Evan Goldstein and Len Gutkin:
Robert P. George, the conservative legal scholar and moral philosopher, has spent the past four decades at Princeton University assiduously cultivating an ever-widening network of influence. For parts of the religious right, he’s an intellectual lodestar on issues including gay marriage, abortion, and stem-cell research. The Catholic journal Crisis once quipped that “if there really is a vast right-wing conspiracy, its leaders probably meet in George’s kitchen.”
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.