They still don’t get it. When Lee M. Bass gave Yale University $20
million in 1991 to develop an integrated course of studies in Western
civilization, he did not want his money going to support the kind of
radical multiculturalism that had become a disfiguring staple
at Yale and other American universities in the past couple of
decades. When
he said “Western civilization” he meant, well, Western
civilization. It doesn’t seem that complicated. But apparently it was
beyond the ken of those presiding over the future of Yale University.
It was announced last month that, after watching Yale dither and
equivocate about the disposition of his gift for four years, Mr.
Bass had lost patience and asked for his money back. Although clearly
stunned by what The Wall Street Journal rightly called this
“extraordinary display of backbone,” Yale had no choice but to
comply.

The saga of the Bass grant for Western civilization (one of several
large grants that the Bass family has made to Yale) is instructive
for everyone concerned. For prospective donors, it is a cautionary
tale. For recalcitrant university administrators and faculty,
it is an object lesson in how not to respond to a major gift. The
inspiration for Mr. Bass’s visionary gift was the
famous speech that Donald Kagan, the eminent classics professor at
Yale who was then Dean of Yale College, gave to incoming freshmen in
September 1990. Crying out like a voice in the wilderness, Mr. Kagan
called upon the students and faculty of Yale to preserve the
traditional focus of liberal-arts education. “It is both right and
necessary,” Mr. Kagan said in that speech, “to place Western
civilization and the culture to which it has given rise at the center
of our studies, and we fail to do so at the peril of our students,
our country, and of the hopes for a democratic, liberal society
emerging throughout the world today.” Not only had Western
civilization “asserted the claims of the individual against those of
the state, limiting its power and creating a realm of privacy into
which it cannot penetrate,” but Western philosophy and religion had
also inculcated a habit of self-criticism as well as “a tolerance and
respect for diversity unknown in most cultures.”

Mr. Kagan’s speech made national headlines. As we reported in these
pages at the time, Mr. Kagan’s championship of Western civilization
sparked angry denunciations from radical elements in the Yale
community. The editor of one student newspaper fumed that “taking
European culture as the center is not only ridiculous, it is the seed
of racism.” Mr. Kagan himself was castigated as “intolerant,”
“paternalistic,” “racist.” But Lee Bass, who had been graduated from
Yale in 1979, understood the clarion call sounded in Mr. Kagan’s
speech. When Benno Schmidt, then the president of Yale, approached
Mr. Bass about making a contribution to his alma mater, he
responded with his extraordinary gift. Built around a
multi-disciplinary, double-credit survey course in Western
civilization, the Bass grant was intended to support seven senior and
four junior professorships. A university committee, which included
Mr. Kagan, was set up to design the course of study, which would
chart the course of Western civilization from Mesopotamia through
World War II.

As The Wall Street Journal reported last November, what happened
next was a quadrille of academic obfuscation and behind-the-scenes
politicking. Donald Kagan left the deanship, Benno
Schmidt abandoned Yale to make money, and the university’s new president,
Richard Levin, announced that there would be no new faculty hired
with the Bass money. The committee planning the program in Western
civilization disbanded in disarray.

What about that $20 million? Mr. Bass began wondering the same
thing. In September 1993, he asked President Levin what progress had
been made in instituting the program he had endowed. By November
1994, his impatience was a matter of public record. In an anguished,
hand-wringing letter to The Wall Street Journal last December,
President Levin complained that the Journal had got him all wrong,
that Western civilization was alive and well at Yale, and that he
had rejected the proposed design for the Bass program for the
“practical, logistical, and nonpolitical reason that it made
inefficient use of our faculty resources.” The Bass gift had not
been “subverted,” Mr. Levin wrote, no matter what critics said. On
the contrary, “the income from Mr. Bass’s generous gift to our
endowment has been and will be spent entirely for the purposes
specified by the donor.”

Really? To get a sense of what Mr. Levin
meant, just consider
statements made by Michael Holquist, acting head of the
Yale comparative-literature department, who envisioned “fusion” courses
that would include “gender studies” and other delicacies on
the multiculturalist menu. Literature and history cannot be taught, Mr.
Holquist explained, “without reference to O. J. Simpson.” So much
for the achievements of Western civilization. Such statements cannot
have been reassuring to Mr. Bass. Rather than sit by while his gift
was used to undermine the very things he had intended to support,
he asked the university to allow him to approve faculty appointments
made with his money. Not surprisingly, Yale refused. Mr. Bass then
asked for his money
back.

The responses to the sorry story of the Bass grant have been
instructive.
President Levin immediately embarked on a campaign of
damage control. In the March 31 issue of
The Chronicle of Higher
Education, he is quoted as saying that the “Bass incident has been
over-interpreted”—give a raise to the
PR man who came up with
that!—and that he thinks it is “an aberration rather than
a sign of a new trend.” No doubt he fervently hopes so. And then
there is his March 23 blandishment “To the Alumni and Alumnae of Yale
University,” in which he writes that “it is important to emphasize
that implementation of the course was not delayed by political
opposition to the course’s content. The study of Western Civilization
has always been and will continue to be at the center of a Yale
College education, and our faculty’s commitment to the subject
remains unshaken.” Yes, of course: the Iliad and O. J. Simpson.
And it is odd, isn’t it, that when Donald Kagan said that Yale
should focus
its energies on Western civilization he was roundly
castigated as a reactionary? But then Mr. Kagan was speaking to
students, who might be expected to take him seriously, whereas
President Levin was merely attempting to smoothe any ruffled feathers
that might exist among the university’s largest pool of potential
donors.

Of course, The New York Times weighed in with an editorial
defending Yale and, by implication, attacking Mr. Bass and his
supporters. “No self-respecting educational institution,” the
Times intoned in its best moralistic fashion, “can allow an
outsider—no matter how well-meaning or generous —to dictate its
education priorities.” Donors, the Times continued, should
learn that “it is probably a bad idea … to try to use a gift to
influence a school’s educational direction,” while “universities
must also resist the temptation to solicit and accept gifts from
donors with a strong political agenda.” The lesson to be drawn from
the Bass case, the Times concluded, is that “it does not pay to
pander to a donor’s political quirks.”

Right. Mr. Bass has a “strong political agenda” and exhibits
“political quirks” because he wanted to support a program in Western
civilization that was not beholden to the politically correct
imperatives of contemporary academic orthodoxy. And what of the
multiculturalist radicals who opposed Mr. Bass? Somehow, the Times
did not get around to objecting to their “strong political agenda”
and “political quirks.”

And as for self-respecting educational institutions refusing to allow
“outsiders” to “dictate education priorities” and
“influence educational direction,” where was The New York
Times when we needed it? When Lee Bass makes a gift to help preserve
Western civilization against the onslaught of intellectual and moral
radicalism, he is attacked for meddling with academic freedom. But
what about the activities of such institutions as the Ford Foundation
and the Rockefeller Foundation (to name only two of the largest and
most influential), which have been blatantly attempting to “dictate”
educational priorities and “influence” educational policy for years? In
January, Evan Gahr reported on some of their projects in The Wall
Street Journal. At the University of Washington, a professor who is
the project director of several Ford Foundation grants co-edited a
volume entitled Transforming the Curriculum: Ethnic Studies and
Women’s Studies, part of an effort to “undo the effects of the
distortions set
in motion 500 years ago when Columbus brought
massacre and the most brutal form of slavery known to these shores,
all in the interest of spreading ‘Western civilization’ with all its
long-lasting assumptions of racial, cultural, and male superiority.”
Or what about the $250,000 fellowship program supported by the
Rockefeller Foundation for the City University of New York’s Center
for Gay and Lesbian Studies? According to Mr. Gahr, that program
helped to support “projects on transgender phenomena such
as transsexualism or specific cross-gender figures.” Or what about the
Ford Foundation’s multi-million-dollar “Campus Diversity Project,”
designed to encourage multiculturalism on campuses across the
country? Can any more obvious effort to transform educational
priorities and “influence” school policies be imagined? Why hasn’t
The New York Times stepped in to criticize these endeavors?

Perhaps even more instructive was Andrew Delbanco’s response to
the Bass case in a “Comment” for the March 27 issue of The New
Yorker. Mr. Delbanco, who teaches at Columbia University,
understands why Mr. Bass and his supporters should have been upset by
what happened to the Bass grant. Unfortunately, he is himself a
perfect embodiment of the kind of institutionalized radicalism that
the Bass gift was intended to combat. Mr. Delbanco acknowledges that
universities have hitherto been places “where the culture in which
alumni prospered has been transmitted to their children.” At the
same time, he insists that

universities are meant to foster suspicion toward every untested
piety and to raise doubts about every axiom. They are, properly,
places of experiment and irreverence; they will never please those
who expect them to be mainly curatorial… . [E]specially now, in
the national climate of reaction, universities have an obligation to
keep alive the spirit of blasphemy that has always been part of the
true
life of the mind.

Rhetorically, Mr. Delbanco’s gambit here can be very effective.
Practically everyone believes that a liberal education, in addition
to transmitting a body of knowledge, ought to sharpen a student’s
critical faculties. Talk of challenging “untested piety” and making
universities “places of experiment” go down very well with the
liberal populace of middle-class America. But what about the
“suspicion” and “irreverence” that Mr. Delbanco mentions? Are they
really “properly” part of a liberal-arts education? And is it really
the case that the “the spirit of blasphemy” has “always been part of
the true
life of the mind”? It would have come as
a surprise to Plato and Aristotle, to Augustine, to Dante and Milton—indeed to
the entire pantheon of great Western thinkers except
the handful of radicals who helped
create the climate of revolt whose legacy
the American university is now struggling
with.

Mr. Delbanco, like many others who have rushed in to condemn the Bass
gift, would have us believe that the choice facing American higher
education is between a mindless conformity and a daring
radicalism. In fact, the choice is between the liberal tradition
that recognizes the past as the foundation of the present and a
rootless intellectual antinomianism. The fate of the Bass grant at
Yale rightly worries Mr. Delbanco because it suggests that the
“compact between universities and the middle class” in this country
is now beginning “to come apart.” What
neither he nor the editorial
writers for The New York Times seem to understand, however, is that
the way to repair that compact
is not by launching additional assaults on
the foundations of liberal learning but by making new efforts to recapture the
ground that has been lost to the irreverent “spirit of blasphemy”
that has dominated the academy in this country since the 1960s. In
this sense, the loss of the Bass gift was not only a blow to the
finances of Yale University but also a warning shot from the
gradually regrouping opposition in the culture wars.