https://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2008/09/05/the-boston-phone-book-harvard-and-sarah-palin/feed/PJ Media is a leading news site covering culture, politics, faith, homeland security, and more. Our reporters and columnists provide original, in-depth analysis from a variety of perspectives.en-usSat, 13 Jun 2026 00:50:46 -0400<![CDATA[In the early 1960s, Bill Buckley famously observed that he would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston phone book than the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. It is perhaps worth pointing out that Bill, a Yale man, was not singling out the Harvard faculty for special opprobrium. Harvard was merely a synecdoche [a reader suggests that &#8220;metonymy&#8221; would be more accurate&#8211;maybe he is right]. It was the smug, &#8220;progressive&#8221; liberal consensus that our elite academic institutions inculcated, even back then, that Bill objected to, not Harvard per se. What are the lineaments of that consensus? In God and Man at Yale (1951), Bill said that, for him, &#8220;the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world,&#8221; and he went on to observe that &#8220;the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level.&#8221; The liberal consensus&#8211;the liberal &#8220;orthodoxy&#8221; as Bill sometimes put it&#8211;is on the side of atheism and collectivism. It takes its emotional weather from Rousseau, its economics from Marx, its theology from Nietzsche, its sexual etiquette from some radical disciples of Freud.]]>Fri, 05 Sep 2008 07:58:30 -0400<![CDATA[Roger Kimball]]>https://pjmedia.com/roger-kimball/2008/09/05/the-boston-phone-book-harvard-and-sarah-palin-n115150