from Superdave at Campus Safety, telling me he had found a bust of what he thought was Wilmore Kendall in the stairwell of the science building. So, Wilmore lived in Old Mill for a couple of years. A little worse for the wear, which is true of most residents there. And he came back with this slight facial injury. In any case, I'm in discussion now with one of our MFA sculpture students, graduate actually, to make a complete uh and real copy for us to display. Okay, before introducing our speaker tonight, then uh I want to thank uh all of the people who have lent support to bringing the conference together, especially our assistant provost, Dr. Sherry Hovertz. I can't think of her person because she's on a flight to Abu Dhabi right now. I'm not fleeing for work. Uh and the whole uh Provost Office, including uh our provost Ork, uh our Vice President for uh Development University Relations, Ashton Ellis, our marketing and communications guru, Claire Benegis, our administrative assistants and graduate assistants in the Colitics Department and the Pioneer Graduate Office, and also a spectral thank you to our university archivist, Mary Kate Coons, who has kindly put together the exhibit uh outside of some of Kendall's artifacts and writings. You can view them uh at the entrance. Uh but a spectral thank you goes to the William Solming Charitable Foundation for its financial support for the conference. So tomorrow, uh there are three panels of tapers, one at 10 o'clock, one at 1 o'clock, and one at 3 o'clock. Those times are right. Uh feature discussions of issues raised in Kendall's work and beyond. And there is also, I will note, a healthy mixture of theoretical questions and American politics. Uh, we decided to mix them up well so there would be a good bit of overlap from one session to the next or questions that will reappear. And we are already in discussions with potential publishers to put papers together into a volume. Okay, enough. Okay. Now, allow me to turn to tonight's featured speaker. Dr. Christopher Owen is a native of Texas and first attended school, he tells me, uh, William Barrett, Travis Elementary, and Bryan. That's to establish bona fides in Texas. Uh he wants it to be known that he had many good teachers over the years. Pursuing his PhD in history at Emory University, he had the great good fortune to work with historians committed to their discipline and to getting at the truth. Among these scholars were Dan Carter, James Warke, and Elizabeth Fox Genovisi. After thirty years as a professor of history at Northeastern State University in Oklahoma, where he is honored as Professor Emeritus, he now does historical research and raises Red Angus cattle on his farm outside Talliqua. Is that how you pronounce it? Talekua. Most importantly, for our immediate purposes, Dr. Owen has written a biography of Wilmore Kendall titled Heaven Indeed Can Fall: The Life of Wilmore Kendall, published by Lexington Books. Dr. Owen, as you can tell from the work, did extensive reading, research, and voluminous interviews in putting the biography together. The book has received many accolades, among them this one I want to note, because it's a tribute from the dean, I would say the dean of 20th century historians of conservative thought, George Nash, who writes of the work as follows, and of Kendall. Kendall, Nash writes, was probably the most controversial American political theorist of his time. Brilliant, iconoclastic, and disputatious, he became a leading exponent of what is now called populist conservatism, an amalgam increasingly prominent today. Then he says, in this deft, discerning biography, Christopher Owen traces the course of Kendall's turbulent career and intellectual journey from left to right. Few who encountered Kendall or his writings ever forgot them. Owen's illuminating volume explains why, and in the process, clarifies the tensions that continue to shape American politics. And I will only add that Dr. Owens is a master writer. The biography is what we would undoubtedly call a pitch-turner. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Chris Owen, who will speak on the subject teacher, Wilmore Kendall's vision for American education.

SPEAKER_01 10:02

Thanks so much for that more than kind introduction. I'm really excited to talk tonight in this place in honor of Wilmore Kendall, because here in 1963, Kendall found peace after his mind after many years of bitter academic battles. The groves of academ had become dark and forbidding for him. But when he heard the Dallas accent, so like that he'd known as a boy in Oklahoma, Wilmore said he felt like Moses. He was returning home to his people after 40 years of wandering. At UD, he happily noted, liberals dwell in the foxholes and right-wingers fly the MiGs. He'd been bombed by MiGs in Korea, by the way. Let's start this evening with some words from Kendall, few of you will have heard. Brethren, he asked, is the call of God upon your hearts for some great work? Oh, let us reach on toward it with every energy of our lives. Lift your eyes. Can you see the great world plain with its burning fields, its dying flowers, its vain strivings and unspeakable sufferings? Let us live to alleviate its heartache and comfort its distress. Listen on, on beyond the plane. Can you hear God calling you to Himself in the voice of eternity's ocean? Let us learn that the way to God must always lie through the path of service. Now, for those of you who know our honory's work, that doesn't sound much like him. That's because it wasn't. That was his father, Reverend William Wilmore Kendall Sr. And the passage comes from a speech from 1907 at Garrett Theological Seminary, where his dad was a student, two years before our Wilmore was born. Yet by parsing the Methodist preacher's words, we can gain insight into the younger Kendall's vocation, into his calling as a teacher. First, we notice that the talk is a call to greatness. It appeared in one of several essays which Reverend Kendall published in a book called The Aspiring Life. In it, he said, we ought all aspire to greatness. God calls us to it. Such greatness, according to the minister, is not wealth or power or fame, but service. And that call to service means building a better world under God to do good by alleviating mankind's sorrows. And I would suggest to you this evening that in pursuing his work as teacher, Professor Wilmore Kendall, our Wilmore followed the sort of aspirational path laid out by his father. Now, to be sure, Kendall Jr. rejected many of his dad's ideas. They had a complicated relationship. His father held a post-millennial vision of peacefully building God's kingdom on earth, and after the Great War, these views lay in ruins. In 1917 and 1918, Reverend Kendall had wrecked his own career by following his own call to greatness. He had risked his freedom and endangered his family by opposing the war publicly from his pulpit. When that evoked tremendous hostility locally, he quietly slipped back into the pro-war mainstream. In the wake of this fiasco, Kendall the Younger turned for enlightenment to H. L. Minken and his sort of witty cynicism. And in later years, Kendall adopted habits and ideas, carousing communism, conservatism, Catholicism, all of which were guaranteed to annoy his father. And yet he did aspire to a greatness focused on service. When talking about Kendall's vision for American education, I'm going to divide the discussion into three parts. First, we'll look at his career as an instructor and formal instruction in formal educational settings. In this role, his dynamism was apparent and he won the hearts of many students. Then we'll look at Kendall's ideas on education, how education should work in the USA and what its purposes should be. And then lastly, we'll look at him as an instructor of society itself. And it's chiefly in this role, as a teacher of ideas Americans need to know and follow that Kendall aspired to and, in my opinion, achieved lasting greatness. From youth, Kendall's calling centered on education. Our Wilmore was a child prodigy, and his father pressed him relentlessly to use his brain to some great purpose. Cradle to grave, almost literally, Wilmore Kendall was engaged as a student or employed as a teacher. In 1922, age 13, he graduated high school in Mangum, Oklahoma. Enrolled that year as a freshman at Northwestern. He eventually got his BA from the University of Oklahoma in 1927, MA next year from Northwestern. Two years later began a doctoral program at the University of Illinois. That was interrupted for three years when he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford from 1932 to 35. Finally completed his dissertation at Illinois in 1940, PhD in political science. As a student, as I count, he attended five public schools, three universities as an undergraduate, three more as a graduate student. He attained two bachelor's degrees, earned one master's degree, and was awarded an Oxford MA before completing the doctorate. His teaching career was even more extensive. After briefly teaching high school, Kendall taught at 10 different institutions of higher learning, most famously at Yale and most happily at the University of Dallas. He loved the intellectual richness of university life. In 1930, starting his career at Illinois, he expressed joy at lunching simultaneously with a specialist of English history, an authority on Shakespeare, a wizard in economics, and all glad of a chance to talk, because Wilmer loved to talk. One sees similar joy at the end of his career in photos taken here at the University of Dallas. You see him smoking and joking and hamming it up with his colleagues here. Insofar as the academy was going to reject Wilmer Kendall, it was rejecting one of his own because his life was centered around schools and universities in particular. He dabbled with journalism before he discovered his great talent as a teacher. Illinois students, even when he taught Spanish 101, he was a fantastic professor. He ditched all the grammar books. Those were boring, and he taught completely conversationally. His first wife was in his first class of Spanish 101. Anyway, in 1937, having switched to political science, he got a job at LSU. Students trickling into Baton Rouge that fall met their 28-year-old teacher of government. Whipped thin, six-foot, dressed in Oxonian vest and coat, his eyes sparkled with energy. Once the introductions were over, they discovered he was no ordinary teacher. When the issue of suffrage came up, he announced boldly, women shouldn't vote. And the class gasped. Citing well-homed arguments, he challenged them to refute him, them to refute him. They rushed home, gathered their evidence, marshaled their arguments, and the discussion went on back and forth for weeks. Kendall declared himself convinced. The need for universal suffrage is so great, he said, Louisiana must immediately drop all restrictions on black voting. And again, the class gasped. An uproar from these discussions was so loud it annoyed all the adjacent professors. At LSU, Kendall pioneered a Socratic teaching style with lots of give and take between himself and students, which he used for most of his career. Those who saw him in action never forgot. According to department chair Charles Heineman, Kendall really shook those kids up. Students would talk about him for the rest of their lives. One gifted student, Henry Wells, later a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, said his impression of Kendall was immediately and overwhelmingly favorable. In no time at all, says Wells, I became a committed majoritarian, as well as an unreserved admirer of Wilmore's intellect, wit, and learning. Future Vice President Huber Humphrey was one of those students there at LSU. Russell Long, future senator, also a student. More renown as a teacher followed, especially at Yale in the late 1940s. Here, Kendall energetically promoted conservatism. His unique teaching style, close reading, guided discussions of text, again one plaudits from students. Most consequentially, two of Yale's best and brightest undergraduates, William F. Buckley Jr. and Brent Bozell Jr., became his intellectual proteges. Both deeply imbibed Kendall's views about majority rule and opposition to communism. His ideas and editorial hand are evidence in Buckley's and Bosell's earliest works, books which kick-started the American conservative movement. One reason Kendall's been viewed, you know, kind of by people like Nash as important, even though he didn't get a lot of publicity. The intensity of Kendall's political beliefs soured relations with Yale's administration in 1961. He resigned. Even before formal separation from the university, he took frequent sabbaticals to work in military intelligence and to teach elsewhere. He was a highly effective intelligence officer, but his true love was teaching. And he wouldn't give up teaching, even though he could have made more money as an intelligence officer, CIA, Army intelligence, and so forth. In 1958, Kendall went to Stanford. Again, he exhibited striking appeal as a teacher, shelved his Socratic techniques, meticulously prepared lectures for the first time. Standing room only. Literally, no seats in the class, people lined up in the hall listening through the doors to his lecture. He also engaged in these very highbrow debates with liberal scholars on campus, thousands of people listening. When Stanford didn't offer him a full-time position, students protested, carried signs protesting. His health was already failing when he reached UD in 1963, but he retained his teaching genius. Taught in an amphitheater-style classroom, stalking around confidently using his newfound lecture skills. He examined students closely about assigned text, so closely some feared his cigarette ashes would drop on them. Fifty years later, school sister of Notre Dame Mary Brian Bold fondly remembered Wilmore in his flamboyant sports jackets. Tearing up with emotion, she called him her intellectual father. His mentoring prepared her for a long and successful career in Texas Catholic schools. Meanwhile, he launched a graduate program and guided talented graduate students. We've talked some about them, John Alvis, John Merley, and others. So charismatic was Kendall the teacher. If you don't believe me, look at the t-shirt outside. You got the Kendall for King T shirts that they made up for him. And that's an amusing shirt for sure, but UD students knew their professor had no use for real kings. Because first and last, he was a teacher of democracy. His views on education were always entwined with his ideas about majority rule. As with his teaching's virtuosity, his distinctive ideas about education first appeared at LSU. Assigned research on local government, he said, I'm bored studying the Water Commissioner. So he started reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau instead. And from that source, he took two lessons. First, the good teacher guides students to think for themselves rather than imposing an ideology. His classroom methods bore some similarities to those of Rousseau's ideal instructor in Emile. He mostly avoided dogmatic proclamations, considered many points of view, nudging students toward the right conclusions. Maybe for that reason he stayed in contact with students who did not share his political views. One of those we've already mentioned, Wells at Penn, who was a liberal there at Penn. Another, a fellow I ran across before he died, a fellow named Oscar Pomantle, had been a student of Kendall at Yale. He became a professor of politics at Berkeley and found his own school based on Socratic teaching methods. Completely opposite political views, but always remained close to Kendall. Even more basic to Kendall's career was a second principle from Rousseau that human beings are only free, only free, if able to participate in democratic decision making. Without such participation, others make decisions for us, and we remain, so to speak, at least in chains. When Kendall discussed education at the primary and secondary levels, he focused mostly on this aspect of Rousseau's teaching and gave little attention to modes of instruction. A good education to Kindle was rigorous, patriotic, and supported democracy. In the 1950s and 60s, he suggested that American schools, public schools, were doing poorly on all accounts. Professional educators had dumbed schools down, de-emphasizing hard subjects for trendy electives. They had imperiled local controlled schools and endangered democracy itself. Kendall believed that democracy, as per Rousseau, was best realized at the local level. Here people met face to face to settle community matters, including how to run their own schools. Kendall praised this American tradition of decentralized schools, comparing it favorably to the centralized system of France. But danger lurked. It always does, right? Professional educators, well organized, basking under an unearned halo of scientific expertise, were undermining the self-confidence of citizens to run their own schools. Giant organizations like the National Education Association promoted a nationwide curriculum. Children throughout the country did the same lessons and read the same books. Local peculiarities were out. Most citizens said Kendall wanted schools to promote patriotism and perpetuate their own way of life, a way of life they found good and wanted to preserve. But communities were ceding their authority to distant organizations dominated by liberals who prioritized change. Ordinary people, he said, had been hoodwinked by false claims of expertise. In reality, said Kendall's, said Kendall, public schools were run by on NEA lines were a major assault on the nation's intellectual skills. College professors knew that firsthand when they just saw what their freshmen did. And then the test scores kept falling and falling and falling. I guess they're still falling. Okay, and that was also proof of that failure. And by the 60s, even greater dangers to local control of schools had arisen. The Supreme Court began to intervene in matters which local governments previously controlled. The use of federal troops in Little Rock in 1957 and at the University of Mississippi in 1962 upset Kendall. But he knew that a strong case for justice underlay the civil rights struggle. So when he was warning against federal authority the dangers of that overawing local democracy, he usually chose other grounds. Most tellingly, he denounced two Supreme Court decisions from the early 1960s, which banned state-sponsored prayer in schools. These decisions had invalidated many statutes, including a Massachusetts law which had stood for 137 years. In 1964, the School Board of North Brookfield, Massachusetts, defied the court to maintain daily prayer in the schools. Board members declared themselves ready from their own small cradle of liberty to defy the world movement toward atheism. Town sentiment for prayer in school was near unanimous. Not everybody else to fight. Kendall knew the town wouldn't win. Americans mostly accepted the Supreme Court as the final arbiter of the Constitution. And the federal government had the power and the will to enforce the court's edicts. Out, out, brief prayer, cried Kendall, wondering if bayonet-wielding soldiers would tape shut the mouths of praying schoolgirls. Well, it never came to that. Fearing fines and jail, community leaders gave way. For Kendall, the struggle of this obscure town of about 4,000 people in central Massachusetts was part of a larger war. He believed the town's residents were combating a global liberal revolution. Capital L, Capital R. A revolution designed, he said, to overthrow the established and traditional social order of the entire Western world. The goal of liberals, Kendall argued, was to establish a completely egalitarian and completely open society. Liberals were organized and prepared to obliterate any institution or practice which stood in their way. As egalitarians, he said, they aimed to steamroll all social differences into a uniform flatness. All inequality, whether based on region, religion, race, wealth, sex, education, beauty, or intelligence, must give way. If the odd atheists objected to school prayer, North Brookfield had to abandon long-cherished practices so his views got equal treatment. Community-sponsored prayer needed to go because it stigmatized our atheists' opinions, which he must have full reign to express. In his 1963 essay, What is Conservatism? Kendall defined conservatives as those who are resisting this liberal revolution, capital L, capital R. Liberal views, he argued, catered to individual self-interest and desire. The conservative resistance, on the other hand, defended a vision of the communal good, one which attempted to promote society's highest and noblest aims. Often inarticulate and scattered, an occasional journalist or a military officer, a few congressmen here, a recalcitrant village there. Conservatives, he said, must make common cause. 1958, Kendall's speech, ordinary people must demand a board of education that will represent their views. Meanwhile, resistors had to recognize that a quote, a line of battle characterized their struggle against the liberal revolution. North Brookfield needed allies. Kindle's prayer decisions article appeared in 1964. He was been here. For 60 years, it read as an odd relic of the civil rights era. But in our own time, school boards have hit the headlines again. Over the last few years, citizens have organized nationally to fight public school policies promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. As in Kendall's days, these policies have trickled down to the local level after promotion by the NEA and the federal government, a new phase in the perpetual liberal revolution. Safe to say, transgenderism was not much on the radar in 1964, and few were suggesting math rigor as a form of white supremacy in those days. But such developments wouldn't have surprised Wilmore. Because if you're in the business of making people equal, he said, there is and can be no stopping place. The danger of seeking utopia, total equality, total freedom, is that you can never get there and you often wreak havoc on the way. This time, however, resistance has been organized and widespread. Moms for Liberty and the 1776 project have worked with some success to defeat pro-DEI school board members. Parents have protested school boards who opened girls' restaurants to biological males and have enforced some policy modifications. Initially, the feds again supported the Be the Change crowd. The FBI investigated parent protesters as dangerous subversives. This time the bullying failed. School-related issues couldn't be swept under the rug, and they played a part in the 2024 presidential election. Such pushbacks showed that the conservatives had finally recognized the salience of social issues in public schools six decades after Kendall raised them. Moreover, they'd united along a political line of battle. What he had suggested back in 1964. Kendall's prescience regarding higher education took even longer to recognize. What the left called its long march through the institutions, that's what Kendall meant by the liberal revolution. He recognized its radical nature as early as the 1940s. In 1951, William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, deeply influenced by Kendall, he went through it with his pen and marked all of it up, changes and so forth, tried to alert Yale alumni to the academics' left's offers, efforts to undermine capitalism and Christianity. Though the book made Bill Buckley a conservative superstar, it failed in its mission because wealthy alumni kept subsidizing the subversion of their own values. And the long march continued through the academy. Many conservatives failed to see the supreme importance of universities and especially elite universities for shaping culture and politics. Kindle never made that mistake. Kindle loved American universities for what they had been and could be, but he hated what they were becoming. Their real purpose was to seek out, understand, and express truth at the highest intellectual levels. To deny the possibility of discovering truth through rational inquiry meant endorsing a relativism that Kendall rejected. On the other hand, Kendall argued that universities weren't meant to be indoctrination centers. He sought a course between the Scylla of indoctrination and the Charybdis of relativism. Kendall believed truth existed. Lovers of wisdom must seek it and propound it. All intellectuals are called to this quest, but few follow it. Numerous contemporary thinkers have given up. They see truth as illusory or contextual. Why seek something which doesn't really exist? Others claim to quest for truth but stop short. Content to be mere experts, they leverage their knowledge for money, power, or fame, and then they rest. Yet another group of thinkers claims to have completed the quest, to have grasped truth fully. Possessing the truth, such persons stop searching and stop thinking. But for Kendall, the search for truth was ongoing and never-ending, part and parcel of mankind's earthly journey. In this approach toward intellectual life, Kendall drew on the teaching of his Oxford tutor, the philosopher R. G. Collingwood. I'm just lately starting to realize how much Collingwood influenced Kendall's ideas. Collingwood championed rational inquiry but denounced scientism. Scientism meaning the inappropriate application of natural science methods to the humanities or social sciences. Collingwood argued that distinct disciplines such as history, philosophy, and natural science provide different paths to truth. All were sciences in the sense of being organized bodies of knowledge. But for determining a prescriptive ought, let's say, rather than a descriptive is, natural science methods were useless. To split an atom, go to a physicist. To understand justice, ask a philosopher. A university, said Kendall, was a conglomeration of distinct disciplines. Freedom for scholars to pursue truth was indispensable to university life. But this freedom had limits, both for the university as a whole and for its disciplines. Kindle called these limits orthodoxy and argued that universities were congregates of orthodoxies. Such orthodoxy itself did not constitute truth. Rather, it reflected the dominant hypotheses of various disciplines. Variations on Mendelian genetics, for example, dominate the field of biology. Advocating contrary ideas means career suicide. Skeptics find employment grants and tenure hard to get. Yet rebels can win such battles. After decades of struggle, for instance, advocates of the Big Bang, not the TV show, but the scientific theory, saw their theory become the new orthodoxy of astronomy. Over time, then, following a discipline's methods faithfully can allow more accurate approximations of truth to emerge. Thus, truth for Kendall had a historical dimension, but he was not a historicist. He repeatedly affirmed the objectivity of truth itself as something human beings discover rather than create. Truth doesn't depend on historical context. Newer doesn't mean truer. The earth rotates around the sun or not, no matter what scientists say about it. Truth doesn't change, but human understanding of it does. Though not automatic, such understanding can be refined using disciplinary techniques, that is, by utilizing science as calling would defined it. Kendall's ideas here resemble those of 20th-century philosophers Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn. Human beings, he thought, invariably discover truth as filtered through their own brains and as funneled through social institutions. Their understanding of the truth is necessarily subjective and incomplete. For Kindle, only God could know the truth completely and objectively. Ethical truth for Kindle has two sources, right reason and revelation. Both transcended time and place. Reason led, correctly he thought, to the principle that one must always do justice. Revelation proclaimed the principle, thou shalt not commit adultery, to be eternally valid. Accepting the transcendence of natural right or revelation, however, doesn't permit us an intellectual holiday. Or is it utterly and always unjust, as everyone today maintains? Jews, Catholics, and Protestants agree that adultery is wrong, but each defines adultery differently. To understand and apply abiding truths in particular situations, that is, requires hard thinking. And if the purpose of universities is to seek truth, then freedom for scholars to pursue their work is indispensable. But again, this freedom has limits. As centers of rational inquiry, said Kendall, universities are designed to discourage foolish thinking. Scholarly freedom doesn't require treating astrology as a science or hiring ornithologists who think birds aren't real. In another important aspect, academic freedom is not and cannot be absolute. Scholars live in particular social settings. If they work to subvert the institutions or society in which they operate, said Kendall, they shouldn't expect approval from said institutions and society. Even before Yale, Kendall was quite familiar with limitations on academic freedom. In 1941, conservative faculty at Hobart College forced him out for his socialist convictions. Yet just a few years later, Yale's faculty felt free to belittle their own institution's founding tradition, Christianity, and to deprecate the source of its funding, capitalism. For suggesting that the university discouraged such efforts, Kendall himself was permanently denied promotion and quarantined from graduate classes. For criticizing academic freedom, that is, Kendall lost his own academic freedom, so his own scholarly liberty curtailed. When Yale pushed him out, it was at least in part for this time for his anti-socialist convictions. Supposedly a champion of academic freedom, Yale increasingly enforced a de facto liberal dogmatism, squeezing out most conservative voices. Even more important to Kendall than his professional status was that Yale and other elite universities were laying intellectual waste to America. His appeals to do something about it, to rein in universities, to stop undermining the surrounding society went unheeded. After God and Man at Yale said Kendall, no one bothered to bring the academic left to heel. As the long march through the institution gathered speed and strength, conservatives tutted and looked the other way. Until quite recently, one might have viewed Kendall's views on higher education as Cassandra-like, maybe correct in principle, but almost universally ignored. But today, we see a real pushback against the now thoroughly left-wing bastions of higher education. The Trump administration has finally tackled the problem head-on, a problem Buckley and Kendall identified 75 years ago. And this time, as Wilmore would have put it, conservatives have really meant business. Wealthy alumni have forced out university leaders for permitting campus anti-Semitism. Read this morning the president of Texas AM has been forced out for promoting, allowing DEI instruction in the classrooms there. Northwestern, another Kindle of the President of Northwestern's been forced out for similar things. The federal government has banned DEI instruction, pressured accreditation agencies and taxed university endowments. Similar measures taken in 1951, American society would be a very different place today, I think. For healthier intellectually, in my opinion. But we can talk about that. Kendall's views on American education were discerning and astute, but the main focus of his intellectual work was political philosophy. Wilmore Kendall, the political theorist, had a consuming desire, and I think it literally consumed him, to understand and promote truth, not merely truth as he saw it, but real truth, but also the humility to know that he never grasped the whole truth, a goal to work toward. With the understanding of politics he did gain, he wished to use in service of the American people. In his journey from Trotskyist lecturer to conservative Cold Warrior, Kendall's allegiance to majority rule held firm. His political theory, extensive, intricate, and evolving, defies easy categorization, and we'll learn lots about it tomorrow, happily. I'm looking forward to a lot of those papers. For now, I'll briefly hit three key points. All of these controversial as his idea. He was always the contrarian. So if you haven't heard them, they might shock you, but we'll just try to work through some of them. First, democracy and the aspirations of the community take precedence over the rights and desires of individuals. Kendall initiated this line of thought in his 1941 book, John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule. He noted that chapter one of Locke's second treatise proclaimed the right of the community to enforce order, including using the death penalty. Only in chapter two did Locke put forth his famous choika of natural rights, life, liberty, and property. To resolve the contradiction, legitimacy of the death penalty versus natural right to life, Kendall suggested that Locke tacitly assumed that a people ruling itself would respect the individual liberties of its members. I think he changed that view later, but that's what he thought in 1941. Kendall's unease with excessive focus on individual rights continued as he moved on from Locke. Most every law we have everywhere, whether it mandates execution, jail time, levying taxes, or institutes a fire safety code, in fact alienates one or more of these rights. They're absolutely alienable. They're alienated by every law in the books. So Kendall also agreed with the author of The Federalists that adding a Bill of Rights to the Constitution was harmful and unnecessary. By enumerating some rights, it invited the violation of others. More significantly, such paper or parchment barriers don't protect rights in the real world. Whenever communities think they're vital interests involved, they proceed to violate individual liberties. The constitutionally mandated right to free speech, just to use one example, well, his father learned out about this the hard way, was effectively abrogated frequently in American history by the Sedition Act of 1798, by General Order No. 38 in the Civil War, and again by the Sedition Act of 1918 in World War I. To protect freedom, Kendall thought an engaged people determined to defend its liberty is far more effective than any Bill of Rights. Second, Kendall argued that equality as a political goal was impossible and undesirable. Kindle took seriously the definition of equality as meaning exactly the same. Using this definition, one can recognize its falsity when applied to society and politics. As Kendall knew, human beings are not created exactly the same as one another. Some are destined to be taller than others, and some are destined to be smarter than others, some are red-haired, some are brunette, some male and some female. Any attempt to achieve full-fledged equality, that is, to make people exactly the same, would be fruitless and tyrannical. Take one of the least extreme versions of equality, one which many conservatives praise, equality of opportunity. If meant literally exactly the same opportunity, massive government intervention must follow. No one can is allowed to have better parents, or more art supplies, or a faster computer than anyone else. All pregnant mothers must eat the same diets. The government must feed, house, doctor, and school each and every child from birth. Instead of chasing this monstrous mirage of tyranny, Kendall suggested goals from the Constitution. Ensuring justice, promoting the general welfare, neither easy, but neither were they impossible or inevitably tyrannical. Kendall's third major principle was that the real font of American political genius, the source of its democratic success, was a people who ruled themselves. Together, the people decided how to build the good society deliberating under God. Over time, Kendall concluded that Hamilton, Madison et al. had solved Rousseau's conundrum about men being born free, but everywhere remaining in chains. The American Constitution allowed that freedom. It allowed the wishes of a majority of citizens to prevail in politics over the long term. Voters didn't directly elect U.S. senators, sure, but they elected the state legislatures who chose the senators. The Electoral College worked similarly. Elected officials appointed and approved even all judges. By slowing down change and getting Americans to talk things through, these institutions allowed what he called the deliberate sense of the American people to prevail, stabilizing and perpetuating democracy by discouraging rash actions. The deliberate sense substitutes for Rousseau's general will. It's what the people want after they've thought it through and talked it through. In this process, however, he also believed the people required a transcendent source of values. For Kendall, the American tradition didn't equate the voice of people with the voice of God. American covenants prior to the Constitution, the Mayflower Compact, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the Declaration, all referenced God. The Constitution didn't, but it retained the notion of transcendent political truths. Americans assumed that certain ethical values, e.g., the Ten Commandments, were true. They saw themselves as institut laws to their own liking, such as the Constitution, which were consonant with Christian principles. Acceptance of this ethical framework discouraged radical innovation and promoted stability. Unlike Robespierre, George Washington didn't need a renewed religion. He already had one. He was an Episcopalian. On the other hand, Kendall knew that crusading for unalienable rights, which were in fact alienable, was a fool's errand. He understood that no political pot of gold existed at the end of the equality rainbow. Wilmore Kendall's calling was to convey these insights to the American people and thereby to promote the good, their good. He believed the people smarter and more trustworthy than any subset of wannabe elites. His path of service was to be tribune and teacher, to build up the people's confidence in their own strength and wisdom and humility. For without a virtual people, he knew democracy would fail. Wilmore dearly loved to shock an audience. In one notorious speech, he stunned listeners by arguing Athens was right to sentence Socrates to death. But he actually admired Socrates, the courage of the Greek thinker, his willingness to suffer the ultimate penalty, to subject himself to his country's laws while trying to correct its course. I've no doubt that Kendall, seeing American democracy crumbling before his eyes, would himself have gladly drunk the hemlock rather than stay silent. Or we might reverse our comparison. Socrates wouldn't have made full professor at Yale either. He was much too argumentative. Thank you.