Voices of Freedom - Interview with Robert P. George

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

An Interview with Robert P. George It’s no secret that viewpoint diversity has long been scarce among faculty and staff at most universities. Yet events on college campuses since October 7, 2023 have exposed for many just how entrenched progressive ideologies have become within higher education, causing an awakening among alumni, families and students. The result could be an opportunity for real reform, allowing universities to return to or reaffirm their role of truth seeking. Our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom is esteemed scholar Robert P. George. He shares his thoughts on how to elevate free speech on campus and provides insights on the future of higher education. Topics Discussed on this Episode: Robby’s journey from West Virginia bluegrass bands to Princeton Whether universities have strayed too far from truth seeking The role of donors and alumni in changing campus culture The reining in of university DEI departments Is college still a wise investment? Overcoming the fear of speaking up Opportunities for reform in higher education Robert P. George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and Director of Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, which he founded in 2000. He holds numerous distinctions and awards, including the U.S. Presidential Citizens Medal and a 2005 Bradley Prize. He also serves on The Bradley Foundation’s Board of Directors.  

Hello and welcome to Voices of Freedom, a Bradley Foundation podcast. I'm Rick Graber, President and CEO of the Bradley Foundation. On the podcast, we'll explore issues that affect our freedoms with a focus on free enterprise, free speech, and educational freedom. So let's get started. Attending a four-year university was once the most logical path toward learning how to think critically and engage with new ideas. Yet sadly, many college campuses today have become hostile to viewpoint diversity

and tolerant of radical extremism. And often this has come at the expense of respecting individual rights, including the most fundamental rights guaranteed by our Constitution, of course free speech and religious liberty. Yet it's also fair to say that higher education may be at a tipping point, making it ripe for reform. Our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom is perhaps the country's leading champion of academic freedom, free speech and religious freedom. Robbie George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and the director of Princeton's James Madison Program in American Ideals

and Institutions, which was founded by Robbie in 2000. Robbie holds numerous distinctions and awards, including the U.S. Presidential Citizens Medal and a 2005 Bradley Prize. He also serves on the Bradley Foundation Board of Directors, now as our longest-serving director. Time flies. Welcome, Robbie. It's great to have you. Thank you, Rick. It's wonderful to be back on Voices of Freedom, and thank you for your leadership of the foundation. We've got a great board at the Bradley Foundation. And as the now senior member, not in age, but in number of years, I want to claim full credit for our great board because I voted on every single one of you. Every single one of those votes was a great vote. We do have a wonderful board that is dedicated and respects our donor intent, the Bradley Brothers. It really has allowed the Bradley Foundation to remain true to their ideals and to their wishes. And there are a lot of foundations

in this country that can't say that. That's certainly true. And that's a determined effort. When I myself came onto the board back in the Middle Ages, the thing that was drilled into my head was that we must be faithful to the intent of Lynde and Harry Bradley. They established this foundation to uphold the principles of American exceptionalism, our constitutional ideals, our economic system, which made their prosperity and the prosperity of so many millions possible, lifted so many people out of poverty. Respect for the rule of law, our institutions of Republican democracy, respect for the autonomy and integrity of civil society. And we have remained resolutely faithful to those principles. The members of the board are people who share those principles. We stand by them, and we think that the future of the nation depends on fidelity to those principles. Absolutely. It's an honor to serve with all of you. But let's start with you, Robbie. Let's talk about you a little bit. You grew up in West Virginia, and I know as a teenager you performed with folk groups and bluegrass bands and coffee shops and clubs and state fairs, and you still do, for that matter. But it sure seems to me that it's a very long road from coffee shops in West Virginia

to Princeton and the world of academia. How on earth did that happen? Well, it's an American story, I suppose. Yeah, I was born and brought up in the heart of Appalachia in West Virginia. Both of my grandfathers were coal miners. Probably the reason I'm not in the mines today is World War II. Now, I wasn't born until 10 years after World War II, but my father was conscripted into the service, into the army, to fight in Europe when he turned 18 in 1944.

And off he went, first to basic training and then to England and then across the Channel where on the troop carrier, the Leopoldville, the carrier was struck by a German torpedo and went down. About half the men aboard were lost, but my father was among the lucky ones who was not only rescued by a British patrol boat, but was uninjured. So he was sent on to fight, and he served with great distinction and valor in Normandy and in Brittany, and then with the occupation after the war. Now, when he came back to the United States, he had some opportunities. He had some training. Things were such that he was able to avoid going down into the coal mines like his father and his future father-in-law.

But he didn't have the opportunity to go to college. So I was the first in my family to go to college. My mom and dad thought that that was a very important thing to do. I'm the oldest of five, all boys, and they very much wanted us to go to college. And when the time came, I, as the pioneer, the oldest son, went in to see my college guidance counselor, and she handed me a big fat book called Barron's College Guide, and I looked at all these colleges. I couldn't read all 3,000 profiles, but I read those dozen or so that were listed in the book as most competitive. I didn't know much about those places, but I read about them, and as it happened, a couple of them really appealed to me by the profile. One was a liberal arts college outside of Philadelphia called Swarthmore, where I applied and was accepted. And it was there

that I became interested in liberal arts education and philosophy, in particular in legal and political philosophy. And then things went the way they went from there. I went from Swarthmore up to Harvard to law school, and I got a master's degree while I was there in law school as well, and then off to Oxford University to study philosophy of law for my doctorate. I like to say, Rick, that when I arrived at Swarthmore College, I was shoeless with my banjo on my back. The shoeless part is merely metaphoric. I did have shoes on, but the banjo on my back was literal. I did earn money when I was a kid instead of by mowing lawns or having a newspaper run. I earned money by playing the banjo with bluegrass bands, especially with dance bands and square dances and fire halls

and rod and gun clubs and things like that. So I've got a blessed life. In a certain way, it's what American exceptionalism is really all about. It's about the kind of social mobility that I and my brothers experienced. One generation, you're coal miners, and then two generations from there, in my case, I'm a former professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University. That's not fundamentally about me, Rick. That's fundamentally about America. Yes.

Because my story is not the exception. My story is the norm. When I tell that story to any audience, I know that I can count on just about everybody in that audience having a similar story about their parents or grandparents or great grandparents and what America made possible for them. So, Rick, I came by my patriotism the same way I came by my banjo playing. I came by it honestly. You're right. It's a great American story that has played out in a lot of different ways, but in a lot of ways similar as well. Outstanding.

Robbie, you've written that the university should be an institution for truth-seeking. Students attend college at a time in their lives where they've got time, they've got freedom, they've got capacity to be exposed to new and different ideas, think critically to challenge pre-existing beliefs. Do you think, and you're in the middle of this, is the environment at most of today's universities still really conducive to truth-seeking? I wish I could say that the answer to that question is yes, Rick, but it's not. We are desperately in need of reform in higher education to return to our foundational principles, to return to our mission as truth-seeking institutions. I think my fundamental role as a teacher is to help the young men and women entrusted to my charge, entrusted to my care by their families, help them to form themselves to be determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers.

Now, I hope they go on to great things. I hope that they make a lot of money. I hope that they get jobs at Goldman Sachs or wherever they want to be, that they have high social standing and prestige and all those things. But those are secondary. Those are the things that matter and they're worth aspiring to, but not the things that ultimately matter. College is a time to begin thinking about the things that ultimately matter. Certainly, liberal arts colleges or institutions designed to do that. The things that are worthwhile, not simply as means to other ends, like wealth and status and power and prestige and celebrity and so forth, but the things that

matter for their own sake, that are intrinsic to our flourishing as human beings, family, faith, friendship, knowledge, beauty, integrity, honesty, dignity. These are what ultimately matter. And what we at our best in universities do is help our students to lead what the great founders of our tradition of learning in the West called the examined life. We want our students to think about what matters, to think critically about what matters, not just to accept whatever they're told, but to think critically, to examine their own values, their own beliefs, their own feelings and emotions, their own ideas, and be a genuine thinker, an independent thinker, again, a determined truth seeker and a courageous truth speaker. But we're not doing that,

or at least we're not doing it as much as we should be doing it. Our institutions have gone too far in a different direction, and it's time to return to the original founding vision, the original mission. That's a common theme we'll come back to a couple times during our conversation, Robbie. Let's drill down a little bit on recent events. Senior leadership at more than a few universities have come under, I would argue, a very well-deserved fire for their handling of the pro-Palestinian protests last fall and this spring. We've watched three Ivy League presidents resign their posts under pressure since October 7th. Certainly, there have been some major donors that have rescinded or held back gifts. Do you think that's a blip, or do you think universities

are now starting to understand that they have to change the way they handle extremist behavior on campus. I think what these events have focused the minds of administrators on is the real problems that come when we allow faculty and students and administrators to politicize education. Just as you can go wrong by overdoing the professionalism at the cost of truth-seeking, you can go very, very wrong by politicizing the university at the cost of truth-seeking. We are not supposed to be institutions that train radical activists or even non-radical activists. Activism on campus is fine. It's great that there's a Republican club and a Democratic club. I don't care if there's a Libertarian club or a Socialist club. Those things are fine to the extent that they do not interfere with or impede or attempt to take over the truth-seeking mission, the intellectual mission of the university.

But in too many classes, we're not getting genuine education, critical thinking, learning. We're getting indoctrination into political ideologies. And administrators have let that go on much too often. And they paid a price for it this past spring. Really what came to light above all, Rick, was hypocrisy. When those three university presidents testified before Congress in that catastrophic, for them and their institutions hearing. What they said about their university's free speech requirements wasn't untrue. It wasn't false.

It was true when they said, well, look, it really depends on the context of certain sorts of expression, whether it is prohibited by our academic codes of conduct and whether regulation is permitted by our free speech rules. The trouble was not that what they said was false, but that the invocation of those free speech rules came across as hypocritical because it was hypocritical. And that was because in so many cases at all three of those universities, they had violated the free speech of faculty who have conservative views about economics or social policy or foreign policy or questions of DEI, you know, diversity, equity and inclusion or affirmative action or whatever it is. There's got to be one standard, and it's got to be the same for everybody,

whether you're on the left or on the right, whether your cause is Palestine or your cause is economic free markets. There's got to be one standard in universities. I don't want the universities to put their thumb on the scale in favor of conservatism, but I don't want them to put their thumb on the scale in favor of progressivism or woke ideologies either. And they had been putting a thumb on the scale, and it was always to the left, and they got called out on it. They got caught. That hypocrisy was exposed for everybody to see. Yes. Same type of question. Higher education has come under well-deserved scrutiny for overzealous DEI departments. You talked about DEI. And some universities, though, are now limiting DEI programs. And in fact, the University of North Carolina,

or all the public universities in North Carolina, have gone so far as to eliminate mandated DEI offices. Do you think we're at a point where tuition-paying parents and taxpayers have just had enough of policies that overlook and ignore merit? We're not quite at that point yet, but I hope we get there, and I hope we get there fast. I think those universities, they're. Same with so much of the DEI apparatus. Let's be clear about what's really going on here. They're not protecting diversity, equity, and inclusion. They're doing the reverse of that. Those policies and practices and programs and offices really have as their goal the elimination of dissenting points of view,

not the expansion of diversity, the imposition of a monolithic perspective. They don't produce equity in any reasonable or responsible sense of that word. they produce bias. And don't talk to me about inclusion when so much of the goal seems to be to exclude evangelical Christians, Orthodox, Jews, faithful Catholics, economic or social conservatives. So there's something almost worse than ironic about the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion when it's used to undermine the very goals of genuine diversity, genuine equity, and genuine inclusion. It's substituting exclusion for inclusion. Are you senior enough that they just don't bother asking you anymore for such statements? They never did.

I suppose they knew me well enough. I should probably put this on the record. A lot of conservative scholars, academics, professors, or people who aspired to positions in academia have been victims of discrimination and bias. Their careers have been, if not ruined, badly damaged. Their progress and advancement has been impeded. But I've been blessed, Rick. I have not. And this is, I have to give credit where it's due.

This is to the credit of Princeton University. They knew when they hired me because I didn't hide it, Rick. I did not lay low. I didn't stay in the closet until I got tenure. From the moment I stepped onto the campus to give my own program, the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, which is the model. It was definitely different times, right? Well, I mean, that takes us up as far as the year 2000. But even since then, I cannot say that I've been discriminated against.

They've shallowed the university's awards and honors on me, recognition for my teaching. They have never attempted to limit or restrict what I could teach, what I could say in class, how I challenge my students. And of course, the majority of students

are students on the left, and they get a pretty rigorous challenge my students. And of course, the majority of students are students on the left, and they get a pretty rigorous challenge from me. No, I'll do the same to my conservative students. They're smaller in number, but they get a challenge too, because I think that's the job of the professor, to challenge people's beliefs, to get people to think about them, to learn to be independent and critical thinkers. And we have, in recent years, hired and tenured some really outstanding conservatives, including some young conservatives. I want you to keep your eye out for some young people here who were recently tenured. Greg Conte in political theory, Boris Hannon, Flora Shampy, these probably are names that don't mean anything

to you now, but they are conservatives who are now tenured professors at Princeton who are going to become quite well known in the future. So I'm happy here. Now, is it perfect? No, it's far from perfect. Are there abuses here? Plenty of abuses. Are there double standards? We still have some. We've eliminated a lot, but we still have some. Is there need for improvement? Is there need for reform? Absolutely. But the picture is not at all completely dark. That's correct. I know a lot of people are questioning whether college is still a good investment. And, you know, in some ways, it's not hard to understand why the average cost of attending an in-state public university for four years is somewhere around $27,000 a year. The cost to attend an Ivy League school can be as much as $90,000 a year, a lot of money.

So in addition to be saddled with debt, a lot of students leave with degrees that don't translate into high salaries, at least not quickly. What's your view? College still a wise investment? The price of college has vastly outstripped the cost of living index. I mean, it's way above the standard inflation rate. And much of that, I think, is the fault of misguided government programs, including loan programs that incentivize colleges and universities first to raise prices and then to expand these bureaucracies beyond all reason. Some universities have as many bureaucrats,

as many members of the staff, as they have students. And of course, those people have to be paid and they need their benefits and so forth. And that's why the cost of education has risen so much quickly and so much higher than even the cost of eggs and milk. So that's got to be reformed, Rick. Our friend and former Bradley board colleague, Mitch Daniels, in his role, which he was in until recently, as president of Purdue University. He did a great job. He showed us the way. And held down costs. That's exactly right. And I think that needs to be emulated by all universities. But that can only be done if we not only stop this bureaucratic bloat, if we turn it around. We need to lessen the number, certainly percentage, of bureaucrats at almost all universities, to tell you the truth. It's a problem pretty much across the board. Now, I think parents are willing to pay for genuine education,

even a high cost. They're willing to make sacrifices. Mind work. I'm going to guess you're willing to make sacrifices for genuine education. They're not going to make sacrifices and pay a lot of money to have their children indoctrinated into woke ideologies, left-wing ideology, or for that matter, right-wing ideology, which doesn't happen, given who controls the universities. But if they're going to pay this kind of money, they rightly expect a genuine education where

their children learn to think for themselves and not a catechism class where they're just indoctrinated into a particular political or social point of view. Seems like a very fair expectation. Yeah. We talked about your students, and let's turn to free speech as it applies to your students. Free speech, of course, on many college campuses has been under attack, almost ceased to exist. I know every year you issue a welcome message to your students to encourage them to speak freely. And in it, you state, my job is not to tell students what to think or induce or encourage them to think as I do.

It is rather to help students to think more deeply, more critically, and for themselves. What I ask of students is open-mindedness, tolerance of those whose opinions differ from yours, a willingness not only to challenge others but to be challenged in turn, and a genuine and deep desire to learn, and to learn by seriously engaging authors and fellow students whose ideas differ, even radically differ, from your own. What kind of reaction do you get to that letter? And have any of your colleagues followed your lead on this? Yes. Actually, I have taken to posting that statement of mine, which goes on my website for my courses each semester, and I also have a version of it that

goes on my syllabus. I've taken to posting it on social media and encouraging professors not only at Princeton, but around the country, to just borrow freely from it. Here's one case where I want them to plagiarize. Please plagiarize. And I have gotten a wonderful response from professors all across the country, and not just conservatives, Rick. You Rick, old school liberals who are as scandalized by what they're seeing out there as we are. And they say, you know, this is a great idea. I'm going to put this on my own syllabus. So they take me up on my offer to plagiarize it.

They need to adapt it, of course, to their own university. But I'm just delighted by that. And I want to see this little gospel, if I may call it that, spread still further. Quite a few of my colleagues here at Princeton have done it, but it goes well beyond Princeton now. That's great. Yeah. How about the students? Do you get a reaction from students? Absolutely. Do you find when they walk into the class that they're ready for this kind of conversation? Yes, they are. I think they're excited about it.

I think it's like you're able to let your hair down. You can actually say what you think. And, you know, I have a reputation, as you may know, Rick, as a pretty rigorous grader. Oh, yes, I know that. The grade of C still exists in local classes. It's extinct everywhere else. It pretty much is, from what I understand. The grade of B is becoming extinct now. So, you know, students know that I'm a rigorous grader, but they know something else. And that is that they're agreeing or disagreeing with my views. And they know what my views are. I'm a very public person, as you know, Rick. So they are aware of what I think. But they know, and this pleases me, they know that their grade will not be affected in the slightest

by whether they agree or disagree with me. And that gives them the confidence to genuinely speak their mind, explore ideas, challenge me. Now, I'm going to be challenging them, but part of the educational experience is also that they get to challenge me. And I love that. And here at Princeton, we get really brilliant students. And they make me think. The challenges they issue are serious. I haven't had my mind changed on anything. But they do make me think I have to scramble, you know, to answer and defend unpopular views. And you talked about this in a recent New York Times piece. Many students are apprehensive to speak about their religious or political beliefs. They're afraid of limiting job prospects. They're afraid of being canceled.

And this, of course, isn't just young people we're talking about. Why do you think it's so important for people to get over their fears of advocating for what they believe in? For this reason, Rick, and first I want to say just what a big problem self-censorship is. And it's not just at Princeton. It's everywhere. People are afraid. As you say, they're afraid that speaking their minds might damage their professional futures. In some cases, this is very regrettable and horrible. Some cases, they genuinely fear that a professor will give them a bad grade or a worse grade because they dissent from the professor's own opinion.

But I think the more important factor than those, Rick, the one that I'm really worried about is very often students self-censor because they fear of being cast into the role of an outsider on campus. They're afraid that they'll alienate their friendship groups. They're afraid of their fellow students. That worries me. of your job prospects, but if you're unwilling to speak your mind because your own friends won't tolerate dissenting opinions, then that worries me about the culture. And culture here is really what matters. I'm going to get to the heart of your question now. Why should we worry about this? Because the whole point of coming to the university is to seek the truth. That's it. And to learn to be a truth seeker, to learn to be a lifelong learner. If we do our jobs correctly in universities, what we do doesn't end after four years. You leave after four years, but we have

formed you as a lifelong learner. Now, you can't do that if you're unwilling to speak your mind. You can't do that in a circumstance where no one will question for fear. No one will question whatever the prevailing orthodoxy is. And that would be as true if that prevailing orthodoxy, Rick, were on the right as it is when it's on the left, happens to be on the left in these institutions today. But any time the prevailing orthodoxy cannot be questioned, it's considered sacrosanct, or people fear dissenting from it because they'll lose friends or social connections or jobs or get a bad grade or whatever, then learning is not going to take place. And that's the whole reason for being of this university or any university. It's the cause of learning. So why worry about it? Why worry about censorship? Because learning is undermined. The very point of this enterprise is damaged. You know, John Stuart Mill, the great liberal, one of the founding fathers of liberalism,

usually not somebody we conservatives invoke, but he said something profoundly true, which I wish everybody would remember, that free speech is not simply a matter of, to put it in our American language, now Mill as an Englishman wouldn't say this, but I'll put it in our terms, it's not just a matter of having a First Amendment. We're seeing today what an advantage it is over Britain, where there's a huge assault What you need is a culture of free speech, a culture in which people are free to exercise their right to speak for themselves, to question other people's beliefs, to raise questions about whatever the dominant beliefs are. Our founding fathers warned about constitutional principles. They obviously believed in the importance of constitutional principles. They gave us our constitutional principles. But they warned that they could become mere parchment guarantees. Words on a page, parchment guarantees. They only come to life if people are willing to act on them.

We'd be nowhere if we had the formality of First Amendment. But in practice, in culture, everybody's afraid to actually speak freely. Well, the First Amendment does us no good then. Yes. So we need to create a culture of free speech. And if that culture should exist anywhere, Rick, the very first place it should exist is on college campuses. Do you find that you have to break down those fears with your students? Are your students different in December than they were in September?

Yeah, it takes a little time. It does take a little time. Yeah. Because you need to, when you're not accustomed to speaking your mind, you're not accustomed to raising questions about prevailing opinions, dominant opinions, you're a little nervous about it. Even if you've got a professor who's encouraging you and assuring you that nothing bad's going to happen to you, you really can't speak your mind. You'll know, Rick, elsewhere in the materials that you've been quoting me from, I make the invitation to people to please be the devil's advocate. Even if you don't believe a certain unpopular view, do our class a favor by exploring it to see how far it can be defended. You might talk yourself into it. You might not talk yourself into it, but you might defend it so well that you talk somebody else into it. You're going to do us all a favor by getting that position out on the table and just seeing how far it can be defended, how far it will hold up. But it does take a little time for

students to feel comfortable about that when they've been basically, for all intents and purposes, in hiding. Yes. Fascinating. Last question. And Robbie, I try to end on high notes with these conversations. And I think I know how you're going to respond to this. And you've alluded to it already in our chat today. Is there reason for hope that change is coming to higher education in America? I've heard you talk about increased or increasing opportunities for conservative scholars across the country. There's a lot of work to do here, but is there hope? There is hope. There's some good things happening out there. Let me give you some of my reasons for hope. Number one, I think parents now are more aware of the problems of politicization and indoctrination in universities than they were even three years ago.

That's progress. Number two, I think parents are being more fully involved with their kids, their sons and daughters, when it comes to the question of where I should go to college. And they're no longer focusing as much on what's going to get me or my kid that job at Goldman Sachs or into Harvard Law School and a job at Kravats, Swain & Moore, Sullivan & Cromwell, and more concerned, and this is a great thing, more concerned with what's going to happen to the soul of my student, what's going to happen to the mind of my son or daughter. Parents weren't really tuned into that all that much three years ago. They are now. So parents, number one. Students themselves,

of course, are more aware of those issues than they were. Number two, donors. Something I had so much trouble figuring out for, I've been in this business now, I'm entering my 40th year at Princeton. Something for 35 years or more that I just couldn't figure out was, why do donors freely give money with no restrictions to colleges and universities where their values, the donors' own values, are being systematically undermined, ridiculed, tranched? I don't get that. Well, it seems to me in the last two, three years, really in the last year in a certain way, above all, donors have woken up. And they're now saying, well, wait a minute.

If that's what's going to go on at this university, if it's going to be catechism class for a particular ideology, and if the values being taught are going to be the values that undermine my values, then I'm not going to give you any money. Or at a minimum, I'm going to target my giving, which is the intelligent thing to do. I would encourage people who've been blessed with resources and have a philanthropic spirit not to stop giving money to higher education. Target it. Send it to the places and to the programs that are providing genuine education, teaching students to be critical thinkers, to think deeply, to think critically, to think for themselves. So that's number two.

Number three, and this is just an objective fact, if we look around the country, there are institutions being built either as alternatives to existing institutions. Here, for example, I'm thinking of the University of Austin in Texas, or within existing universities, both private universities and public universities, that model for the rest of the university what it means to be a genuine educational institution, where we've thrown the politics out and we're doing real education. This is especially true in the civic education area. So just in the past five years, we've seen the creation of new institutes for civic studies, studies in law, politics, philosophy, history, economics, and so forth. Many of them modeled on my program at

Princeton, I'm very proud to say, modeled on the James Madison program at the University of Florida, at the University of Texas, at Arizona State University, at the University of North Carolina, now most recently at the University of Tennessee and the Ohio State University. And in fact, in the case of Ohio, their institute's being built not only at Ohio State University. And in fact, in the case of Ohio, there are institutes being built not only at Ohio State, which is the flagship, of course, but at several of the other state universities.

And there are similar sorts of institutes now at many private universities, the Program in Human Flourishing at Harvard, the Program in Moral Philosophy at the University of Chicago, the Program in Market Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and on and on. They're setting the example, Rick.

They are showing that it can be done, that real education can be restored. And what's to argue with? People will say, you know, people who have given up hope will say, well, just impossible. It never happened at Princeton. It never happened at Harvard. We can never get that at the University of Florida. Well, I mean, people who have given up hope will say, well, just impossible. It never happened at Princeton. It never happened at Harvard. We never got that at the University of Florida. Well, I mean, the evidence is now in. We've got these institutes and they are flourishing.

And students are flocking to their classes. Our executive director at the Madison program in Princeton, the wonderful Dr. Shiloh Brooks, who came to us from the University of Colorado just a couple of years ago. Last semester, Rick, he taught a course in statesmanship where he looked at great figures in the history of political leadership going back into antiquity and all the way into the modern period with people like Lincoln and Winston Churchill. And at Little Princeton University, and remember, we're really a small liberal arts college pretending to be a big university. There are only about 7,500 students, including our graduate students. So we're about

the third the size of Harvard and Yale. But here at Little Princeton, we had 265 students sign up for Shiloh's course in statesmanship. Now, he's a brilliant teacher, and many of the students came because he's a brilliant teacher. But beyond his being a brilliant teacher, they knew they were getting genuine education, not indoctrination. They were studying things that really matter. The thought of a figure like Lincoln, the thought of a figure like Churchill. And they saw the opportunity to learn about figures from antiquity whose names they recognized but they knew nothing about. I mean, it was by far the largest course taught in the politics department,

and it was one of the largest courses taught in the entire university. So there is a market. The students are interested. I guess what we're doing is we're vindicating that old slogan in the real estate business, build it and they will come. Well, we built it and they are coming, Rick. That's terrific. Robbie George, thanks so much for spending some time with us today. Thanks for your courage and leadership on these just critical issues to the future of our country. We truly do appreciate it. Thank you so much, Rick. And thanks for everything the Bradley Foundation does.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Voices of Freedom. Join us next month on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for our next conversation on issues impacting our freedom and America's foundational principles. And make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. I'm Rick Graber, and this is a Bradley Foundation podcast.