The Lone Professor, or Why We All Need Heroes

I just read the following from one of William F. Buckley's speeches, and thought you might enjoy it.  Buckley gave this speech in honor of one of his Yale professors who was the lone active free-market economist at Yale in the late '40s and '50s.  He gave this speech in 1961:

  "Professor Saxon was the nearest thing to an omnipresence I ever knew.  He made Yale unsafe for economic presumption.  You could never tell just when one of the current economic myths, traveling about the campus drawing applause from all the little apprentice social magicians, would turn a corner, bump into Glenn Saxon, and die a miserable death.  Occasionally, our beleaguered conservative forces needed a massive display of strength,and we would summon forth our Big Bertha, and put Mr. Saxon publicly on display before, say, the Political Union.  There he would pronounce the verities... and, reanimated, those of us who were convinced of the interrelationship of economic freedom and freedom could go about our businesss with the unique confidence that comes from knowing that the champion of your ideas has met the challenger and is still champion."

(From p. 41 of Let Us Talk of Many Things).