Buchanan left St. John's College in 1947 after a successful but disillusioning legal struggle with the U.S. Navy, which had been trying to seize the St. John's campus as part of a plan to enlarge the nearby United States Naval Academy. After spending the next two years directing Liberal Arts, Inc., a failed venture to create a Great Books-based college in Massachusetts, Buchanan's democratic vision for the revival of the liberal arts turned from the academic to the political arena. Except for a brief period in 1956 and 1957, when he was a visiting lecturer at Princeton University and also served as chairman of the Religion and Philosophy Departments at Fisk University, he held no more positions in academic institutions. In 1948 Buchanan worked actively in the Progressive Party presidential campaign of Henry Wallace, and for several years afterwards was consultant, trustee, and secretary of the Foundation for World Government. In 1957 Buchanan accepted an invitation by Robert Maynard Hutchins to become a senior fellow at Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a liberal political think tank in Santa Barbara, California. Buchanan remained at the Center for the rest of his career, and one of the projects to which he contributed was the Center's efforts to publicize the work of Jacques Ellul in the English-speaking world.