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While Reagan was the first Republican candidate to score a major political win by assailing higher education, the party's animosity to the liberal atmosphere on many college campuses can be traced back to the 1951 publication of William F. Buckley's "God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom."

Buckley, a devout Catholic from a wealthy Connecticut family, graduated from Yale in 1950.

Buckley's book became a surprise best-seller.

In an introduction to the book, John Chamberlain, a conservative editorial writer for Life magazine, endorsed Buckley's accusation that Yale had set-up "an elite of professional untouchables . . . The elite would perpetuate itself as it chose. Departments would select their staffs without reference to alumni or parental or undergraduate opinion . . . This is caste rule as applied to education, it might be unkind to call it 'Fascism,' but it certainly is not democracy."

Chamberlain said he endorsed Buckley's criticism that Yale faculty was "skeptical of any religion and interventionist and Keynesian as to economics and collectivist as applied to the relation of the individual and government."