As an award-winning orator, the young Keyes was confident of his ability to capture audiences, but wasn't sure his speeches contained the right message. The youngest and the first black to win the American Legion's national public speaking championship, Keyes was only 16 when a synagogue asked him to prepare a reflection on the Six-Day War in 1967.

"I was scared that my speaking wasn't connected to real experience," Keyes says. "So I stopped using this gift until I had something to say, until I knew something."

Keyes' speaking ability won him the support of a small yet loyal group of followers, but he credits his educational background and professional experiences for providing the content that resonated with the taste of his supporters.

He placed his gift on hold for seven years in order to learn what to say. Faced with a choice between Cornell and Harvard, Keyes opted for Cornell because of its accelerated, six-year combined bachelor's and doctorate degree program. Hoping to obtain a Ph.D. before applying to law school and then working in government service, Keyes embarked on his short-cut plan in 1969 but ended up relishing academia so much that he transferred to Harvard, where he stayed until 1979 to complete his doctorate.

Cornell was a hotbed of controversy during Keyes' first years, and he often found himself in the thick of the action. Several gun-wielding members of the Black Student Union stormed an administration building and the National Guard had to shut down Cornell's campus to reassert authority. Keyes articulated strong opposition to the militant protest, in private, to the group and told it that he disagreed with its tactics and its ideology.

Keyes subsequently was threatened with death, according to Paul Rahe, a classmate in Cornell's Ph.D. program.

Dissatisfied with the education he was supposed to be receiving, Keyes followed his mentor Allan Bloom--later author of The Closing of the American Mind and professor of social thought at the University of Chicago--to Paris on a scholarship as Bloom's research assistant.

"Professor Bloom was a rewarding man to work for," he says. "He always challenged you and pushed you and expected great things from you. If he felt you had the talent, he'd invest time in you."

One year later, Bloom left for Canada, but Keyes wanted to return to the U.S. He transferred to Harvard in the hopes of studying under Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. '53, a scholar who shared Bloom's political inclinations.

"I chose Harvard for its people rather than for the institutions," Keyes says.

Keyes was not deeply engaged in student life as a resident of Adams House; he chose instead to devote his time to studying political philosophy.

"I believe his coming to Harvard was partly motivated by the danger he was in at Cornell from other students who didn't agree with his views--personal danger, physical," says Mansfield in an interview, who recalls Keyes as "very bright" and "very interested in politics."

Mansfield, who says Keyes matured as he went from the College to graduate school, notes that Keyes subscribed to the view that cultural changes had contributed to the rise in single-parent families and to the increase in welfare recipients, an idea championed by such conservative thinkers as Harvard government professors James Q. Wilson and Edward Banfield.

"His political theory comes from the American founding, the Declaration and the Constitution, so it's that sort of peculiar American conservatism, which begins with the Revolution and continues with the Constitution that was quite new to the political experience of republics before ours," Mansfield says.

Mansfield adds that Keyes' identity as an African-American "probably gave him greater disgust for liberalism than otherwise might have been the case. The attitude of the liberals towards blacks was dominated by their sense of guilt and not by any careful consideration of what was good either for blacks or for America, and that's probably still the case."

Drawing on his years as a teaching fellow and resident tutor in Winthrop House in 1975 and 1976, Keyes recalls the changes in higher education from the 1960s to the 1970s.