The Dispatch Podcast - Sniffing Out Advocacy | Interview: Robert P. George

Episode Date: December 26, 2023

Princeton professor Robert P. George says it’s up to the faculty to save universities. He joins Jamie to explain the issues with our campuses, including: -punishing free speech -abstract advocacy versus threats -banning the bad stuff -the long march through institutions -the trustees not saving the universities -Claudine Gay’s plagiarism accusations Show Notes: -Robert P. George's profile at Princeton -Robert P. George's X profile -Watch this episode on YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. This is Jamie Weinstein. My guest today is Robbie George. Robbie George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals Institutions at Princeton University. He has won too many honors and served on too many prestigious commissions to mention here. Suffice to say, he is one of the country's leading academics of any ideology and on a short list of maybe two for the most famous conservative college professors on campus today. So it was an honor to have him on this program. We discussed many issues, including and most obviously what is going on on college campuses today, what he thought of the statements of the three presidents of major elite universities before Congress,

what he would do if he was president of Princeton University and faced with those same questions, and a little bit about the just broader national political moment we are in. I hope you enjoy this episode. Without further due, I give you Professor Robbie George. Thank you, Jamie George. It's my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me on. Well, it's a real honor to have you on. And I want to start here, actually. And I'm kind of interested in what your response would be as both someone who is a staunch advocate for free speech and someone who has been a strong fighter against anti-Semitism. I want to imagine for a moment you are Princeton president, Robbie George, and you were sitting in a house hearing room earlier this month, and you were asked a very broad and general question, which was, does calling for the genocide of Jews constituted? bullying and harassment? How would Princeton President Robbie George respond?

Our university has very strong policies against harassment, intimidation, and threats. Those coexist with our very strong free speech commitments. Those free speech commitments track the obligations that state institutions would have under the First Amendment. Now, the free speech protection means we cannot ban any idea, no matter how vile, no matter how gross, no matter how horrible. But where the expression of an idea amounts to harassment or intimidation or genuine threats, we will punish those. Now, I have to admit, I'm now in the role of a university president, right, of, let's say Penn or Harvard. I would then say, Representative Stephanic, I have to admit that my institution, the institution I now have the honor of leading,

has not always been faithful to its free speech commitments. And when I invoke now free speech protections, even for people who express anti-Semitic sentiments, you may be thinking, well, that's awfully hypocritical because you've come down very hard, not respecting free speech, on people who have made statements that deviate from woke orthodoxies on campus. And Representative Stefaniq,

I have to plead guilty on behalf of my institution, We have done that in the past, but I pledge to you. I'm a new president, just in office a few months. I pledge to you that you will not see that hypocrisy going forward. We will prevent harassment and intimidation of Jewish and all students, but we will also respect free speech for everybody. And that includes conservatives, that includes evangelical Christians and devout Catholics, Orthodox Jews. Anyone who expresses any view on campus will get equal free speech protection. Can I press you on that a little bit, Professor? What is interesting is, and I think you express what a lot of conservatives were most upset about is that, you know, in the past, this idea of free speech was not usually invoked when a subject came up. And all of a sudden, we saw three staunch free speech defenders in front of Congress when asked about issues that related to harassment of Jews. Yeah, when it was anti-Semitic free speech, anti-Semitic speech, everything suddenly seemed to change. change. And of course, that looked hypocritical. And it looked hypocritical, Jamie, because it was hypocritical. Yeah. But I wonder, even if you are a staunch supporter of free speech, you know, there are questions of, you know, people trying to parse from, you know, from the river to the sea, you know, some, I guess, can argue that it's not genocide. A lot of people like me think that

that's what it means. But if something is so specific, if someone was on campus actually saying, You know what? I do support the genocide of Jews. I do support the murder of all black people. I do support the murder of all Catholics. Is that something that you think the university should say, even if they are for free speech? That does seem oddly, very specific and very, very clear of what they're what they're calling for and it being something that should be against. In the hypothetical case you're giving me, it is abstract advocacy. That is, It's not getting in someone's face and saying, let's say to a black person, we should kill all blacks, where it becomes an actual intimidation. We're in a classroom discussion, and some misguided, deeply immoral person says something like, you know, Hitler's policies were pretty tough, but, you know, the Jews were a real problem, and he needed to get rid of them if Germany was to make progress. Let's say a student says something that vile, but in the context of abstract advocacy and discussion, not where it can be interpreted as an actual threat against an individual. Is that the hypothetical we're in? Yeah, I guess there's not saying I'm going to go participate in the genocide, but, you know,

I support the idea of a genocide. Believe me, you would not want a university to have the power. You would not want an official in a university. You saw those presidents. You know who the people are who run universities. you would not want a university official to be able to make the judgment that this or that constitutes an illegal call for genocide, illegal under the university's rules that can then be investigated and punished. I don't know the college official that I would trust with that power. And of course, if you tried to, if a university tried to make such speech punishable, what would happen is,

people would not say outright, you know, kill the Catholics or gas the Jews or, you know, eliminate the blacks. They would say things like from the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab or something like that. And then there will be some university official. It might be the head of the DEI office. It might be the dean of undergraduate student life. It might be the provost. It might be the university president who's going to have to decide whether that constitutes speech that is punishable. And when you do that, again, believe me, I'm right in the belly of the beast. I've been at this 39 years in the heart of the Ivy League. Here's what would come next.

Someone saying, you know what? These civilian casualties are horrible, but Israel's got to do what it's got to do to defend its own people. And so, you know, we're just not going to, we can't be deterred by the deaths of Palestinian babies and Palestinian civilians. And then that person is targeted and punished for genocidal speech or for hate speech or for bias speech or something like that. You do not want to empower these people to do that.

Let's get to what is going on on campuses. And you tweeted a poll that kind of was stunning to me. I had seen it before. The poll was of 18 to 24 year olds, which showed that 79% support an ideology that says white people are oppressors, 669% support an ideology that says Jews are oppressors, and 60% believe that the October 7th massacre of Jews in Israel was justified. And you wrote above the poll, gee, I wonder where they are getting these ideas, who's stuffing their heads full of this stuff? Such a mystery. For those who are not on campus, who may be a little bit surprised, and it is a mystery to them, explain what

you meant. Where are these ideas coming from? Well, if you look at the ideology that you find in the writings of figures from Franz Fanon, I don't know if that name means anything to you to Jamie, but he's an important influence on contemporary academic life, or Herbert Marcusa, the left-wing guru who taught here in the United States, emigrated from Germany, taught in the United States in the 1960s and 70s. These ideas that the world is divided up into oppressors and the oppressed, and you're either in one category or the other, and that categorization depends on what group you're in. This idea is part of an ideology that has taken hold, taken root, flourished, unfortunately, in our contemporary intellectual culture and plays a very significant role,

I very much regret to say, in academic life. So if you want to know where students are getting these ideas, they're getting them from universities, they're getting from university professors, they're getting it from university administrators, they're getting it from DEI offices and DEI bureaucracies that reflect these ideological misunderstand, in my view, misunderstandings. Some would say understandings and commitments. Now, they also, of course, are communicated on social media. They're in high schools.

They're even in middle schools. For all I know at this point, they may be in elementary schools. But even to the extent that they are in social media and elementary schools and high schools, where's the source? It's in the universities. And this is what makes the reform of the universities. urgent. You know, we need to, we need to depoliticize our universities and, and restore them to their original, justifying, defining, constituting mission of being truth-seeking institutions. Professor, I guess my question is, is this new to some degree? Or, I mean, is this a new? I mean,

obviously, Bill Buckley wrote and God and Man at Yale of kind of a left-wing orthodoxy that he encountered at Yale. You have been in academia, not quite when Bill Buckley was writing Got a Man at Yale, but since the 80s. Is this a new type of moment in academia, or is it just a continuation of what you've seen since you entered Swarthmore as a freshman in the 1980s? Well, you know, figures like Fanon and Marcuse, and there are many others. I'm just using those as a couple of leading examples. There were figures like Marcuse and Phenon, who were influential all the way back into the 60s, obviously. And we could even take it deeper. But when I arrived at Princeton to begin my academic career right out of graduate school, this was back in the Middle Ages, back in the fall of

1985, so a little more than 39 years ago. When I began, the phenon-type ideology, the ideology of Marcusa and others, and there are interesting differences between Phenon and McCuza. I'm just using them as members of a broad category. But that ideology was present, but it was not dominant. In those days, when I was a young scholar, the dominant position on campus, the dominant ideological position on campus is what I now refer to as the old school liberalism. And it was the old school liberals who set the terms basically of discussion on the campus. And these were people who, although they were McGovern voters in the 72 election, and they were sworn enemies of Ronald Reagan and the conservative movement and so forth, they really did believe in things like free speech.

And the fact that I was hired, and I was out of the closet as a dissenter from the liberal orthodoxy from the moment I first appeared on the Princeton campus to be interviewed for my position, the fact that they hired me reveals that they were open. to a diversity of viewpoints. They thought it was fine, indeed good for students to be exposed to ideas that were different from theirs. We did not have an ideological monoculture or anything approaching an ideological monoculture when the old liberals were in charge.

They were dominant. Their ideology was dominant. But it wasn't a monoculture. That, I think, Jamie, is what has changed. It's become more and more like, closer and closer to being a monoculture. Now, they're still dissenters. like me in the academy. But what's remarkable, and I think the thing I would have been least able to predict back in the mid-1980s, is that the old school liberals are now almost gone. They were

in charge. They were in control. These places were their places, these institutions were their institutions. Now they are rare as hen's teeth. You can't find them around. They are aging out. They're retiring or dying. And they're certainly not being replaced. based by new versions of the old liberals. That ideology now seems archaic. If these institutions are now becoming dominated by a kind of illiberal type professors and administrators, how does one fight back against it and turn these institutions back into what they were?

isn't the isn't it already too far along if you're you know dominated by a group of leaders who don't really want to have open debate well what I would propose is I don't know let's let's try to come up with a label for it let's call it a long march through the institutions so what I would like to do is build infrastructure where you can oases of intellectual excellence within existing institutions, especially elite institutions because other institutions in our country follow the lead of elite institutions. Academic people will tell you that they're independent thinkers and they're certainly not snobs and they believe in egalitarianism and equality and so forth.

But if you want to change what happens at Kansas Wesleyan or the University of Wyoming, change what happens at Yale or Stanford or MIT. There will be a very swift trickled down effect. So I think we should work wherever we can, but certainly when we can in the elite institutions to build infrastructure, what I'm following Eric Cohen and calling them OASES of excellence, that will exemplify embody the ideals that were and should be the guiding ideals of academic life, genuine truth-seeking, where a range of viewpoints is represented, where students really aren't told what to think, but are rather taught how to think, empowered to think more deeply, more critically, and for themselves. Real education, deep education,

what the Greeks called Pidea, not just communicating information or specific skill sets, but actually teaching students to wrestle with the deep questions and their implications, confronting and countering and engaging the best that has been thought and said throughout history on these issues. I think we can do that. I think donor money can be effectively marshaled to do that in many institutions. Not all. There are some that are just so resistant they're not going to let you in the door.

Well, there's nothing to do about that. But there are plenty of institutions where you can build programs like the program at Princeton that I founded and lead, the James Madison program in American Ideals and Institutions, now in our 23rd year and flourishing and providing on our campus exactly the model that I just described, genuine deep education, education that does not degenerate into indoctrination. And there are other institutions and programs and institutes here at Princeton and around the country, many of them modeled on the Madison program, that do the same thing. And not just in our particular area of civic education, constitutional law and political thought, but in other areas as well, the program in human flourishing led by Tyler Vanderweil at Harvard, the program on markets and economics led by Josez, sorry, Jesus Fernandez-Villeverde, at the University of Pennsylvania, of all places. The program in moral philosophy led by Candace Vogler at the University of Chicago.

And I'm also excited, Jamie, about state institutions. institutions now being built at places like Arizona State University, their excellent school of civic and economic thought and leadership. The University of Tennessee at Knoxville, its great new program on American civics. There's a terrific one at the University of Texas, the Civitas Institute, the Public Discourse Institute at University of North Carolina, the wonderful Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, the flagship university down there. But, Professor, if I may, what makes you optimistic if these campuses are increasingly being taken over by illiberal leaders that your program, the Madison program, or the Hoover Institution at Stanford will not be tried to be pushed off campus or dismantled? I mean, if it becomes just a standard view on these campuses that debate, there should be no debate on certain issues,

And these institutions have debate on these issues or have people advocating a side of these issues that has decided to be, you know, not allowed verboten. What makes you confident or optimistic that this won't ultimately lead to the destruction of these institutions, these positive institutions on this campus? Of course, we're talking to here about human life, the human condition, so I can't give you any guarantee, Jamie. On the other hand, we've been at this for 23 years at Princeton in the Madison program. We're bigger and stronger and more influential on our campus and off campus than ever.

There's a tremendous amount of student interest in our work and our courses. We're offering a course this spring in statesmanship, and it's got over 250 students enrolled in it. In Princeton's a small university. We're really a liberal arts college pretending to be a big university. 250 students enrolled in a course is huge at Princeton, and that's for our course on statesmanship. And they're not going to be getting woke ideology in that course. Believe me, they're going to be getting a serious education. They're going to be reading the best that has been thought and said. They're going to be studying Cicero and George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

Frederick Douglass figures like this. This is the real thing. This is real education. No fooling around. So my experience is that you can have. have an enormous impact on a campus and that the student interest is there when it's offered. But you need a core. This is the thing.

You need a core of faculty that isn't intimidated, doesn't practice self-censorship, speaks up, loud and clear that models for our students what we want our students to be. And what is that? Determine truth seekers and courageous truth speakers. That's the goal. determine truth seekers and courageous truth speakers. And students will follow the lead when they see professors exemplifying those virtues.

But if you don't have them, then what you're going to get from the students is either conformism or self-censorship. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your love, loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the

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It's a single hub for managing your work and reaching your audience without having to piece together a bunch of different tools. All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. What do you make of, in gun referencing again, Bill Buckley's God and Man at Yale, his solution to the issue at the time was the trustees to step in and kind of do away with what he thought was not the type of education that Yale should be giving. Do you believe that is the solution to this problem, or would you be opposed to the trustees stepping in and kind of mandating their own worldview or the own view of what education should be? I think trustees have a role to play and should play that role in the reform of higher education.

Same with Regents and the state universities. I think they have largely abdicated their responsibility in most cases, most universities over the years. but place not thy trust in princes as the Bible says the trustees of the princes and they're not going to save us even if they would step up to the plate and do the work and play the role that they should play that'll only be a small part of the solution you can't outsource this one to the trustees it's going to take faculty it's going to take alumni and other donors working together finding opportunities. They won't be everywhere, Jamie. Let me again emphasize that. There are some universities that are just not going to let you in the door, but there are going to be a lot of universities

where you can build infrastructure. And that infrastructure is going to make a huge difference on the campus. It's going to make that campus different from, let's say, I don't know, Oberlin. And it's going to make a huge difference in the lives of the students. And it's going to produce students who really are determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers in lifelong learners. And that's really, as I say, the goal. One of the big voices, big donors who is trying to change things. I don't know what your view is for the better or worse since October 7th is Bill Ackman. And I was curious what your thought as someone who is a big supporter of free speech, whether this is in bounds of one of the things that he has been doing, which is that I guess

CEOs and law firms have asked him whether there's a compilation of people that signed what Many of you as effectively pro-HOMOS petitions on various campus to kind of make them students persona non-grata if they make applications to Goldman Sachs or some of the major law firms. Is that something that you think is within bounds, even as someone who is a supporter of free speech? I think it's an imprudent precedent. No, I think Mr. Ackman should do with his money as he sees fit. and he certainly seems like a person whose intentions are wonderful and who has done a great job at exposing some of the really bad stuff that's going on campus on it. This is not a criticism of Mr. Hackman, but there's a danger because the left will pick up on this. And the next thing you know, there will be comprehensive efforts to blackball from future

employment, evangelical Christian students or devout Catholic students, Orthodox Jewish students, people who made statements or signed petitions that were, say, pro-life or that stood up for traditional marriage and sexual morality or against the ideas of transgender ideology and things like that. And you'll have movements on the left. And these movements have a lot of influence in corporate America. Woke Capital is a real thing. They got a lot of influence in law firms. We know that from the experience of Paul Clement at two law firms, the great Supreme Court litigator, Paul Clement, who's left two law firms, been pushed out essentially because of his advocacy of causes that were unpopular on the left. The left will figure

this out. They will weaponize it and they will use it against honorable students who have conservative, especially socially conservative viewpoints who dissent publicly from woke orthodoxies on campus. So I don't think this is a good road to go down. I think you're probably going to be handing a dagger to your enemies if you do this. It'll seem like a good idea at the beginning. It'll turn out to be a bad idea. Generally, Jamie, I think that the strategy should be one of build, don't ban. We don't need to ban the bad stuff.

This is, I think, what Buckley was tempted to think back when he published God and Man and Yield. Trustees should come in and ban the bad stuff on campus. Whether that was possible then, and we just missed the old. opportunity or not, it's not possible today. And it's not a good strategy. We should worry less about banning the bad stuff and more about building good stuff. If you build good stuff, believe me, it will prevail. Students can sniff out indoctrination when they've got an alternative and they will go to the alternative. Another issue that has arose since the hearing earlier this month of the college presidents was a, I guess, a scandal that's brewing at Harvard with

the president of Harvard, Claudine Gay. I wonder if you had any thoughts on the plagiarism scandal and allegations, whether you've looked at them and what you think they're accusing of are as serious as some suggest. I just, in the last couple of days, have had a chance to look at them in a serious way. I haven't done a comprehensive review, but I've looked at a of the material. It's now become available publicly. And it looks awfully bad to me, I have to say. Here's the principle that I think Harvard and every other institution really has no choice, but in the end, to observe. And that is, you cannot permit faculty members to get away with things that you would suspend or expel students for doing. That's just a general principle

that there's no way out of that in the end. You can put it off for a while. But those double standards are just not tenable. That is treating the standards applying to students more rigorously and standards that apply to faculty in a lax way. So that's the standard. Now, if we look at what I've been looking at the past few days from President Gay's writings and then comparing them with the sources that she obviously relied on, sometimes without quotation marks,

sometimes without attribution, it looks really bad. Because it seems clear as day to me that if a student were caught doing what she has done, that student would be at a minimum subject to serious disciplinary action and likely suspended for a semester or a year. And in very egregious cases, perhaps expelled. So it's a bad situation. And I'm very sorry. I say this with absolutely no glee. I'm sad that President Gay is in this position.

I don't know her personally. I certainly don't have anything against her. But she did what she did. And I think the situation is very grave for her. Let me ask you one last question on the campuses and what's going on now. Would you advise a parent of a student who could get into an elite university to send them to an elite university given what's going on

on college campuses? Here, I have to sound like one of those university presidents, I'm afraid, Jamie, and say, it depends on the context. And it does indeed. In two senses. First, I need to know which university or college. If it's a university or college

where there is no dissent, there's no resistance, there are no professors, who are not standing up against the woke orthodoxy. If it's going to be a place where the student is just indoctrinated, never hears a different point of view, never has an opportunity to study with a professor who thinks differently, or take classes where he's exposed to material that challenges the dominant orthodoxy.

Well, why would you just send a student there? Because you like the name Oberlin, sorry to be picking on Oberlin. You like the name Oberlin as a sticker on the back windshield of your beamer? It's not worth it. Believe me. your kid's soul is a lot more important than that. So, yeah, I mean, if it's that kind of place, don't send your kid there.

But there are other places where the woke orthodoxy is pretty powerful, but where there's dissent and resistance and faculty members who will expose students to criticism of woke orthodoxies and where students will have an opportunity genuinely to encounter the best that has been thought and said. Now, those institutions should be on the table. But here's the second sense of context that I have in mind. So you need to know what universities we're talking about here because they're not all alike. Even the elite universities are not all alike.

There are some places that don't have significant resistance and dissent. There are others that do. Now, the second sense in which I mean referring to context here is you need to know your child. Is your child the kind who's a confront? Is your child the kind that's going to just go along with whatever the dominant orthodoxy is? Perhaps your kid's a pleaser. It just likes to fit in and likes to be accepted. And, you know, it's just, it's going to go along with whatever the dominant view is on campus.

Well, in that case, please send your kid to Hillsdale or Francis can use or University of Steubenville or University of Dallas or someplace where we'll get an education despite himself. You don't want to send that kid even to a place that's got sick. significant dissent and faculty members who will challenge those dominant orthodoxies because your kid's likely to fall into that group of students that'll just shun dissenting professors and, you know, think that it's not acceptable to study with them or take their, uh, their classes. Now, on the other hand, if you got a kid who's, you know, serious about learning and, you know, doesn't always just go along in order to fit in who who thinks sometimes being accepted is not the ultimate thing in the world that you know thinking for yourself really is important if

you've if you brought your kid up that way or you're blessed to have a kid like that send him to me we'll take great care of that kid that kid's going to hear a lot of woke nonsense and including it in some of his classes he's going to hear that nonsense challenged in other classes and that kid will resonate and and at the end of the day I'll tell you what that kid's going to be, like I said before, that kid's going to be a determined truth seeker and a courageous truth speaker and a lifelong learner. Professor, if you permit me, just a few kind of questions about the broader political moment. And I think they were impetimized for you in a sense from two tweets that came right after each other on your Twitter. One was lamenting President Biden's

position on abortion and unborn babies. The other was lamenting Donald Trump's short circuiting, just kind of general commentary in the way he speaks. How does, how does Professor Robbie George navigate a moment where he doesn't seem to have faith in either likely candidate for the, for the presidential nomination? How does Professor Robbie George vote when he gets to the ballot box when he has two candidates he seems to not very much like to put it's a very bad situation as it was in 2016 as it was in 2020 at least if you're a person who believes as as I do in 2016 and again in 2020 at least in my humble opinion neither of the major parties put up a candidate that met the threshold of meriting our support neither was

fit to be president of the United States and in all of those cases Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton in 2016, Mr. Trump again and Mr. Biden in 2020, I think the problems with the deep, deep problems with the candidates were fundamentally problems of character, of moral character. I'm old school. I believe that that virtue in our leaders really matters, that character matters in our leaders. It's not just do they have the right positions about this or that or the other thing. Positions are important. Policy is important. But gosh, you know, you need character. In the end, that really matters. It's a dangerous, dangerous, dangerous world. And character really matters in our leaders. And our major parties have put up candidates of poor

character in these two elections. And so in 2016, I couldn't vote for either of the major party candidates. I wrote in the name of a somewhat obscure senator from Nebraska named Ben Sav. Ben Sass, who happens also to be a friend of mine and is certainly no longer obscure. President of the University of Florida now, he's left the Senate. And then in 2020, I cast, I guess, what can only be called a protest vote. I wrote in the name of a legislator, African-American Democrat legislator from Tennessee, who had been essentially expelled from the Democratic Party because of his pro-life commitments and votes in the Tennessee state legislature.

the party ran a candidate against him in the primary who defeated him. And I wrote in that man's name as a tribute to him and his independence of mind because of my dissatisfaction with both Trump and Biden. And it looks like we're heading for Trump and Biden. Again, I myself many months ago, endorsed Governor DeSantis, who I think would be a wonderful president. I cannot explain to you, Jamie, why Governor DeSantis has not caught fire. I did expect him to actually take down Mr. Trump in the primaries because I thought, gosh, here's a governor who won by a whisper in his first election. Four years later wins in a landslide against a credible opponent who had been governor himself, 64, almost 6040, turned a purple

state, bright red, had great successes in policy, as well as in politics. Mr. Trump, Trump's record electorally was not good. The candidates, most prominent candidates he were supporting, he supported were losers in 2018 and 2020. And then again, in 2022. So I really thought DeSantis was going to take the lead. And obviously he hasn't done that. The Democrats have helped Trump enormously with their lawfare campaign against him. I mean, each indictment or, you know, other.

big public act against him has simply elevated his standing among Republican primary voters. This may be in part by design because they think that Trump is going to be the easiest candidate for the Democrats to beat. So they're wanting to help him. If that is their view, I wish someone would remind them of 2016 when that was exactly their view. And they really did help Trump to get the Republican nomination because they thought that they could beat him. Clinton would easily beat him. and he'd never be president of the United States, and how well did that work out for them? I was just going to, when you mentioned the indictments,

do you find any of them have merit, or do you think in total that they all are spurious? I haven't examined all of them in detail. There are certainly some violations. There's no question about that, for example, in the Public Records Act. The trouble is it just looks like the prosecution is selected, that he's being prosecuted in at least some of these cases for things.

that while they are technically offenses, other people have not been prosecuted for. And the record of the Democrats going after Trump, going all the way back to the steel dossier fraud and the Russian collusion business and all that, the record has just been really, really, really bad. So, you know, I'm not sure what the Democrats are thinking here. Maybe it's very simple. Maybe it's just get them any way you can. It's certainly good for a Democrat politically to issue an indictment of Trump if you're a prosecutor or something like that. But I don't think it in total is doing the country any good.

I think the way to beat Trump is at the ballot box, and I'd love to see him defeated in the Republican Party. That at the end of the day is the way that would actually help the country and help the country. to heal. If we defeated Trump, trying to keep him off the ballot as with the recent Colorado Supreme Court decision and so forth, those may look like smart, short-term strategies, but they are very bad in the long term. They're just going to feed the idea that Trump is a victim. They're going to feed the idea that Trump has been treated unfairly. At some extent, he certainly has been. As strongly as I oppose him, I have to admit, he has been treated unfairly in many ways. And it just gins up his base of support and further alienates his supporters who are large

a number, further alienates them from the institutions of our country. I wasn't going to go here. But let me just ask you then, I mean, how do you view how he handled January 6th? You know, does it rise to a level of criminality in your view? One of the interesting aspects, which is obviously tangential to some of the January 6 cases, which is the Colorado decision that just came up, was, you know, kind of masterminded in some ways by Judge Lutig, who's probably someone that, you know, you are familiar with as a longtime writer-center jurist. But I guess in total, I guess there is a view that what happened on January 6 was so criminal. in a sense, that it rose to the level of insurrection, tried to overthrow the government, that some of these cases do have merit,

maybe as opposed to some of the New York cases that go after his financing and what he may have paid Stormy Daniels and how he paid Stormy Daniels. So I guess just in total, the questions on January 6th, the cases coming after him for those, how do you view those?

I think President Trump behaved very, very irresponsible. responsibly. But I don't see the case. I don't see the evidence that he behaved criminally. If you apply what I think the established, what most legal scholars and lawyers and jurists would think are the established legal principles here, I think the judgment would have to be this was extremely irresponsible behavior in a president, but not criminal. Let me end with this final question. There's another. other candidate running for president who happens to be a friend of yours, and his name is Cornel West.

I was wondering what your thoughts of his campaign are. Could you ever imagine pulling the ballot for him, voting for him in an election? And what do you make of him generally? Well, Cornell is a dear friend of mine. We go back many years together. We taught together several times at Princeton. We've gone around the country together doing programs on civil discourse and on other topics. We fundamentally disagree politically. We have some shared values, of course, including our beliefs in the importance of free speech on campus and off campus, the importance of education, not deteriorating or degenerating into indoctrination. And believe me, having taught with Cornell, haven't been on a faculty with him, he's as good as his word on that stuff. He's been a very

powerful ally of mine on free speech issues. And in the classroom, he does not indoctrinate his He challenges them in the way that I challenged, and that's what made us such a good pair which made it so easy for us to work together in classroom teaching. He also says what he believes is true, even when it's going to alienate his own side, and he just did that day before yesterday by criticizing the Colorado Supreme Court decision. Obviously, he's extremely hostile to Trump. He calls Trump, if I remember the phrase, a game. gangster and a neo-fascist. But he criticized the Colorado court for taking the democratically

constituted citizenry's right to elect the candidate of their choice away from them without a very good constitutional basis for their argument. Well, you know, I admire that. I admire a person who speaks his mind, says what he thinks, is honest with the public. Even if, as in this case, with Cornell, you know, we disagree politically about so many of the the most basic policy issues. Israel and Palestine, abortion and the right to life, marriage and sexual morality, and, you know, a range of other things. Professor, thank you for joining the dispatch podcast. Oh, it's my pleasure, Jamie. Thank you. You know what I'm going to do.