Benjamin Weingarten of the Blaze takes a look back at the role higher education played in producing today’s progressives.

How America’s elite universities paved the way for progressivism 70 years ago

Blaze readers are likely familiar with the so-called “Long March” of progressivism through America’s institutions, whereby leftists undertook a concerted effort to embed themselves in the media and academia over many decades in order to change American culture and peacefully subvert and overthrow its system of governance.

While books such as Paul Kengor’s “Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century,” have eloquently argued this thesis — with Kengor comprehensively documenting links from figures like the New York Times’ chief Stalin apologist Walter Duranty, to educators like John Dewey, to more modern dupes, useful idiots and true believers — one particularly striking portrait of the left’s strategy comes from William F. Buckley’s 1951 classic, “God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom’.”

Here is what the prolific National Review founder, who attended Yale from 1946-1950 following his service in the army, wrote about the damage done to his fellow Yale students by the school’s economics department alone, some six decades ago:

…if the recent Yale graduate, who exposed himself to Yale economics during his undergraduate years, exhibits enterprise, self-reliance, and independence, it is only because he has turned his back upon his teachers and texts. It is because he has not hearkened to those who assiduously disparage the individual, glorify the government, enshrine security, and discourage self-reliance.

Buckley continues:

I believe the net influence of Yale economics to be thoroughly collectivistic.