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Commentary on a pending visit of U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon to the Buckley Institute, (located on the grounds of Yale University), has been scattered and occasionally scatterbrained.

The Yale Dailey News tells us, “In an interview, Yale President Maurie McInnis lauded the Buckley Institute for scheduling an event with U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon, whose department has investigated Yale and slashed federal funding for universities.”

Driving the point home, the paper adds, “McMahon is slated to speak about diversity, gender and the government’s education policies at an April 16 event hosted by the Buckley Institute, a group that brings conservative voices to campus. The secretary, a member of President Donald Trump’s cabinet, oversees a Department of Education that has canceled billions of dollars’ worth of federal funding grants to universities across the country.”

Much of Connecticut’s media is in danger in its news accounts of becoming the nation’s premier pabulum pusher among hard-wired anti-Trumpists. Like love, conservatives know an anti-Trump bias when they see it.

Chris Powell, the former Managing Editor and Editorial Page Editor of the Journal Inquirer, now retired, though he continues writing a column for the paper, reminds us that McMahon has not been a politician favored by Connecticut’s media. Newspapers across the state, once independent and privately owned, have now been swallowed up by large national and international chains that push out what some conservatives dismiss as prefabricated media pabulum.

Powell, who has written often on education in Connecticut and the nation, laid his finger in a recent column on several sore points: “Of course indications are that education in the United States has declined substantially since the {Federal Department of Education] was established. For indeed the department is most of all a source of educator patronage and leftist ideology, so Republicans have a case for getting rid of it. They also can argue that Democrats, especially in Connecticut, including Mayor Elicker, who is also a member of his city’s school board, don’t have much of an educational record to defend.

“It’s not the fault of Trump and McMahon that about a third of New Haven’s students and teachers alike are chronically absent, missing 10% or more of their classes, and that, when they do manage to show up, so many students chronically misbehave, causing their teachers to burn out faster. Nor is it the fault of Trump and McMahon that New Haven’s students, like those in Connecticut’s other cities, perform so poorly on the few proficiency tests the state dares to give them even as education spending keeps rising while enrollments fall.”

Powell’s commentary is often dangerously fresh. He is without doubt an inspired contrarian, unwilling to go along to get along, a journalistic disturber of the peace such as William Randolph Hearst, the namesake of the present Hearst media empire. Here are some of Hearst’s notable quotes on the subject of newspaper independence:

“The liberty of the press is essential to the security of freedom in a state: it ought not, therefore, to be restrained in this commonwealth.”

“The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed.”

“In the First Amendment, the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy.”

These strictures apply as well – or should apply as well – to universities, or at least to universities like Yale that are massively endowed through the generosity of their alumni and other freely contributing friends of Yale. The university’s endowment is so large it needn’t worry overmuch about cuts proposed by the U.S. Government.

As stated in her answers to questions presented to her by Yale’s newspaper staff, Yale’s President Maurie McInnis reinforces and adds weight to Hearst’s perspective.

“’Buckley does an amazing job, as do many of our other student groups, of inviting leaders to come speak on consequential topics,’ McInnis said in her interview on Tuesday. ‘I applaud that they have invited her.’”

Asked if she believed the Education Department should be scrapped, McInnis responded “’… the U.S. Department of Education serves many wide and diverse functions, many of which serve our students very well,’ mentioning Pell Grants as an example. ‘I certainly think that those functions are absolutely vital and need to continue,’ she added, emphasizing the word ‘functions.’”

Asked what she would most want to convey to McMahon if given the chance, McInnis said she would highlight the University’s commitment to open inquiry. “I would stress what an extraordinary educational opportunity Yale was able to provide to students who have wide ranges of views” adding, that Yale offers to its students “open opportunities for debate and dialogue.”

Buckley’s Book God and Man at Yale -- subtitled “The Superstitions of Academic Freedom,” first published in 1951 and republished with a new introduction by Buckley in 1977 -- caused an upheaval in academia. George Will called the book “a lover’s quarrel with his [Buckley’s] alma mater.”

The new introduction to the book is well worth the price of admission: “I know why Yale shouldn’t be turned over to the state. Because there are great historical presumptions that from time to time the interests of the state and those of civilization will bifurcate, and unless there is independence, the cause of civilization is neglected. The critical difference [between Berkley and Yale} is the critical sense of mission. At Berkley, that sense of mission is as diffuse and inchoate – and unspecified and unspecifiable – as the resolute pluralism of California society. At the private college, the sense of mission is distinguishing. It is however strangled by what goes under the presumptuous designation of academic freedom. It is a terrible loss, the loss of the sense of mission. It makes the private university, sad to say, incoherent; and that is what I was trying to say when, two months out of Yale, I sat down to write this book.”

Buckley is here attacking the levelers, those who believe that a loss of character and mission is not ruinous. The Buckley Institute’s mission is to see to it that character, coherence and mission is not swept away by temporary enthusiasms, such as a distaste bordering on irrational hatred for things Trumpian.

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