Robert P. George is the McCormick professor of jurisprudence and the director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He has served as chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, and on the President’s Council on Bioethics. He holds a juris doctor and masters of theological studies from Harvard University and a doctor of philosophy, bachelor of civil law, doctor of civil law, and doctor of letters from Oxford University.
What is your advice for students who may want to go into public life?
I think the most important thing for all of us is to discern our vocation, our calling, and not to be deflected from pursuing what we discern to be truly our vocation. For some of us, that will be a life that is not lived in any major way in the public view. I think we all have certain responsibilities as citizens, so we’re all to some extent living in public as citizens. I think we all have obligations to be good citizens and to participate in public deliberation and discussion. So there’s a limited sense in which all of us do live in the public domain. But not all of us are called to be activists or to be primarily concerned vocationally with public discussion, persuasion, advancing worthy causes, and so forth. I’ve discerned my own vocation to be one that puts me very much in public life. But that doesn’t mean that you have that same vocation. That’s the thing about vocations, they’re different. If you do discern a vocation to a life that gives you a more public role, you should embrace it. It will come with slings and arrows. And if you’re thin skinned, you have to toughen up. You shouldn’t just assume because ‘I don’t like criticism’ or ‘I don’t take criticism well,’ that ‘it must be the case that I don’t have a vocation to public life.’ It might be that you do have a vocation to public life and what you have a need to do is toughen up so that you can bear the slings and arrows that come, so that you can take criticism as well as dish it out.
What brought you to Hillsdale?
I was invited to come by Professor Schlueter and by the Federalist Society chapter. Professor Schlueter is an old and dear friend. He visited the James Madison Program at Princeton, which I founded and direct, as a visiting fellow about a decade ago. And so we spent a year together and got to know each other. I myself have been involved with the Federalist Society at the national level for most of my professional career, and so I’m always happy to help Federalist chapters. I love coming to Hillsdale not only because I greatly admire the work that the college does and the kind of education and formation that it gives its students but also because of Dr. Arnn, who’s another old and very dear friend.
How did you first meet Arnn?
Dr. Arnn and I have known each other since Dr. Arnn was at the Claremont Institute. It was many years before he became president of Hillsdale. I can remember what our first conversation was about. He won’t remember this, but I remember. It was about Thomas Hobbes’s statement in “Leviathan” that “the thoughts are to the desires as scouts and spies to range abroad and find the way to the thing desired.” That is Hobbes’ view of practical reasoning as purely instrumental. Reason can’t tell you what to want or can’t adjudicate among wants on the basis of what’s truly the best thing to want. All it can do is enable you to attain what you want, happen to want, whatever it is you happen to want. That’s a view that fundamentally challenges Aristotle’s view or the older view that reason is not purely instrumental. Its role is not simply to enable us to get what we want, whatever we happen to want. It helps us to understand what is truly wantable, what is truly good and therefore should be wanted because it’s good. Our first meeting I think somehow we got onto that topic and had a wonderful conversation about it. And we’ve been friends ever since.
What can colleges do to preserve academic freedom and freedom of speech on campus?
It’s really a matter of sticking to our principles. We say in universities like the one at which I teach that we are truth-seeking institutions. We want to empower our scholars, our professors, to boldly seek the truth on every subject, whether it’s in the natural sciences, whether it’s in the social sciences, whether it’s in the humanities, whether it’s in mathematics, and speak the truth as best they understand the truth. We say that. And for that to be done, for that truth seeking mission to be prosecuted, you need conditions of freedom. We acknowledge that formally in our universities. We say that we believe that truth is best discovered or advanced or our knowledge of it deepened by the clash of ideas, by letting the best arguments be made on the competing sides by trying to assess the best that has been thought and said on all sides of issues on which people disagree. We say all those things, but too often in colleges and universities today, we say them but we don’t live by them, we don’t honor them. So people are punished or disciplined or disadvantaged in one way or another or marginalized because they make arguments that are unpopular, they take positions that are unpopular, that are contrary to the dominant positions on campus.
Is having a requirement for civil discourse a threat to free speech, or what is the relationship in your view between respecting free speech and requiring civility in discussion?
You can’t have a classroom discussion without civility. The truth-seeking mission is not advanced by us calling each other names or shouting at each other. Civility is very important, and you need civility in college classrooms. I have no problem with individual professors insisting on civility or with the university saying civility has got to be respected. You can’t just call people names. That’s not an argument. That doesn’t advance the cause of truth seeking. You can’t just shout at people. You can’t be abusive. You can’t harass people. You can’t threaten people. Genuine free speech and academic freedom does not require that we abandon our prohibitions of threats, harassment, incitement to violence, defamation, obscenity, or any of the other categories of expression that the Constitution of the United States in its First Amendment does not protect.
