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Conspiracy or not, there’s no doubt that George has been tremendously influential — and at the moment, his brand of higher-education reform is ascendant. Simply put, if you’re sympathetic to the view that academe has been ideologically captured by the left but find Christopher Rufo and his ilk giving off strong “destroy the village to save it” energy, George looks like a genial antidote. He’s a critic of the academic left but also a staunch defender of institutional autonomy and academic freedom, including against attacks from the right. To his supporters, his approach offers a serious-minded alternative to the nihilistic recklessness of Rufoism. He’s also one part of academe’s oddest duo, having co-taught and lectured extensively with his Princeton colleague on the left, Cornel West. (Truth Matters: A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division, written with West, was published earlier this year. To gauge the giddiness with which they approach their partnership, look no further than the picture on the cover.)
In 2000, George established at Princeton the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, a model for the many colleges and universities, public and private, spinning up similar initiatives. To critics, especially on the faculty, these often legislatively imposed initiatives are little more than an elaborate system of affirmative action for conservative scholars.
George has been in the news recently because of his resignation from the board of the Heritage Foundation over concerns about its handling of antisemitism on the right, especially the fallout from Tucker Carlson’s interview with the avowed white nationalist Nick Fuentes. George didn’t want to discuss Heritage but did make clear that something noxious is bubbling up on parts of the right, especially among young men. He even sees it among his students at Princeton.
Over the course of two interviews — the first conducted from his home and the second from his office on the Princeton campus — George discussed the risk of indoctrination from the left and the right, the need for a more ideologically diverse professoriate, and how academe made itself vulnerable to attack by the Trump administration. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Evan Goldstein: You’re from West Virginia. Both your grandfathers were coal miners. You’re the first in your family to attend college. You’re a conservative. You’re a devout Catholic. This is an atypical profile for a professor, especially at a place like Princeton. Have you felt like an outsider in the academy?
Robert P. George: I’ve not been around a lot of people in academia who are just like me. But I’ve had a blessed career at Princeton. I’m now in my 41st year, and Princeton hired me knowing exactly what they were getting. I was not one of these people who came in under the radar. I work in areas that touch on hot-button moral and political questions, so there was no way to hide my beliefs and judgments, nor temperamentally would I have been capable of doing that. So while it’s certainly true that dissenters from campus orthodoxies across the nation have often been victims of discrimination, I am not a victim. I’ve been treated exceptionally well.
Goldstein: You were hired more than four decades ago. How confident are you that someone of your beliefs and background would be hired at Princeton today?
George: I’m sure that there are some departments in which dissenting voices would not be welcome, but I think at most departments or most units of the university someone like me could be hired — and people like me have, in fact, been hired, advanced to tenure, promoted to full professor, and given endowed chairs. So perhaps I’m unusual, but I’m not unique. Now, there are universities where a dissenting voice like mine would not be allowed to be heard.
Goldstein: You founded the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton 25 years ago. It has become a model for a host of similar institutions at other universities, both public and private. Take us back to the Madison Program’s origins: What was the need that you felt was going unmet at Princeton specifically and in higher ed more broadly?
George: The Carnegie Foundation and others were taking note of the deficiencies of civic education around the country. I grew concerned that our students — and we get outstanding students — lacked even an elementary grasp of the principles and institutions of the American civic order. The Madison Program represented an effort of renewal.
Len Gutkin: We recently spoke to Gordon Gee, who’s helping with the launch of the Salmon P. Chase Center at Ohio State. He had this wonderful description of these civic centers as “carbuncles in the middle of an institution.” His point: They tend to provoke faculty opposition and are difficult to integrate. Do you feel like a carbuncle?
George: Quite the reverse. There was no significant faculty opposition to the Madison Program. I’m sure there are a small number of faculty members who wish we would go away, but there are many more across the ideological spectrum who think we make a vital contribution to the intellectual life of the university. Student demand has also been fantastic. I predicted that. I said, If we build it, they will come — that old real-estate axiom. We built it, they came, and they are still coming. Beyond the walls of Princeton people noticed what we’re doing and have tried to replicate it.
Even people doing their best to be fair to perspectives they don’t share typically can’t present those perspectives as well as people who actually hold those perspectives.
Goldstein: There are some important distinctions between the Madison Program at a place like Princeton and, say, the Chase Center at a place like Ohio State or the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida. For one thing, the Madison Program is a privately funded entity at a private university.
George: That’s correct. We do not get any annual allocation of funding from the university. But I am authorized to raise money for the Madison Program. Gifts are made to Princeton University, but they are designated by the donor for the exclusive use of the Madison Program. It would be nice to have a few million dollars dropped into my account on September 1st each year, but I haven’t minded raising money. And we’ve been financially secure. Thank God.
Gutkin: One of the ironies of the Madison Program becoming a model for civic centers in red states is that the careful, politically neutral orientation of the Madison Program is not being rhetorically embraced by the legislatures or politicians in states like West Virginia or Texas. They tend to embrace these centers as weapons to combat “woke ideology” — that’s a quote from the governor of West Virginia. What advice do you have for people spearheading civics initiatives in red states who are trying to maintain the integrity of these programs, while also working with, but in some ways against, politicians who might have rather different goals?
George: I always begin with first principles. The whole purpose of a college or university is to seek the truth and then to speak the truth as best we understand it. And it’s our job to expose students to the best that has been thought and said by whoever has thought and said it, and to do that in an ideologically nonpartisan way. I pride myself in exposing my students to the best arguments, the best thinkers, the best writers for positions very much at odds with my own.
And yet, teaching with my beloved friend Cornel West showed me something. When we are discussing a topic, he will raise a point in defense of a progressive perspective that simply would not have occurred to me, even though I’m doing my best to be nonpartisan. He tells me he has the same experience teaching conservative views with me. I draw from that the lesson that even people doing their best to be fair to perspectives they don’t share typically can’t present those perspectives as well as people who actually hold those perspectives. So it’s important, it seems to me, to ensure that there’s a significant range of viewpoint diversity represented on the faculty. That will happen quite naturally if, but only if, we are nonpartisan in our faculty-appointments process. We don’t need affirmative action for conservatives.
A final word here: I don’t think we can any longer say that these centers are just in red states, because the University of Michigan has announced that it’s building one. You’re also seeing them at mainstream, private universities. Johns Hopkins University has set up what is looking to be a fabulous one. Stanford has introduced its wonderful civics initiative. Yale, I think, is starting on a smaller scale, but it’s got a civics initiative. The example we’ve set here with the Madison Program is being noticed.
Gutkin: Is there a risk that the civics frame is itself so value laden that it will tend to inculcate a certain set of ideologically predetermined attitudes toward things like patriotism, the American founding, the value of the American constitutional order and so on? It’s a very specific program, and it is prescriptive to a degree. Am I wrong?
George: It’s a concern that has to be taken seriously. I’m an old-fashioned American patriot. My heart still flutters when I see Old Glory flying. But I’m not preaching that old-fashioned patriotism in my classes. I want to give my students an ideologically nonpartisan picture of the principles and institutions of the American civic order and let them decide for themselves whether they share my enthusiasm for those ideas and institutions or whether they reject them or are more critical of them. That means exposing them to critical perspectives. Sometimes my conservative friends are scandalized that I teach Gramsci, Marx, Frankfurt School theorists like Horkheimer and Marcuse. We have a motto in the Madison Program: Think deeply, think critically — which always means self-critically — and think for yourself. Students can only think for themselves if they’ve been exposed to competing ideas, including those that compete with ideas that I myself cherish.
Goldstein: I want to put a finer point on Len’s previous question. You mentioned new civics initiatives at the University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins, Stanford — there’s an efflorescence of these centers. I see a potentially important distinction between starting one at Princeton or Stanford or Yale and starting one at Ohio State or the University of Florida. The Chase and Hamilton centers were created by legislation. They’re funded in part by the state. You have politicians articulating their own rationales that diverge from the way you talk about the Madison Program. That might be a reason that Gee feels like a carbuncle and you don’t.
Students can only think for themselves if they’ve been exposed to competing ideas, including those that compete with ideas that I myself cherish.
George: I take your point, Evan. Full disclosure: I’m the chairman of the governing committee of the Chase Center. The way Ohio set it up was that the chairman and members of the committee are nominated by the governor and then subject to confirmation by the State Senate. I went through that process, and I was sad that the senate vote broke along ideological lines. Every Republican voted for the governor’s nominees, including me, and all the Democrats voted against. That shouldn’t happen. I wish that somehow people could be more reassured that the mission of civic centers, at least those that are doing it right, isn’t to promote any ideology or partisan perspective. It’s part of the job of everybody who is associated with these centers to communicate that message, and you communicate it by precept and action. You reassure with words that we’re going to do this in an ideologically nonpartisan way, even if other units of the university are acting in ideologically partisan ways. You also have to exemplify nonpartisanship in the programming you do, and the appointments you make. If you do all of that, no matter how skeptical people are at the beginning, over time they will see this isn’t more indoctrination. There’s enough indoctrination going on at universities already. We should eliminate it, not mimic it from the other side.
Goldstein: I take you at your word on that, but again, when the governor of West Virginia calls this an effort to combat “woke ideology,” or Jerry Cirino, the state senator in Ohio who is the driving force behind the creation of the Chase Center, talks about it in similar terms, it lends the entire project a partisan overlay that predictably prompts the faculty’s antibodies.
George: Rhetoric matters, and politicians and others associated with these centers should be careful about their rhetoric. We’re not going to advance learning by having different units of the university compete for indoctrinating students. Anybody who thinks that’s going to work is mistaken. What will happen is students will end up in silos. They will gravitate to the units of the university that are preaching what they already believe.
We know this because we see it in broader society. Half the country only watches Fox News. If they read a newspaper editorial page, it’s The Wall Street Journal. If they read a magazine, it’s National Review. The other half only watches MSNBC or CNN. If they read an opinion page, it’s The New York Times. If they read a magazine, it’s The Nation. I don’t want that for universities. I say this to university administrators all over the country: Do not create a playpen on your campus for conservatives. That’s not the way to enhance viewpoint diversity. If you’ve corralled all your conservative faculty members in one spot, that’s not doing much for your students or for the cause of education. Let’s be ideologically nonpartisan and not discriminate in our hiring. We’ll get the viewpoint diversity we need if we are just fair in our hiring processes.
Evan Goldstein: We’ve heard from some conservative scholars, especially younger ones, that this is the best hiring environment in their lifetimes. The new hiring at civic centers is part of it. But you also have a political environment in which it’s useful to have prominent conservative or at least heterodox scholars on the faculty. You are someone who’s mentored a lot of young scholars, and a lot of conservative scholars who have sought you out. What are you seeing on the hiring landscape?
Do not create a playpen on your campus for conservatives. That’s not the way to enhance viewpoint diversity. If you’ve corralled all your conservative faculty members in one spot, that’s not doing much for your students or for the cause of education.
George: Anybody who’s talking to undergraduates, if you’ve been at this for more than 10 years, knows the experience of having a young man or woman who is academically oriented. You can see they love history or philosophy or political science or sociology, and in an ideal world they would find their vocation in academic life. But then you think, Oh, gosh, am I going to ruin this person’s life by encouraging him or her to go into academia, where the job market has been so bad for my entire career? If the person happens to be conservative or heterodox in some way, then they’re also going to face possible discrimination. You’re tempted to say, Have you thought about law school? We’ve all had that experience. Yet I find myself having that experience less and less often because there are jobs now for my students, certainly my doctoral students. I’m just so glad I lived to see that.
Gutkin: I want to ask about undergraduate culture. In your new book, Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, you describe students coming to college “already in groupthink” — adherents to what you call “The New York Times editorial board view of the world.” Have you noticed changes to that trend in the last year or two?
George: I think what you’re asking me, Len, is whether I’ve noticed the vibe shift. Indeed, I have. We on the faculty have 100 percent noticed a vibe shift. I was with a group of Madison Program undergraduate fellows the other day and I asked if they’ve noticed as well. Every single one of them agreed. You can say things in class that you used to not be able to say. You can engage in conversations in the dining halls and in the dorms that you used to not be able to engage in. People feel freer to express views that dissent from woke orthodoxy. So there has definitely been a vibe shift.
I’ve noticed another phenomenon that I had not experienced until recently, and that is students coming in with minds closed around right-wing ideologies that are unfriendly to the principles of the American civic order. It’s an anti-Americanism on the right. These students arrive with the idea that the seeds of 1968 were planted in 1776. The trouble was that men like Madison and Jefferson were liberals, and the woke ideology that these students are rebelling against was planted by Enlightenment-era liberals like the American founders. That’s a very crude understanding, really a misunderstanding, of the founders. Although there are distinguished academics who, in a much more sophisticated way, hold a version of that view. And I want my students to be exposed to those academics, such as Patrick Deneen. But what I’m seeing is something much cruder, and sometimes, very regrettably, it’s connected to grotesque ideologies such as racism and antisemitism. I don’t want to exaggerate the scope of the problem because it’s a very small number of students. But prior to maybe three years ago, I hadn’t seen it at all.
Goldstein: You’re seeing these students show up at Princeton?
George: Yes. And I have to say, I haven’t yet seen it with a girl.
Goldstein: So there’s a gendered dimension to this phenomenon?
George: Absolutely. I’m sure there are some girls who are buying into it, but it seems to be mostly young men.
Gutkin: You’re a co-founder of the Academic Freedom Alliance. How do you distinguish its work from FIRE or the AAUP?
George: The AAUP doesn’t seem to be committed to the ideals that it was originally founded to advance. I’m sure the AAUP would say otherwise. But if you look at the statements coming out of the mouths of AAUP representatives, it’s hard for me to see how you can say the current teachings and actions of the AAUP are consistent with its founding ideals. The AFA is consistent with the AAUP’s founding ideals. So, as things stand right now, the AFA is very different from the AAUP.
By contrast, the AFA is fully aligned with FIRE. The difference is that FIRE is not a membership organization. AFA is a membership organization. We have people on the hard left and people pretty far to the right. The basic principle of the AFA is that it operates in the spirit of Article 5 of the NATO Charter: An attack on one is considered an attack on all. I’m a conservative, but if you attack the academic freedom of one of my left-wing brothers, I am going to be right there in defense of him. And if somebody attacks my academic freedom, he’s going to be right there in defense of me.
Goldstein: So was the AFA in part born out of a belief that the AAUP had abdicated its traditional role?
George: I wouldn’t necessarily say that because we didn’t focus on the AAUP. But there was a felt need because people weren’t standing up for academic freedom until their academic freedom got attacked. Whether they were on the right or the left, people were defending academic freedom only for those in their ideological camp. Those of us who founded the AFA said enough with that. We’re going to be people of principle. We realize there are limits to academic freedom, just as there are limits to free speech. We don’t claim people have a right to defame or threaten or harass. But we do have a broad conception of the University of Chicago Principles, and we will defend them, whether you’re on the right or the left.
Gutkin: There is a persistent line of critique, especially of FIRE but it applies to the AFA, by people like the philosopher Jason Stanley, who argue that advocacy by free-speech groups has contributed to a moral panic around campuses that helps to legitimize or justify Trump’s attacks on the sector. What do you make of those kinds of arguments?
George: They’re asinine.
Goldstein: So you don’t see any line of causality from those who’ve warned about rising illiberalism on campuses and Trump’s higher-ed policies?
George: If anybody should acknowledge responsibility for laying the groundwork for Trump’s policies, it’s people within universities who violated or stood by idly while other people violated fundamental academic freedoms. They are the people responsible. I’ve had plenty to say about Trump’s policies toward universities, most of it quite critical, but our problems were very severe long before Donald Trump entered politics.
Goldstein: And you believe those problems will persist long after Donald Trump leaves politics if the root causes are not dealt with?
George: Absolutely right. There was a reason back in 2014 or 2015 that the University of Chicago empaneled that distinguished group of scholars, led by Geoffrey Stone, to develop free-speech principles. Trump wasn’t president, but Chicago knew that we’ve got a problem.
If anybody should acknowledge responsibility for laying the groundwork for Trump’s policies, it’s people within universities who violated or stood by idly while other people violated fundamental academic freedoms.
Gutkin: You’re part of a conservative reform movement, though it has some liberal adherents, that seems to be winning or is at least ascendant. At the same time, the Trump administration and the MAGA right, or whatever you want to call it, are attacking campuses in ways that seem less reform-minded than simply destructive. You’ve taken stances to try to mitigate some of that. You co-authored a letter signed by several legal scholars that we published warning about the dangers of Trump’s compact. How should reform-minded conservatives help protect the university against this right flank that’s been unleashed?
George: First, we should remind the university that it rendered itself vulnerable to attack by failings and delinquencies on its own part. You can think of the Amy Wax case at the University of Pennsylvania, the Carole Hooven case at Harvard, the Tyler VanderWeele case at Harvard, the Dorian Abbot episode at MIT. I could go on and on and on. By betraying its own principled commitment to academic freedom, and even more fundamentally to the value that academic freedom serves, which is truth seeking, it rendered itself vulnerable to attacks that are, in many cases, unfair, and in even more cases, are being conducted without due regard for proper procedure. So I’d remind universities of that. Second, for those of us in the reform movement, we must be willing to criticize the government for actions that jeopardize academic freedom or intrude improperly on the autonomy of universities.
Goldstein: Let’s close on a matter of sartorial significance. Is it true that you wear a three-piece suit seven days a week?
George: I might be ruining my reputation, but I’ll confess that yesterday I wore a sweater vest and a tweed jacket instead of a proper suit. I was slumming it.
