I may be the only person in the western world who can say this truthfully:  I was converted to conservatism while an English major in college.

My major advisor – Dr. James Blake (easily the finest among many, many fine professors I had at my obscure but talent-rich little college in the middle of nowhere) was so far to the right, he described himself as a “monarchist”, with a straight face; he also introduced me to a series of writers that helped push me along on my journey from left to right; Dostoevski, Solzhenitzyn, Tolstoii, Paul Johnson, and even P.J. O’Rourke. 

Dr. Blake and I weren’t entirely alone; the other upper-division major at the time was a guy named Scott.  We’d been friends since high school; a year older than me, we’d played guitar together in any number of abortive bands; he wrote a column under the pseudonym “Madagascar Red” in the college paper that I edited which, with the hindsight and gauzy soft focus that two decades’ remove grants all things, was as funny as anything in The Onion.  Honest.

Anyway, Scott was another conservative in the English department.  And as my own journey to the right coalesced, the three of us became something of a conservative brickbat-throwing machine at Jamestown.

The school’s library was run by quite a different specimen – a woman who was, in addition to the wife of my History minor advisor, a bit to the left of even the academic norm.  A well-meaning sort, but…well…

She had a “suggestion book” at the entrance to the stacks; if someone wanted to see a book or other resource, they could write it into the book.  There was a column for the librarian’s response. 

One chilly October morning, Scott and I walked into the library.  He looked around, grabbed a pen, and wrote down “Please get a copy of God And Man At Yale“. 

The response took a week or two; finally, the librarian wrote something snarky and dismissive.

Wrong move.

In an exchange that resembled a blog comment section, fifteen years before blogs were invented, Scott and the librarian mixed it up – he making the case for including this key, vital book in the collection, she backpedalling and trying to justify (eventually) its exclusion.

I think Scott graduated without seeing the issue resolved. 

The long and short of it being that the whole fracas was my introduction to the pure, simple joy of being a conservative underdog, duking it out with the leaden, lumpen establishment.

Just saying; without that dust-up on William F. Buckley’s behalf, this blog might never have existed.