A Conservative Professor on How to Fix Campus Culture

0:02Robert P. George:This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Robert George is not a passive observer of what we call the culture wars. He's been an active participant, very active. George is a legal scholar and a political philosopher at Princeton University, and he's been an influential opponent of Roe v. Wade and same-sex marriage. He received a presidential medal from George W. Bush, and he counts Senator Ted Cruz among his many students. Professor George has also been a Trump skeptic, to say the least. In 2016, he co-wrote an op-ed declaring Trump manifestly unfit to serve as president, and he argues from religious and moral grounds.

0:52Meanwhile, a major backlash has been brewing on college campuses. not just against Harvard or Columbia, but many elite schools, state universities, smaller colleges, and other institutions. The Trump administration has cracked down all over, punishing universities for policies related to DEI, campus protest, academic freedom, and much more. Professor George stands against this effort to force campuses to bend to a conservative agenda. On the other hand, he does agree that the campus environment, writ large, is too uniform and it's stifled debate for far too long, which is part of why he wrote a book called Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment.

1:36The book tries to chart a course back towards civil, functioning debate in a dangerously fractured society.

1:46Professor George, we've been hearing a lot from the Trump administration and in the culture war discussion now for quite a long time, the notion that American universities are uniformly left-leaning, especially in humanities departments. You're at Princeton. I often hear about you and your work as if you are singular as a conservative, as if you are the lonely giraffe at Princeton University. How would you describe the reality of those circumstances? Well, David, when I arrived at Princeton for my first academic job just out of graduate school, this was back in the Middle Ages in 1985, I was, as far as I could tell, the only out-of-the-closet conservative.

2:32That's no longer the case. There are now, I would say, on our faculty, something between 20 and 25 out-of-the-closet conservatives of various stripes across the arts and sciences. That's still a very tiny percentage of the faculty, and there are many, many, many, many more out-of-the-closet liberals than people to the left of the liberals. But still, I think our students have a pretty good shot with the number that we have here at Princeton at least being exposed to conservative perspectives from faculty members. If in fact that's the case, what were the factors that led to it? I think we're talking mainly about the humanities.

3:15I assume we're not talking about the sciences or even the economics department. People tend to reproduce themselves. People tend to favor people that are very much like themselves. If conservatives had the kind of monopoly that liberals had and to a very considerable extent still have, I suspect we'd have the same situation, but just in reverse. Human nature is the same, whether you're liberal or conservative. Also, of course, coming out of the 1960s, students who had moved very much to the left in the 60s during the civil rights era, and especially the Vietnam War, the rise of the counterculture, many, many of them chose to remain in academia and went on to careers as scholars and teachers, as professors.

4:05The critique that you hear from a lot of conservatives now, sometimes with goodwill, sometimes not, I would say, and you can disagree with that as well, is that a lot of college students are scared to express themselves honestly because of leftist groupthink in some way emanating from the professor in charge. Now, do you find that to be true or not? Oh, there's no question that it's true. And it's not just students, it's faculty members. It's even tenured faculty members who, in a certain sense, have nothing to lose. And the reason I'm certain this is true is all the polling data show it. There is consistent survey data here that shows that students, including here at your alma mater and the place I teach at Princeton University, and there's no question that large numbers of students and faculty, including tenured faculty, admit to people taking the polls that they censor themselves, that they don't say what they really think.

5:03And even some admit to saying things they don't believe because they think they need to say them in order to retain their respectability. It is not fundamentally a fear that faculty members will give them bad grades for their views. Are there such professors? Sure. Do we have one or two of them at Princeton? I suppose we do. But that's not, when I talk to my students, that's not what they fear. They fear disapprobation from their fellow students, especially on social media. They fear that they will be vilified, called names such as racist or bigot or hater or whatever, and that the internet is forever, social media is forever, it will affect their future educational opportunities, their career.

5:48Well, let's accept your premise that college campuses have become, in many spots, unwelcome to more conservative viewpoints. How can that be changed as opposed to the way the Trump administration is going about it? how not to do it is with affirmative action for conservatives. The main thrust of the problem, not the exclusive, it's not exclusive, but the main thrust of the problem is not open, outright, conscious discrimination. It's not the liberal professor or the left-wing professor who is looking at a job candidate who has a conservative view and says, we can't have people like that around here.

6:33He's a Reagan person or a Trump person or he's pro-life or he's pro-Israel or whatever they object to. Does that happen? Yeah, I can give you actual cases where I know it happens and where liberal colleagues who are people of goodwill who were offended and even scandalized by it, but say it happened, they observed it. It's not the main thrust of the problem. The main thrust of the problem is subconscious discrimination. The real problem is right now, a lot of professors who are voting against hiring or against giving tenure to a really well-qualified candidate could pass a lie detector test when asked, are you being fair?

7:12Are you not discriminating? They would. They'd pass the lie because in their heads, they really honestly believe they're not. Because it's so hard really for us human beings to say, you know what? I disagree with this. And I really think what he's advocating here is really outrageous. But look, you know, this guy makes powerful arguments. He really makes me think, you know, this guy's pushing the intellectual boundaries here and he's really benefiting his students. I mean, I encourage my students to take courses from people who disagree with me, like Cornel West and Peter Singer. Cornel and I teach together for this same reason.

7:44Peter invites his students to take my courses. That's the way it should be. The big target, ostensibly, of the Trump administration has been DEI programs at universities, or at least that's one of them. I must tell you, when I went to the university we share, it was very, very white. And when classes come up here, as they do occasionally from Princeton or from all over, the composition of those classes is radically different. To some extent, I think you have to give credit to some of those diversity programs, whether it's affirmative action or other kinds of efforts. What's so bad about that? Well, if it's a matter of not evaluating people on the merits in a competitive process and holding against some people the color of their skin or their ethnicity, then that's what's bad about that.

8:40No, but the argument is that there are many, many, many, many more students than you can possibly admit to a place like Princeton who are qualified. And so you use other means to change the composition of the classes. That is the classical practice of affirmative action if it's working well. But if you see very large gaps in achievement on test scores, grade point averages, the objective criteria, you'll realize that you're not just choosing between equally qualified candidates on the merits and you're putting a little thumb on the scale to get racial diversity, ethnic diversity, or what have you.

9:19I think the real achievements in diversifying a place like Princeton, and we are much more diverse than when you were here, David, and to our benefit, very much to our benefit, let me be clear about that, is that we are choosing on the merits. Once we lifted the stupid Jewish quotas, this was before your time and before my time, but Princeton, like Harvard and other elite institutions. It would have to be before my time because that's how it got in. Yeah. You know, had the Jewish quotas. Well, you know, once we lifted those, the percentage of Jewish students at a place like Princeton went straight up because the university was choosing on the merits.

10:03Now, Princeton also in the old days discriminated against Catholics quite openly. But when they stopped doing that, the percentage of Catholic students went up to a little over 20 % at Princeton. Woodrow Wilson's University. Choosing on the merits has given us a much higher number of East Asian and South Asian heritage students. In other words, students from non-biblical cultural traditions. And this is, I think, the right way to do it.

10:40Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and the Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. We'll continue our conversation in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

11:13This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I've been speaking today with Princeton professor and author Robert P. George. In his new book, Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment, Professor George attempts to diagnose the age we live in. He calls it the age of feeling, a post-Enlightenment era where truth is seen as a subjective idea. And although George is a conservative public intellectual, he doesn't see this as a partisan condition. In his view, we're all operating in a world where personal feelings trump reason. For his part, George has tried to practice what he preaches.

11:53He's taught a popular class alongside Cornel West, whose political views could not be farther from his own. And he's continued to criticize the Trump administration for its attacks on democratic institutions. I'll continue my conversation now with Robert P. George. I know you're not a sociologist, but how would you, or even a psychoanalyst in a sense, but how would you go about explaining the ardent support of evangelical Christians for Donald Trump, whose personal behavior and rhetoric is, let's just say, not kosher? let me give it a shot by telling a personal story. So I was born and brought up in the heart of Appalachia in West Virginia.

12:42This is now Trump country. Now, when I was growing up, this was wall-to-wall Democrat country. I was brought up to believe in four things, David. Jesus Christ, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic Party, and the United Mine Workers of America. Both my grandfathers were coal miners. I had a kind of hot fin existence growing up hunting and fishing and playing bluegrass music. As you know, I play bluegrass banjo to this day. So the people I grew up with and my own family back in West Virginia are Trump people. So back in 2016, when my mother jumped on the Trump train, and I was very critical of Trump to the point of, you know, publishing a saying that the man is simply morally unfit to be president of the United States.

13:32Well, my mom confronted me about that. So I said, Mom, I can remember back in 1980 when you were wrestling with your conscience about whether you could vote for Ronald Reagan. So my mom's wrestling with her conscience. So why is she wrestling with her conscience? I said, Mom, do you remember? Well, it was because Ronald Reagan had been divorced. And now you're mad at me for not jumping behind a guy who's, you know, got, you know, on his third wife, I don't know how many mistresses, porn stars, you know, all this craziness. And she said to me, he fights. He fights for people like us. I mean, I say to my colleagues here, you know, I'm not a Trump guy, but it was you guys who gave us Donald Trump.

14:20Okay, so let's dig into that. Let's dig into that. The condescension issue, the looking down. Tell me how you see that from your vantage point. Well, I mean, you can see it in, you know, when we hit peak woke with, you know, if you're not all in with, you know, let's say affirmative action, for example, or you dissent on some aspect of welfare policy or whatever, you're a racist. You're a bigot. You're a hater. You're a deplorable, you know, you're kind of an inferior human being. And we're smarter. We've been to Harvard, you know, well, you know, we we're the sophisticated people and we we govern by by right.

15:09And, you know, when when when courts do things like hand down Roe versus Wade, well, that's that's just your betters actually deciding what the policy of the country would be, because we can't trust this to the democratic process because it has people like you then making the decisions. the decisions. No, we'd rather have people who have been socialized into elite culture make these sorts of decisions. I think this is exactly how it came across to people like the people I grew up with. I've sort of lived between two worlds because my heart is still in Appalachia. I'm still a West Virginian. But, you know, I live my life on the Princeton faculty with my faculty colleagues.

15:54But I can tell you both sides misunderstand each other. They mischaracterize each other. They have caricatured views of each other. But I have to say it's going to make people mad, but here it is. I think that my colleagues at Princeton misunderstand and mischaracterize my friends and family in West Virginia worse than my friends and family in West Virginia mischaracterize my colleagues. You know, you're a racist, you're a fascist, you're a hater, you're a bigot. You don't want your daughter competing against a boy in Well, you're a hater. You're a transphobe. You're a bigot. You know, people aren't going to put up with that.

16:34How, though, to deal with the fact that there is racism that lingers in this world, call it systemic or not, that there is a desire, call it Christian or not, to respect all human beings, whether gay, straight, trans, whatever. In other words, what is the way back? How do we find our way back to each other and not exist in this horrific state of division, misunderstanding, and just antipathy that just characterizes American political life today in such a dramatic way? It's what I'm campaigning for. It's what Cornel West and I are doing. We want to restore two very closely connected things, civil discourse and civic friendship.

17:30People need to recognize that issues are difficult. Reasonable people of goodwill can and do disagree about them. And when you disagree, that doesn't mean that if you're on the right, the people who disagree with you are Marxists. or if you're on the left, the people who disagree with you are fascists. All of us, if we're sober, if we're honest with ourselves, all of us know that right now we have some false ideas in our head, right? Who can say, I only have true ideas in my head. I don't have any false beliefs. Nobody can say that. And we can be wrong on those big questions as well as on the small questions.

18:09And undoubtedly, all of us are to some extent at least wrong on at least some of those big questions. And if we would only recognize that, David, I think we'd give each other a little grace, realize that you're in the same boat I'm in. You're a fallible person, just like I'm a fallible person. So, you know, I shouldn't be calling you names and, you know, depersoning you and canceling you. And let's sit down, let's exchange views, may not come to agreement, but let's exchange our reasons, our evidence, our argument. Do you feel, as Ross doubt that has written on his own account that the country has become since the period you were discussing in the 60s and 70s has in some sense become decadent oh i don't think there's any question about that yeah um and and it's not just a left-wing phenomenon i mean you've got plenty of I mean, what would you call it?

19:05Neopaganism on the right? You have extreme versions like, you know, what's this guy's social media character? Bronze Age pervert? Do you know what that is? No, I don't follow Bronze Age pervert. So he's got a big following. He's a kind of Nietzschean. He's totally against Christianity, radically rejects Christianity, but very much on the right. Right. You see it in a figure like his name, Andrew Tate, the misogynist kind of guy. Although I believe he claims to be Muslim, but it doesn't sound very religious to me. Not that I follow him all that much, I have to admit that. But there is a kind of anti-religious, anti-Christian, hardcore secularist right that completely affirms the decadence that a lot of conservatives only see on the left.

19:57Well, you got it on the right, too. You just wrote something. You just published something that really led me to think a great deal. In your new book, you identify the period that we're living in as the age of feelings, as opposed to the Enlightenment's period, which is the age of reason, or the medieval period's age of faith. Why do you frame modern times as an age of feelings? So I talked to so many students, and not just students, even the adults, even the grown-ups, even some people in my own very elderly now generation, who seem to suppose that the touchstone of truth is neither faith nor reason.

20:39And not faith and reason, which I believe, and which I think is what the medievals believed, and many of the Enlightenment figures believed. No, the touchstone of truth, and therefore goodness, justice, right, is feeling. is emotion. It's how I feel or how something makes me feel. My truth. And so you'll, you know, the people will say, you have, I have students who sometimes say, well, you have your truth and I have my truth. And you know, at first blush, that sounds kind of polite and tolerant, but then how does it actually cash out? Well, if you have your truth and I have my truth and those truths conflict, we are at war.

21:17So give me an example. And then I'm justified in shutting you down. You're right. If your truth is out of line with my truth. So far from making us tolerant, and you see this with so many people today, you know, especially but not exclusively younger people. And that is a kind of dogmatism, ideological hard edges, sometimes authoritarianism. This is what cancel culture during peak woke was all about. After all, if I have my truth, then it's immune from challenge, right? No point in challenging. your truth doesn't really represent a critique of my truth because we can't reason about truth. But if your truth is in conflict with my truth about something I really care about, then I've got to make sure you don't have free speech.

22:02So my worry is that when you fall into what seems to me the manifest error, the demonstrable error, if you want me to run through the argument, I can, but the demonstrable error of believing that you have your truth and I have my truth and there's no such thing as the truth or no such thing as objective truth, Far from getting toleration and liberty, you will get dogmatism and authoritarianism. All over the ideological map. Oh, yes. This is not, again, it's a human nature problem. It's not a right or left problem. Whoever has power will use that power to silence and suppress and oppress the other guy.

22:40Recently, Ted Cruz happens to be one of my former students. broke ranks with the Trump administration precisely on the issue of free speech, when he criticized Pam Bondi for falling into this idea that there's some kind of an exception to the First Amendment for something called hate speech. Well, when Ted criticized her very sharply for that, I snapped my fingers and said, gosh, you know, Ted must have been paying attention in class that day when we did the First Amendment free speech clause, because that's exactly right. There is no exception. And we conservatives, those of us on the conservative side, we were harshly critical of people on the left who wanted to shut down speech because they considered it so-called hate speech.

23:23Have we forgotten? Are we going to be hypocrites? And now say, well, when there's hate speech that we consider on the right to be hate speech, we're going to shut down that speech. Come on. Professor George, thank you so much. Oh, it's my pleasure, David. Thanks for having me on.

23:43Professor Robert P. George. His latest book is Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth, Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment.

23:54Now, before we go today, I want to tell you about something pretty important to all of us. You've probably heard that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting shut down its operations as of last week. That is a consequence of Congress, at President Trump's demand, rescinding all of CPB's funding. Some public radio and TV stations are now in real danger of not being able to pay their bills or even closing entirely. In response, WNYC has launched the Station to Station Programming Project. We're providing the New Yorker Radio Hour to at-risk stations for free, without the normal fees that stations pay to broadcast the program.

24:37And not only the New Yorker Radio Hour, but On the Media, Radio Lab, Today Explained, and all the other programs from WNYC. Public radio is an essential service, and we're going to do what we can to help keep it on the air across America. You can find out more about what we're doing at wnyc.org slash station to station. I'll say that again, wnyc.org slash, all one word, station to station. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening today. See you next time.

25:15Robert P. George:The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Sommer. With guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Deckett. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherena Endowment Fund. Thank you.