In 1949, William F. Buckley declared that college campuses needed “intellectuals who must preach American principles and natural rights and divine sanction.” Today, Ron DeSantis wields power over schools in ways Buckley could only have dreamed of.
The novelty was not in the messaging—nor in DeSantis’s bland delivery. It was in the staging. Normally, the dais is set up at midpoint on the long central green, the speakers facing east, with the Mother Theresa Museum on one side—her visage on a mural next to Pope John Paul II. The DeSantis team, however, “wanted to flip” the stage, according to a university official—that is, pivot in the opposite direction. The difference was evident in the video and photos of the event.
It was only later, in 1973, after a women’s right to choose became the law of the land, that Catholic conservatives and evangelicals formed an alliance. Opposition to abortion “was a godsend for leaders of the Religious Right,” the historian Randall Balmer recently pointed out. And it was Catholic intellectuals, writers, and jurists who framed the main arguments, crowned by thewritten by Justice Samuel Alito, one of six Catholics on the Supreme Court, the most conservative in modern history.
He had one culprit in mind, one of the most popular educators on campus: sociology professor Raymond Kennedy. In his early 40s, rock-jawed with the fierce gaze, it was said, of a Marine colonel, Kennedy attracted legions to his course on comparative cultures, enlivening his lectures with anecdotes drawn from his research expeditions in the remote cultures of Southeast Asia, an experience that had made him a harsh critic of both colonialism and ideologies of cultural supremacy.
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