SwatTalk: "Academic Freedom"
with Robert George ’77
Recorded on Tuesday, June 25, 2024
TRANSCRIPT
Jim Sailer ’90 Okay, welcome everyone to this edition of "SwatTalks." I'm your moderator. My name is Jim Sailer. I'm in the class of 1990 from Swarthmore. SwatTalks are brought to you by the Alumni Council. The Alumni Council is a service organization of alumni that leads the Alumni Association and has a number of activities and initiatives to support the college and the students and the alumni, including SwatTalks itself, and also the Alumni Awards that you see that are presented at reunions every year. I'm the vice president of the Alumni Council. Our president is Ayanna Johnson, who's in the class of '09. Our lead for the SwatTalks is Jason Zengerle, the class of 1996. I'll introduce our speaker in just a moment, but I'm gonna go over just the format and the ground rules for how this will work. So we will start by, I'll be asking some questions of our guest, to get him to talk about the issues that are the subject of this SwatTalk, which I will introduce as well. And we'll do that for a period of time to kind of get the conversation going, so to speak. At a point after that, I will open it up for Q&A from all of you who are watching and participating, and the Q&A, I will select that. So I'll see the questions that come in, and I'll try to select the ones that are the most relevant to our topic today. Professor George has spoken and written about so many issues in so many contexts. He's an expert in many, many, many issues on many things, and has written a lot, and people wanna talk to him about many things. But today we're here to talk about academic freedom, and specifically how that has played out and is playing out, and some of the things that Professor George and colleagues have been active in to support academic freedom. Let me go on to introduce Professor George. And Professor George's background and CV is long enough that if I took the time to go through all of it, we would have no time for him to speak or for you to ask any questions. So I'm gonna do just a very high-level summary, and forgive me if I miss critical things, professor George. But Professor George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University. He's also the Director of the James Madison program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton. He's published hundreds of papers, books, essays, articles, has spoken in many, many different contexts. We'll actually talk about some of his speaking tonight, and why he's felt that's so important to do. Since this is a Swarthmore crowd, I'm gonna be sure to mention his degrees, which also takes a long time to mention, because he holds JD and MTS degrees from Harvard, and he has four degrees from Oxford, that I had to look up what they were, because I didn't even know what they were, but a DPhil, BCL, DCL, and DLitt degrees from Oxford University. In addition, he has 22 honorary doctorate degrees. But of all those, I know that we can have the most important degree that Professor George has, I think we can all agree, is the one he received in 1977 from Swarthmore College where he was Phi Beta Kappa. That's the most important one. And I will also say that I spoke to a classmate of Professor George's before this event, and asked him about it, did he know Professor George when he was a student? And he said, "Yes, I knew of him." And he said, "What I knew of him was that he was this really nice guy who played the banjo, and I had no idea that he would become one of the preeminent scholars in the United States, and expert on so many issues that he is today." I was very happy to see from your bio, Professor George, that you still play the banjo, and so you've kept that going as well. At Swarthmore, Professor George had a class with Ken Sharpe, an emeritus faculty member many of you may know, on political theory, and that is actually where we're going to begin our discussion tonight, is a little bit on political theory. But Professor George, I wanna say thank you so much for joining us. It's a pleasure to welcome you here.
Robert George ’77 Thank you, Jim. I'm really honored to be joining you. And I also wanna thank Melissa and Amy, and everyone from the Alumni Council, who helped to make this possible. Swarthmore is a place that I owe an enormous debt to, a boundless debt, and I'm always happy to be able to do anything for the college, whether it's serve as an honors examiner, which I have on a number of occasions, or give lectures, or engage in a dialogue like this. So it's a really great pleasure, and I'm grateful for the invitation.
Jim Sailer ’90 Fantastic. One of the things that we're going to do tonight, is have a conversation and hear, I think, from people, some who are curious, some who may disagree with you, some who may agree with you. It's very difficult to have difficult conversations in today's day and age in this country. It's become very fraught, and it's been a challenge about how to talk to people who differ from you, and how to, more important, maybe, how to listen to people who might have different views than you do. So I'm really excited about this opportunity tonight. But I wondered if you could start, Professor George, by talking to us about, when we spoke to prepare for this, one of the things you mentioned was that a lot of your views on academic freedom start with, really, political theory. And I wonder if you could expand on that a little bit for us all, and talk about the role of political theory in influencing how you think about these issues.
Robert George ’77 Well, yes, and that takes us to that wonderful course that I had with Professor Sharpe. It was in my sophomore year. A little background to set the stage. I came by my banjo playing honestly, Jim. I was born and brought up in West Virginia. I had a bit of a Huck Finn boyhood, hunting and fishing and playing bluegrass music with my four younger brothers, who were all bluegrass musicians. I was not especially well prepared for college when I arrived at Swarthmore. I was struggling, and fortunately, James Kurth, who was a professor, just arrived himself from Harvard, noticed that I was struggling in the Introduction to Political Science class that he was teaching, and really took me under his wing. I have to say, professor Kurth, rescued me, and I enjoyed that course in political science, and so I decided to continue. And then in my sophomore year, I had the blessing of taking Professor Sharpe's introductory survey course in political theory, which began with the ancient Greek thinkers, and took us all the way up to contemporary thinkers like John Rawls. And in that course, for the first time, I encountered one of Plato's dialogues. When I was growing up, I'm sure I never heard of Plato. I doubt that I knew who Plato was when I arrived at Swarthmore. Again, my background was not especially good, educationally. I had a great family background, but neither of my parents had been to college. Both of my grandfathers were coal miners, both were immigrants. My mother's father was able to save up enough money to get out of the mines eventually and open a little grocery business. My father's father remained in the mines and working on the railroad his entire life, and died from the scourge of mining, which was black lung disease, pneumoconiosis. In any case, I arrived at Swarthmore without much of a background. I hadn't heard of Plato, but I was assigned Plato's dialogue, "Gorgias," by Professor Sharpe. Now, when I was growing up, my parents were very keen that their sons go to, well, we're all boys, that the kids go to college, the boys go to college. But they stressed to us that the real reason for going to college was in order to rise in the world, to get a better job, make more money, have some higher social standing, even perhaps a bit of influence. I hadn't yet encountered the idea that I did then encounter in Plato's work, and especially in that dialogue that Professor Sharpe assigned to us. And that was the idea that whatever instrumental value knowledge and learning might have, whatever instrumental value debate and discussion and dialogue might have, the most fundamental value that we're given by debate and dialogue, when it leads to knowledge, is knowledge itself. That knowledge isn't merely instrumentally valuable, but most fundamentally, it is intrinsically valuable. It's intrinsically enriching of us as rational creatures, as human beings, human persons. Well, this was an epiphany to me, Jim. It completely shook up my view. I can remember very clearly sitting in the library on the second floor, reading the library's copy of Plato's dialogue "Gorgias." I didn't buy it. I didn't know it would be interesting enough to own. But gosh, once I started reading it, and Socrates and his debates with a sophist is bringing us around, bringing the reader around, to seeing that the real point of dialogue and debate is not victory, it's not showing off, it's not rising in the world. It's knowledge for its own sake. The truth is worth knowing for its own sake. Well, it wasn't epiphany, it's like a religious conversion. People who've had, I've not myself had a religious conversion, but people who've had religious conversions describe them to me in the way I would describe that experience with Plato's "Gorgias." And it caused me to have to rethink everything I thought. I quickly realized, upon reading the dialogue, that most of my beliefs I had not thought my way into. or reasoned my way to. I had picked them up from my tribe or my group or my family or my faith. I was believing what I thought I was supposed to believe, or believing what I thought sophisticated people believe, because I wanted, after all, to be a sophisticated person and to be regarded as a sophisticated person. But that's really, as Plato teaches us, not a very good reason for believing. So you got reason your way to things, and suddenly everything was on the table. I had to rethink everything I believed. Some of my beliefs didn't change, or even strengthen. Some of my beliefs dramatically changed. But it was a liberating and exhilarating, if somewhat terrifying, experience. And somewhat terrifying for this simple reason, and it's relevant to the discussion of free speech, that's our topic tonight. If you are open to persuasion, if you put your beliefs on the line and subject them to critical scrutiny, and allow other people to challenge them, you don't know where you're gonna end up. I mean, if you're serious, if you're not just in a defensive posture, defending your views at all costs, if you're really interested in learning and knowing, and getting at the truth of things, recognizing your own fallibility, recognizing you can be wrong, not only about the minor, superficial, trivial things of life, but the big important profound questions of life. When you're in that position, you don't know where you're gonna be at the end of the reflection or dialogue or discussion, or extended period of consideration. And that means you're not gonna know who you are, because we human beings naturally, it's part of our nature, we tend to wrap our emotions more or less tightly around our convictions. We identify with our beliefs, which in itself is not a bad thing, but it can quickly turn us into dogmatists and ideologues if we wrap our emotions too tightly around our convictions. The other concern is this, our beliefs make us members of certain communities, friendship circles, faiths, political parties, or political societies, all sorts of things. And we crave, we human beings, acceptance. And we wanna be part of the group. Well, if we subject, or allow our beliefs to be subjected, to critical scrutiny with the possibility that we may change our beliefs, you don't know whether you're gonna be excommunicated from the group. You're no longer a member in good standing if your beliefs change, and there goes your acceptance. And who wants to be alone? You may or may not be accepted into some other group in virtue of your revised beliefs. But Plato forced me to do that. I'll always be grateful to Professor Sharpe for that assignment, because Plato forces anybody who reads him to do that. And it was like an epiphanal experience for me, and it set me on the road. I didn't know at the time that, oh, okay, I'm gonna be a professor. But if I trace things back from where I am today to where it all began, it began, you know, on the second floor of McCabe Library reading Plato's "Gorgias', because Professor Sharpe had assigned it.
Jim Sailer ’90 Fantastic. And you know, I certainly think there are generations, decades worth of students who came to Swarthmore, were exposed to ideas like Plato's, and many, many others for the first time, and had had epiphanies like that. So you talked about exposing your ideas, and so I thought it might be useful at this point to ask you about Cornel West, and your collaboration with Professor West. It's actually how I first got to see you, was the two of you speaking together. And for those who don't know Cornel West, ideologically he probably does not fall in the same camp as Professor George on very many issues. And yet what I observed in watching you was two people who had profound differences in beliefs, but who actively listened to one another, engaged with one another, seemed to learn of one another, and possibly the most difficult thing to all, respected and liked each other, either despite or because of these differences. And I wonder if you could talk about how that came about, and what you get out of it, and you're message you're trying to send by your continued public events and other collaborations with Professor West.
Robert George ’77 Well, I'll be happy to do that, Jim. Cornel West is my beloved friend, my brother, really. I love him. We work together, we spend time together, we do some singing together, we do some praying together. We've got an awful lot in common for a couple of guys who don't agree on much. And that common ground includes a belief that truth is, in fact, intrinsically valuable, and that we should be pursuing it for its own sake. A belief that, because we are frail, fallen, fallible creatures, we're gonna get it wrong an awful lot of the time. That if we're gonna swap out some of our false beliefs for true beliefs, we are only gonna be able to do that if we allow ourselves to be challenged by somebody who disagrees with us, which we're happy to do for each other at the drop of a hat. We both strongly believe in free speech, and we should talk some more about that as the hour goes on. We strongly believe that the mission of universities is a truth-seeking mission, and the vocation of scholars and teachers is a truth-seeking vocation. We put that in first place when it comes to university life and to our vocations as scholars. So we have all that in common. It began in this way. I arrived, Cornel's a little older than I am, but I arrived at Princeton before he did. He was already teaching, first at Union Theological Seminary and then at Yale. I arrived at Princeton the fall of 1985. I was just out of Oxford, where I got my doctorate, as you kindly mentioned. And then he arrived, I guess about three years later. And since we were interested in many of the same issues in ethics and political philosophy, we ended up in some faculty seminars together. And as part of a community of scholars at Princeton who were interested in moral theory and normative ethics, and things like that, we were kicking around a lot of ideas in seminars. And although Cornel and I tended to end up in different places, when it came to the answers to questions, the one thing we seemed to agree on was what the right questions were. When you get a group of scholars together, certainly true in political theory or political philosophy, you get a group of scholars together, things can quickly get pretty technical, things can get somewhat arcane, abstract. We can get focused on minute issues of interpretation. Well, what did Plato say? What did Kant really mean here? You know, what is Rawls getting at here? But Cornel was interested in the big, deep, important questions. The questions of meaning and value, what are sometimes called the existential questions. Questions of human nature, the human good, human dignity, human destiny. And I was interested in those questions too. And I loved the way that Cornel would always bring the discussion back, wherever it had gone, however arcane it had gotten, he brought it back to the real questions, those deep questions. And so I admired that from the beginning. But we were friendly acquaintances for about a decade before the event that really brought us together and made us dear friends and brothers. And that was when a student of both of ours, a student who had studied with Cornel in his classes, and had studied with me in my classes, showed up at my office hours and said he wanted to talk with me about a new student magazine that he was involved in creating. It was gonna be called "The Green Light," eventually was produced and was called "The Green Light." And he explained that as a feature of each issue of the magazine, on a regular basis, one professor would interview another professor. And for the inaugural issue, he informed me, they had invited, the editors, had invited Cornel to be the interviewer, and asked him who he would like to interview. And he said that he would like to interview me. So the student asked me if I'd be willing to be interviewed by Cornel. And I was very flattered. Cornel was already a celebrity. I was very flattered that of the entire Princeton faculty, a thousand or so of us, he would want to interview me. And so I said, "Of course, yes, I'd be very honored." So on the appointed day at the appointed time, here came the student and brother Cornel and a photographer to my office in the old Corwin Hall at Princeton University. And we were supposed to go for an hour. He had one of those old-fashioned cassette, the student had one of those old-fashioned cassette tape players, this would've been about 2005, I think, old-fashioned cassette player, before we did all these things on our telephones. And he got the tape going and we started, and then a half hour in, he jumped up and waved his hands and said, "Wait, wait, I gotta flip the tape over." And by this time we're really into it. And we're talking about every issue you can think about, theoretical issues, practical issues. We're really going at it. It's not an interview, it's a rambunctious debate and discussion and dialogue. So the second half of the tape goes in, the other side of the tape goes in, and we go for another half hour. I think it began at two. So at three o'clock, you know, we finished the tape, the tape clicked off, but there was no stopping us at that point. So we continued, the photographer kept flashing photographs. He must have taken 2,000 photographs that day. But we continued until I looked down at my watch and noticed that it was after six o'clock. We'd been going for four hours. And I said, "Brother Cornel, this has really been wonderful, but I'm gonna have to get home for dinner. We really need to get to know each other better. We have so many common interests. Let's do this again. Let's arrange to have a meal and get to know each other better." And he said, "Oh, brother Robbie, that'd be a great thing to do. Let's do that at the first opportunity." Well, we then walked down to my car, I said, "Walk me to my car," and we continued talking. And when I got to my car, I put my hand on the latch to open the car door, and my hand remained there for the next 45 minutes, 'cause we still couldn't quit. And we kept the dialogue going until I finally said, "Gosh, my wife's gonna call the police and report me as a missing person if I don't get home for dinner." But it was a wonderful way of getting acquainted with each other. And then, Jim, the next thing that happened was within a week, some of the senior members of the faculty got a note from our Dean of Students, a wonderful professor named Nancy Malkiel, who said that she was looking for more senior professors to teach freshman seminars, that we were advertising our freshman seminar program very heavily, including to students we were trying to recruit to come to Princeton during the admissions season. And we promised that they would be taught by professors, and even the more senior and most famous professors teach the freshman seminars. But the problem was there weren't very many senior professors teaching them. So she was pleading with more senior professors to teach. And so, well again, the light bulb went off over my head, it was another epiphany, and I said, "Gosh, wouldn't it be wonderful to do a seminar with Cornel, get, you know, 16 or 18 of these brilliant Princeton freshmen, and we can just keep that conversation going." So I reached out to Cornel and he said, "Well, brother Robbie, that's a wonderful idea. Let's do it. Let's make it a great book seminar." We have 12-week semesters at Princeton. He said, "Let's do one book a week, so that'll be 12 books. Let's each choose six, and let's choose books that were really important to us in our own intellectual and spiritual odysseys." So I said, "That's a great idea, we'll do it that way. And let's have no secondary sources. Let's not encourage the students to get into these interpretive questions and philological matters, and so forth. Let's try to wrestle with the deep questions, the existential questions that the writers are wrestling with." So of course, I chose, as one of my books, Plato's "Gorgias." I also chose Sophocles' "Antigone", which is where we began. Cornel chose Saint Augustine's "Confessions," and then we just worked our way forward to figures like John Stuart Mill, Martin Luther King, Leo Strauss, CS Lewis. Well, when the seminar finally came together, and, you know, we met the first class, within five minutes of the class beginning, I knew something magical was happening in that classroom. The chemistry between us, well, chemistry is the wrong word, the magic between us was just phenomenal. And students seemed to deeply enjoy it and benefit from it. And it was just the most wonderful experience that I've had in my academic life. And so we continued to teach seminars together on that same model, great books model, no secondary sources, for the entire period that Cornel was with us here at Princeton, before he then left to go to to Harvard. And even then, when he got his first leave of absence, he came back and we taught seminar at Princeton together again. He's now at Union Theological Seminary. And as you know, since we can't teach together, we take our show on the road and go around the country doing our programs together. One thing I'd call viewers' attention to, in 2017, Cornel and I put out a joint statement called "Truth Seeking, Democracy, and Freedom of Thought and Expression." And that's available online. You can easily find it by looking up our names, and "Truth Seeking, Democracy," again, "Truth Seeking, Democracy, and Freedom of Thought and Expression." And that represents our joint opinion, deeply considered opinion, about the importance of free speech. Two things, one, the maintenance of a democratic republic, and two, the truth-seeking mission of universities.
Jim Sailer ’90 Well, and that leads us very well into the Academic Freedom Alliance. So, in 2021, a group of scholars, you included, you were a founder, set up the Academic Freedom Alliance, and I'm wondering if you could talk to us about why you did that, what you thought the problem was, and what you're trying to promote through this alliance.
Robert George ’77 Yeah, happy to do that too, Jim. This takes us back a couple of years before that statement that Cornel and I put out in 2017, to about 2015, when a group of us on the faculty at Princeton, a small group, got together to see if we could persuade our faculty colleagues here to enact a set of principles of free speech to govern campus life, modeled on the principles that had just been adopted a few months earlier by the University of Chicago. They've come to be known as the University of Chicago Free Speech Principles. And we thought these were necessary, because if you're gonna get at the truth of things, us frail, fallible human beings, you're gonna get at the truth of things, you need robust debate. You need people to feel free and be free to put any proposition on the table and explore it, see how far it will go, no matter how crazy or evil it sounds, you know, let's see if it can be defended. This is the way you learn. In any case, this is what the group of us felt. And we succeeded. In 2015, Princeton became the second university, after the University of Chicago, to adopt the Chicago Free Speech Principles, and the first to adopt it by faculty, those principles, by faculty vote. At Chicago, as I understand it, the board of trustees adopted the principles. At Princeton, we did it by faculty vote. And I'm really proud of our faculty for doing that. Well, it soon became evident that this was a very timely thing to have done, because we began to see across the academic world threats to freedom, expression, freedom of expression, freedom of thought, freedom of speech, coming both from within universities and from outside universities. From within universities by people who were willing to exercise power, whether at the administration level or within faculty bodies, to punish people who dissented from whatever the prevailing view was on campus on this issue, or that. From outside it was usually politicians from state legislators coming down hard on state universities, faculty of state universities, because they didn't like what faculty members had said or published or were teaching. And these attacks and these threats to academic freedom came from across the ideological spectrum. We needed to protect academic freedom from assaults, no matter where they were coming from. So we needed a group, an organization, that was genuinely ideologically non-partisan, genuinely ideologically diverse. I'm a founding member, but Cornel West is also a founding member. We have about a thousand members now in the Academic Freedom Alliance, and we really do represent the spectrum from left to right, and some people who are just not classifiable one way or another. But what binds the Alliance members together as an alliance is the shared belief that we can't do our jobs as scholars and teachers unless we're allowed to explore ideas, say what's on our minds, challenge conventional thinking, predominant orthodoxies on campus. We need to be able to explore any proposition, as the University of Chicago Free Speech Principle state. There should be no view, no matter how deeply we cherish it, no matter how critically important we think it is, no matter how central it is to our own identity, should be no view that's immunized against challenge or critique. So that's what the Alliance stands for, and it is supporting people across the board. Today, of course, one of the biggest issues is the question of Palestine and Israel. And the Alliance, which also has a legal defense fund, is representing clients who are being disciplined for stating positions on both sides. We have clients who are being disciplined or threatened because of their pro-Palestinian statements, and those who are being threatened because of their pro-Israel statements. And we are completely neutral as between those. It's a non-ideological organization. We will defend anybody whose free speech is under attack. And it doesn't matter whether I, or anybody else in the Alliance, agrees with what they say or abominates what they say. My colleague Peter Singer here at Princeton is a founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance. Peter and I are as far apart on issues of bioethics as you can possibly be. And yet, like Cornel and me, we, you know, we agree, but Peter and I agree that I need to protect his speech and he needs to protect my free speech. No matter where we are politically or morally, free speech is essential to our vocations, and essential to the mission of our institutions. And so we are united, despite our substantive differences on so many questions, in our commitment to defend free speech for everybody.
Jim Sailer ’90 And so this seems like a really good jumping off point to start to ask for questions from the over 120 plus people who have joined us. And we actually have one that's come in, and I'll ask people to put your question in the Q&A, and if you'd like me to say who the questioner is, just type your name along with your question, as the first person has done. And this is a classmate of yours, his name is Rolf Larsen from the class of 77. And he's asking-
Robert George ’77 Oh, Rolf.
Jim Sailer ’90 Yeah, Rolf is asking a question, "Where is the boundary between free speech and hate speech? Or is there such a boundary?"
Robert George ’77 Great question Rolf and thank you. And it's good to be back in touch with you. There is no boundary. The University of Chicago Free Speech Principles, and similar codes that have been adopted by more than a hundred universities around the country, and even the codes of some other institutions that haven't formally adopted the Chicago Principles, replicate to a very considerable extent First Amendment free speech law. They track it. And one of the great misconceptions people have today, especially young people, my students coming into my constitutional interpretation, or civil liberties scores for the first time, seem to believe that there's this category of unprotected speech, called hate speech. But there is not. Now there are some unprotected categories of speech. Those of you who happen to be familiar with First Amendment law will know, for example, that genuine threats, that is a threat directed at an individual, "I'm going to kill you," or, you know, "If you don't stop doing that, I'm gonna punch you in the nose." Genuine threats are unprotected speech. The deliberate incitement to imminent lawlessness, under the 1969 case of Brandenburg against Ohio, is unprotected speech. Now, I wanna stress it has to be deliberate and the lawlessness has to be imminent, otherwise the speech is protected. So this is a very, very narrow category. Intimidation, defamation, slander and libel, unprotected speech. Obscenity is unprotected speech. Now there's a debate about what constitutes obscenity, and it's a fairly narrow category, but that's unprotected speech. False advertising is unprotected speech. Conspiracy to commit a crime, that's unprotected speech. But there is no category called hate speech, even racist speech, anti-Semitic speech, speech that we rightly abominate, is protected speech. It's not unprotected speech. There is no category of hate speech. It comes as a big surprise to my students, but that's true under our First Amendment law. And there's good reason for it. If a case came before the Supreme Court, even today, proposing to carve out a new category of unprotected speech, called hate speech, there would be a nine zero vote. Even in this very polarized divided Supreme Court, it would be a nine zero vote. This is deeply entrenched in our constitutional traditions. No matter how evil speech is, if it's abstract advocacy, as opposed to a genuine threat or deliberate incitement of imminent violence, it is protected. And that's a good thing. I'll tell you why. Someone, if you have a hate speech exception or a racist speech exception, or what have you, someone is going to have to decide who is going to be punished for what speech. And I certainly wouldn't trust anybody I know, including myself, to be the arbiter of that, to decide who's going to be punished and who's not going to be punished. Let's look. A very timely example, of course, is one that was raised in Congress in the hearings with the three university presidents, the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and MIT, what about speech advocating genocide? The congresswoman who was questioning the three presidents said, "Well, you know, does your speech code forbid we're calling for the genocide of Jews?" And the presidents actually, having been advised by lawyers, actually my old law firm, the firm that I began with when I was a young lawyer, then known as Hale and Dorr, it's now merged with another firm and it's called WilmerHale, gave them correct advice. They they told them what the law is, and that is, it depends. If it's the abstract advocacy, even if something as evil as genocide, antisemitism, so forth, if it's the abstract advocacy, then it is protected. If it's a directed threat, a threat directed at an individual, then it's a different case. So when the presidents answered the congresswoman by saying it depends on the context, they were right. Now, the problem I think for the presidents is that the universities, all three of those universities, had failed to live up to their own free speech guarantees. And so they came across looking like hypocrites. But the answer that, on advice of counsel, they gave was correct. It really does depend. If you take the abstract advocacy of genocide, so some people would say, "Well, someone should be punished for advocating genocide if they chant from the river to the sea." Someone else would say, "Oh no, that shouldn't be punished, that's not hate speech." But if someone says, "Destroy Hamas," then that's the advocacy of genocide against Palestinians. And other people would say, "Well, no, no, that's directed at a terrorist organization, not the Palestinian people as a whole." But who's going to be the official in the university, who's gonna be the dean in the university, who's gonna say, "Well, we're gonna interpret this speech as hate speech, but we're not gonna interpret that speech as hate speech, or we're gonna interpret both, we're gonna interpret neither." I don't wanna give anybody, certainly not in university life, and I don't think in political life, that power of what amounts to censorship. Thank you Rolf.
Jim Sailer ’90 And so your answer there leads us into two questions which I'm gonna put together here, both talking about academic freedom. So the first is, can you talk about the differences between freedom of speech under the First Amendment and academic freedom? And then a more specific asking of that question comes from Barry Schwartz who says, "Isn't free speech different from academic freedom?" And he says, "There are norms of academic work within which academic freedom can flourish, but without which you get chaos. So for instance, the commitment to truth telling and truth finding." So can you talk about those elements, about the differences between academic freedom and free speech as you see it?
Robert George ’77 Yeah, academic freedom does require a very significant respect for freedom of speech, both extramural speech, speech outside the classroom by professors, and speech within the classroom for professors, which is why, for example, I regard the provision of the Florida Stop WOKE Act, which forbids the advocacy of divisive theories as antithetical to academic freedom. That's the kind of restriction on freedom of speech that really does undermine academic freedom. So academic freedom will require a great deal of respect for freedom of speech, again, both outside the classroom and inside the classroom. But Professor Schwartz, for which I have great admiration by the way, is right that they're not exactly the same thing. So there are professional standards which we rightly insist that professors honor when they're in a classroom with an assignment to teach a certain subject. If your assignment is to teach mathematics, if you're hired as a mathematician and your course is some advanced trigonometry, or something like that, if you use your classroom to lecture on your views about Shakespeare's tragedies, you can rightly be punished for that, or disabled from teaching that course, because that's not what you're supposed to be doing in it. Yeah, you have a right to your opinions, and to express your opinions about Shakespeare's tragedies, but that classroom is not the appropriate place for that. And more controversially, there are professional standards as to what is plausible and not plausible in a field. So if you are hired to teach astronomy, and you're supposed to be doing what Wulff Heintz taught me when I was at Swarthmore and studying astronomy, if that's what you're supposed to be doing, but instead you're teaching the zodiac table and astrology, then, you know, you're not doing your job. And even though you're perfectly entitled under the First Amendment, on your own free time to believe in astrology, and, you know, teach people about zodiac signs and all that kind of stuff, you know, that is not something you should be doing in the classroom. And if you're doing it in the classroom and the university says, "We're not gonna let you teach this class, or, you know, we're not gonna retain you as member of the faculty, you know, you're retained to teach astronomy and here you are doing all this astrology." And we could get to some borderline cases that get really interesting and complicated, but you can see the way the principal works. And it validates the point that Professor Schwartz was making that there are these professional standards. Now that leads us to another important dimension of free speech law. It's applicable, more generally, to academic freedom, and that is in addition to unprotected categories of speech, like the ones that I mentioned. There are also reasonable time, place, and manner regulations of speech. When I'm teaching my introductory lectures on free speech and my civility scores, I'll use the example of a sound truck blaring out a political message. Maybe it's, "Vote for the libertarians," or, "Vote for the socialists," or whatever the political message is. If it's going down Nassau Street, the main street in Princeton, the little town of Princeton where the university is, if it's going down Nassau Street blaring out its message at three in the afternoon, that's fine. You know, there's no expectation of quietude or anything like that at three in the afternoon at Princeton on Nassau Street. People are out shopping, doing things, there's lots of noise, stuff's going on. But take the same sound truck with the same message and send it through a residential area of Princeton, the Riverside neighborhood or the Littlebrook neighborhood at three in the morning, blaring out its message, whether it's vote for the libertarians or vote for the socialists, well, that can be prohibited. Not on a viewpoint basis, that is not because of the content of the message or the views expressed in the message, but because it's the wrong time and the wrong place and the wrong manner of sending that message out. And the same, you know, applies to campuses. So what applies in the general polity also applies on campus. But the key thing it seems to me, Jim and Barry, is that we respect the need for scholars and students to be able to consider whatever has been said by qualified people across a broad spectrum of positions, so that students, and faculty members as researchers, can decide for themselves. They should hear, if they're gonna hear my views about some bioethics question, they should also hear Peter Singer's views. It would be damaging to the cause of truth seeking if either side's views, or the views of people between Peter and me, would be banned because of their viewpoint. So, I'm opposed to viewpoint-based restrictions on speech, reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions are necessary, often necessary and proper. But this would also go to questions of like, when you should be talking about Shakespeare and when you should be talking about the zodiac, and so forth, not in a math class and not in an astronomy class.
Jim Sailer ’90 Great, thank you. And we have a number of other questions, and our hour is, believe it or not, almost 50 minutes in. But you have sparked a lot of interesting questions. So let me start with one. Question comes, "How can we address the triggering of so many students and the canceling of those with whom they disagree? I think a lot of times it's said that, you know, the viewpoints that are expressed make me feel unsafe on campus. This could be any campus, when the person with whom I have a very, very deep disagreement with, and in some cases might feel so objectionable to the kind of person I am, or might declare myself to be, is so strongly offensive, it makes me feel unsafe. And I'm wondering if you can respond to that."
Robert George ’77 Yes, happy to do that. It's a really important question. I'm grateful to the person who asked it. All of us who teach on controversial subjects in universities today face this issue. So let me tell a little story that I think is illustrative. Two years ago, one of my teaching assistants, we call them preceptors at Princeton, got in touch with me to say that a student in the precept, this was the first time I've ever encountered this myself, that a student in the preceptorial, in the discussion section, was refusing to read some of the readings that were assigned for the week on free speech, that had to do with questions of pornography and obscenity. And at first, when I just read that much of the message, I was just assuming this may be a religious student, perhaps an evangelical Christian, who felt that the readings themselves, in describing pornographic materials, I wasn't actually assigning pornography, but in describing pornographic materials, might just object to that. But as I read on it became clear that it wasn't, it a student who have a certain feminist perspective, secular feminist perspective on things, and found these particular readings to be offensive. So I knew what I thought the right thing to do was there, but I wanted to make sure that, you know, the university policy was being observed. I thought the right thing to do was to tell the student, "Well, of course I can't force you to read these materials, but they are essential to the subject that we're talking about here, pornography in the First Amendment, so if you don't read them, I can't relieve you from responsibility on exams for reading." So I got in touch with our wonderful dean of students, successor to Nancy Malkiel, Jill Dolan, and laid the case out to Jill. And Dean Dolan got back in touch with me and said, "You know, have your preceptor tell the student that she needs to be strong and resilient and do the reading, but you cannot, you certainly cannot relieve her of responsibility for doing the reading." I thought Jill Dolan gave the right answer. It was certainly congruent with what I, myself thought. And we do need to encourage our students, as Jill put it, to be strong and resilient, to engage ideas that they not only disagree with, but they find offensive, even abominable, hateful, dreadful. We know throughout history, people sometimes on reflection change their minds about things that were really, really important to them. They adopt a different perspective on the basis of thought and reflection and study. But to go more deeply into this, Jim, I would say the following, that message of strength and resilience, and the need to be willing to engage and take seriously and dialogue with people who deeply, deeply, deeply disagree with you, we need to both exhort our students to be strong and resilient, and we have to model it for them. I don't know if it's true, but it's attributed, I think, to St. Francis of Assisi. He's said to have said, "Preach the Gospel always, and if necessary use words." Well, I feel similarly about the message that Jill Dolan gave me. You know, preach strength and resilience, and if necessary use words. How do we do it without using words? By modeling it. So Cornel and I, for example, a lot of what motivates us to do what we do, and we love it, we enjoy it, we enjoy each other's company, we enjoy the intellectual exchange and so forth, but we're also trying to set an example for people. We're trying to show people that you can really, really deeply disagree about stuff, but still share a commitment to truth seeking, which is a bond that's stronger than what divides you. That this is something very much worth doing, because we're all fallible, that we can all be wrong. And as I said earlier, not just on the minor, trivial, super superficial things, but on the big important things. There's a part of the Jewish liturgy on Yom Kippur, which I always find deeply moving and very, very wise. It's the part of the Jewish liturgy on Yom Kippur where we in the congregation beat our breasts and go through the sins. We have lied, we have stolen, we have cheated, we have committed adultery, we have born false witness against our neighbor, and then it's added, "We have been zealots for bad causes." Now that's deep wisdom. It takes thousands of years to get that kinda wisdom. Nobody's ever a zealot for a bad cause on purpose. You know, it's always an accident. You don't commit adultery by accident. You don't lie by accident. If you're lying by accident, it's not actually a lie. You're saying something that happens not to be true, but it's not a lie. But anybody who's a zealot for a cause is a zealot for that cause because they believe in it, and they believe in it so deeply that they're zealous for it. But what the tradition recognizes is it can be a bad cause because we are fallible. So we've got to be open to being challenged, even about the deepest, most cherished identity-forming beliefs that we hold.
Jim Sailer ’90 Fantastic. We have a number of other questions. I'm gonna ask you to kind of, this is a big thinking question here, so we have a member of the class of 1991 who's asking a question. She left her job at a small college, and since then has volunteered as a moderator with an organization called Braver Angels, which is you'll be familiar with, that provides workshops on skills for bridging the political divide. And her question is this, "Do you think that the decreased quality of cross-politics conversations by the general public affects free speech on campus? Or is it the other way around? Or do they affect each other? And do academic debates in general, public conversations, influence one another, and how?"
Robert George ’77 Well, I do think that they influence each other. And I think what happens in the public, especially the political sphere, is both cause and effect of what happens on campus. So the the answer is unfortunately it's complicated and it's multifactorial. Things are both causes and effects, as I say. But the key thing is that we try to do something about it, and Braver Angels, and congratulations to her for her involvement in that organization, Braver Angels tries to do that in the way I mentioned earlier, by example, by modeling it, by showing people how to do it. If you go to a Braver Angels event, you'll usually see people like Cornel and myself, or like Peter Singer and myself, you know, people who really do disagree about some very, very important things. And we're not denigrating in any way the importance of what we disagree about, but we're trying to show that you can disagree about them fruitfully. Fruitfully in a way that causes everybody concerned to learn. And here let me introduce, much of my scholarly work has been a critique of the philosophy of John Stuart Mill, the 19th century British philosopher. I've been critical of Mill's utilitarianism, for which he's famous of course, and of his libertarianism. But I'll tell you, on his defense of free speech, I think he gets it exactly right. He defends free speech, not as an abstract right, and not as just a matter of simple fairness or anything like that, but as protecting important aspects of human well-being and fulfillment, as protecting human goods. You need the right to free speech, for example, and above all, to protect the truth-seeking enterprise. And Mill's got an idea that's sometimes referred to as Mill's trident, and Braver Angels models this. So here's what it is. If you and I, Jim, disagree about something, let's say you and I disagree about some important thing, there are three possibilities, hence the trident. One, you're entirely right, I'm entirely wrong. Two, you're partially right, partially wrong, and I'm partially wrong, but partially right, and three, I'm entirely right and you're entirely wrong. Now, if you are entirely right and I'm entirely wrong, then, boy, I'd better not restrict your free speech, because allowing you to speak is the one hope I have of moving from error and falsehood to truth. Letting you challenge me, can get me to where I really need to be. If you are at least partially right, same argument applies. Even if you're partially wrong, if I don't shut down your free speech, I've got a shot at your educating me and hearing your argument, hearing your evidence, and swapping out the false part of my beliefs, and, you know, coming nearer the truth, or to greater fullness of truth. But then there's the third one, and this is the hard one. What if you're, let's say you are entirely right, and, well, let's say I'm entirely right and you're entirely wrong, you should respect my free speech anyway, because by hearing the argument of an intelligent person who has come down a different way, even if he's got it completely wrong, and by trying to figure out how I got it wrong, providing a critique, thinking through my arguments, you will come to a deeper understanding of the truth. It's one thing to know that something is the case, so you can check the right box on the SAT score, SAT test, but it's another thing, and a much better thing, to know not only that something is the case, but how it is the case and why it's the case, or how it might relate to other things that's the case. Again, to go back to Peter Singer, Peter and I have deep disagreements about some really profound things. I actually think I'm right about them, and he thinks I'm wrong about them. He thinks he's right about them. But I think both of us would say the following, at least I'll say it for myself, I have deepened my understanding of these issues enormously by being forced to engage with Peter. Even though I think he's completely wrong about this. It's just deepened my understanding and move from a more superficial to a deeper understanding. I think Mill got this exactly right.
Jim Sailer ’90 Fantastic. And I think that is where we're gonna have to leave it off. This hour went exceptionally quickly. There are a number of other questions I would love to get to. I apologize for anyone if I didn't read your question out, but this has been a stimulating hour, and I think we can understand after this why one of the awards you've been given is the Princeton University President's Award for Distinguished Teaching. So Professor George, thank you so much for speaking with us, and thanks to everyone who's joined and engaged with your outstanding questions.
Robert George ’77 Thank you so much, Jim.
Jim Sailer ’90 Alright, have a good night everyone.
