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This chapter examines Kirk’s friendships with Robert Nisbet, Leo Strauss, Flannery O’Connor, Eric Voegelin, and Ray Bradbury. It also tells the disastrous story of Kirk’s creation and editing of a nonideological journal of thought and scholarship, Modern Age, only to be thwarted by bigotry and editorial disagreements with the publisher.

The epilogue treats critics of American modernity and the instrumental university, especially the sociologist Robert Nisbet, a University of California faculty member (and sometime administrator) at Berkeley and Riverside from 1939 to 1972 who knew Clark Kerr. Nisbet lashed out at organized research in his 1971 book The Degradation of the Academic Dogma, where he coined the term “academic capitalism.” The most unfortunate consequence of the ORU’s rise to prominence, Nisbet believed, was that it separated research from teaching, thus tearing asunder what he conceived as a coherent fabric of academic practice. Nisbet’s thought provides a helpful framework for assessing the instrumental university’s legacy for higher education and American society today.

Post World War II conservative thinking witnessed a marked shift in criticism away from capitalism itself and to the state. Cold War conservatives’ anti-communism led many on the right to perceive economic systems in stark terms as either purely capitalistic or on the road to communism.

Fears over physical blight soon intersected with cold-war anxieties over infiltration and subversion. Chapter 4 surveys prominent cold-war interpretations of the city neighborhood's functions, where narratives of peril and decline overwhelmed the progressive neighborhood aspirations of the early 1940s. As commentators warned that even the smallest-scale institutions of American life were vulnerable to ideological infection, sociologists such as Morris Janowitz and Robert Nisbet debated the traditional neighborhood's function with reference to questions of statism, consumerism, authority, and individualism. At the same time, cold-war liberals increasingly suspected that neighborhood solidarity—a value once celebrated—led only to conformism or collectivism, social prejudice or narrow forms of group-think. As this chapter relates, in the works of figures ranging from screenwriter Reginald Rose to pundit John Keats, and from opera composer Gian Carlo Menotti to novelist Edwin O’Connor, older ideals of neighborhood unity had come to seem clannish and constricting.