BATTLE HYMN

Long before Ron DeSantis made the regulation of college curricula a stump-speech talking point, WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR. launched a conservative crusade to transform universities into bastions of right-wing ideology

- SAM TANENHAUS

ON SUNDAY, October 30, 2022, the day before Halloween—All Saints Day Celebration, as it is called in the calendar at Ave Maria University, near Naples, Florida—Governor Ron DeSantis came to town. It was just over a week before the gubernatorial election, but his victory was a foregone conclusion.

The 1,300 or so students at Ave Maria had all gotten an announcement about the governor’s visit. Many were excited to see and maybe meet him. Very few did. “He kind of swept through,” one student told me in March when I traveled to AMU’s campus, founded in 1998 but relocated to Florida in 2007. “Maybe one in five people in town knew [DeSantis] was here,” said another, adding that in Naples—which has all the media—“no one knew.”

One bemused witness to the DeSantis event was the man who made it happen: the chair of AMU’s politics department, James Patterson, a genial and erudite scholar, formidably articulate, who writes about religion and politics. Seated in his office—the novels of Walker Percy on one crowded shelf and a small refrigerator, a relic from his long-ago college days, quietly rumbling on the floor—he glanced out the window overlooking the long stretch of green, with its palm trees and neatly parked golf carts, where DeSantis had spoken.