A Gentlemen's Disagreement

On a cold and rainy winter evening, Dr. Cornel West and Professor Robert George sat down in a cluttered office to dialogue for Green Light Magazine. Cornel West GS *80 is the Princeton Class of 1943 Professor of Religion and author of both the 1993 national bestseller Race Matters and the new book Democracy Matters among a host of other influential scholarly works. Robert George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton. George is currently a member of President Bush’s Council on Bioethics and has authored numerous articles and books including, The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Morality, and Religion in Crisis. Amidst two full hours of debate, disagreement and frequent laughter, these two brilliant public intellectuals discussed everything from Princeton to newspaper advertisements. In our first issue, we present a few of the many highlights of those two hours.

Cornel West (CW): Brother Robert, you’ve said it’s very difficult for a rising young faculty member who has a conservative philosophy to get tenure at an elite academic institution. Could you discuss the relevance of this statement at Princeton?

Robert George (RG): Well, I think Princeton has a comparatively good record. My own case is, I think, an example of how it’s possible at Princeton for someone who is known to be a conservative, and indeed a conservative not simply on issues where it’s more broadly acceptable to be a conservative (for example in economic issues), but also on social and moral questions, to break through the screen. So while I think Princeton would do well to have more conservatives on its faculty--a greater richness of voices in the mix--I believe that Princeton does pretty well by comparison with other institutions. It's worth adding that this University is the home of out-of-the closet religious believers such as yourself, Eric Gregory, and Martha Himmelfarb in the Religion Department (there are others there, too), and people in other departments, such as Robert Wuthnow, Harold James, Bas van Frassen, and Bob Kaita. So I find Princeton to be a comfortable, institutional and professional home. I certainly think that things are better here than they are at a lot of places.

CW: Of course I would add I was never in the closet. But let me ask you this, does Princeton’s distinctiveness lie in its visionary leadership? Is that Shirley Tilghman’s vision, or in Harold Shapiro’s vision, or in the faculty themselves? Is there an openness to robust, uninhibited, intellectual discussion and inquiry? How do you account for Princeton being different?

RG: First of all, having said we are comparatively better than many other places, let me add that I don’t think we should pat ourselves on the back too much because I think we can still do better. And I’ll perhaps explain my view later in the conversation of where I think the problems are. But I think that the successes we have enjoyed are a result of the genuine desire of people with influence in the university, both in the faculty and in the administration, to generate a robust conversation where voices are not excluded on ideological or religious grounds. I began to see that when I was hired and tenured here.

CW: And that was circa 19--?

RG: I arrived in the fall of 1985 as an Instructor. I had to complete my dissertation in that year to become an Assistant Professor the following year. My tenure clock began to run in the fall of 1986. I was granted tenure in 1993 and promoted to the rank of Professor and given the chair I hold in 1999. I am cognizant of the fact that at each step along the way my advancement could not have happened if I had to rely on conservative senior faculty to make those decisions. There just weren't many. So my fate, fortunately for me, was determined by honorable liberals who knew about my positions and disagreed with me, but nevertheless thought that these positions ought to be advanced and defended in the debate on campus, and that students should be exposed to the arguments I was making.

CW: Right, right. But Robert, didn’t you think when it comes to the sheer quality of mind and display of intelligence and depth of critical engagement with material that certainly transcends politics and certainly transcends ideology, that that is being lost in some degree, in universities around the country? Or is that still operative enough so that we wouldn’t have to worry about whether people who are judging us are liberals, are conservatives, are leftists, and are reactionaries or whatever?

RG: It depends on the material, I think. There are some areas of intellectual inquiry, particularly in the fields of ethics and political theory, where inevitably we’re in a domain in which moral and political beliefs are apparent. When someone is producing a piece of scholarship In these areas, his view of the matter on important issues upon which reasonable people disagree will be often be evident.

RG: In circumstances of genuine academic freedom, having a high quality of mind will faculty members to cut across a variety of political and ideological perspectives, but whether it does in practice, that depends on a lot of things, including there being a culture that’s welcome to people of diverse points of view, and the capacity of people to appreciate work with which they disagree.

CW: Radically disagree.

RG: Even radically disagree, that’s right.

CW: Frederick Hayek, he’s going at me every page but I’m wrestling with him, I’m expressing it with him and taking him seriously.

RG: That’s exactly right. That’s my test. My test is, even if I’m not persuaded, is this student’s paper making me think? Does the scholarship of this person we’re thinking about hiring, make me stop and think? Am I learning from the work, even if, in the end, I'm not persuaded of the author's conclusions. If I’ve been made to think--if I’ve had to wrestle with the work--then that student is going to get a good grade, or that person we're thinking about hiring is going to get my favorable consideration. And I just wish professors across the board would adopt that as the standard. The trouble, in this vale of tears É

CW: I would definitely agree with you.

RG: Here’s the trouble as I see it: It is not fundamentally a matter of conscious prejudice against conservatives. Of course, that happens, though I’m glad that it doesn’t happen here at Princeton as much as it happens at some other places. But that’s not fundamentally what the problem is in the academy today, and it’s not the basic problem here at Princeton. I think the reason that we have so few conservative voices represented on campuses like ours, and even fewer at places other then Princeton, is that it’s so difficult for people, whether they’re liberals or conservatives or socialists or libertarians, truly to appreciate work that they fundamentally or (as you say) radically disagree with. It Is not that they want to be unfair or discriminatory. In fact, they don't think they are being unfair. Many people who go astray on this issue could put their hand on a Bible and swear that they were doing their best to be unprejudiced. They could pass a lie detector test.

CW: Subterranean, unconscious.

RG: Yes. And, as I say, in this vale of tears--given our frail and fallen human nature--it is not all that easy for anyone truly to recognize and appreciate the intellectual quality of work that challenges what they hold dear.

CW: One thing I find fascinating is that for me, of course, the university ought to have an intense, passionate but respectful Socratic dialogue. And anytime you are marginal in a minority, it could be an ideological minority, political minority, racial minority, ethnic minority or what have you, you are going to have a much deeper suspicion of the orthodoxy that is in place of the hegemony of the school of thought that’s operating. And that actually becomes the angle of vision and the vantage point from which you can make the discourse more robust, you can make it more open in this. Because they don’t see their own willful blindness and deliberate ignorance operating within their orthodoxy. And I wonder at times if whether what brings you and I together is an ability to perceive secular limitation or a kind of liberal blindness. And of course I’m coming in the academy looking at a whole host of blindnesses and ignorances in relation to how white supremacy operates, in relation to how class privilege operates, in relation to how religion might be viewed or caricatured or what have you, you see. And in an instinct kind of way we end up having some similar hermeneutics of suspicion, vis a vis the orthodoxies that are in place, even though we come down in very, very different ways, and sharply contrasted ways on a number of different issues.

RG: Well I think that is true. I think that is Socratic. I also think it’s very important, and I have warned conservatives around the country of this. It’s very important not to revel in marginalization. It's important not to come to take a certain delight in being in a marginal class. Conservatives should not develop a culture of complaint. I honestly think it’s far better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. And among conservatives in the academic world there’s far too much cursing of the darkness. Now, there’s plenty of darkness to curse; but we would do much better for everybody concerned--ourselves, our students, the cause of learning--if we lit candles, got the conversation going, worked to ensure that there is a robust dialogue. We need to take advantage of the opportunities that we do have, and we need to avoid embracing a kind of victimology.

CW: At the same time what I find interesting is that for conservative brothers and sisters over there, of color, or even sexual orientation, if they are feeling they are marginalized, all they need to do is step outside the academy into the larger society and they find themselves in good company. Because we are in a deeply conservative moment in the country. Bush across the board. Do you agree or disagree with it?

RG: Well, it’s more complicated than that I believe.

CW: Okay.

RG: We’re a polarized country. Perhaps not in exactly the way that the pundits tell us, with red states and blue states and all of that.

CW: The irony, the paradox here is that we do currently have a moment of relative triumph of conservative vision and ideas within public opinion, within the world of ideas, not in the academy but in the larger society. That from my point of view the very framework from which we look at so many issues have been so deeply shaped by conservative intellectuals from think tanks, from a number of different sources. Not universities so much. Because I think you’re right, the universities have been open to conservative intellectuals but it’s been resistant to the arguments of conservative intellectuals. So we got a number of different multi-layered, multi-dimensional realities here and I think that’s part of the complications that you’re after, right. And I think that’s fair. On the other hand, I love being at Princeton even as I recognize that there is a Princeton in which I feel I’m exiled. On the other hand, there is a kind of liberal set of Orthodoxies that I am deeply suspicious of, and I’ve got conservatives like yourself and others who I can respect in dialogue, and revel and have similar Christian identity. But not only have disagreements with, but are deeply fearful of some of the dangers of some of the conservative policies in terms of impact on the poor, working class, so forth and so on.

RG: Let me ask you about something else. Every year in our student newspaper, there has been an ad seeking female students to donate ova for in vitro fertilization, and I noticed that the ad has certain requirements. They’ll pay 10,000 dollars, though I think it might be higher now.

CW: It’s like 20,000 dollars now.

RG: See, the market has, generated a price increase. Well, I don't like this whole sector, so I guess I’m not always so friendly to the market.

[Laughter]

RG: Yeah. But you know, it stipulates that you’ve got to be five foot ten, or five foot eight or whatever it is, with SAT scores of 1400. Of course you know, you could throw a rock out the window and you’ll hit somebody with 1400 SAT scores around here, so it’s not that hard, but by the national average that’s high, and you can’t help but think, though that they aren’t saying it, they’re looking for a girl who is blond with blue eyes.

CW: Absolutely

RG: So you worry about this just as I do, but in the culture you and I inhabit at Princeton University, there’s nobody to say boo, there’s nobody expressing any concern about this, there’s nobody saying to students "you know, you should be appalled that this kind of thing is going on." It does make me wonder about the development of an attitude that identifies the value of a human being with these attributes. I mean as much as I love all our students with their 1400 SATs, and their five foot seven or six foot two statures, that’s just not what matters in life.

CW: Very, very true

Green Light: Both of you have been here for a while. Professor West, you were here as a grad student. Profesor George, you've been teaching since 1985. So the question is, what are the similarities and differences you see in Princeton students over the course of your time at Princeton?

RG: In my experience September 11th made a big difference. It made a difference in reawakening students not only to foreign policy issues, which had been off the radar screen as far as I could tell to all but the foreign policy jocks. So either a student was really into it, or he couldn't locate Italy on a map. But not only has it reawakened interest in foreign policy, it's reawakened interest in politics generally. The Politics Department now has the highest enrollments in the university--higher than the History Department. Higher than Economics and English. I think that is a result of September 11th. The other thing about September 11th--I don't know if this is a change, but it was something striking to me--is just how thoughtful students were about it. Students did not immediately jump into a kind of anti-Arab bigotry. They didn't say "let's go and blow half the world off the map," or anything like that. Nor did they jump to the conclusion that this was all our fault, and we brought this on ourselves, and our real concern should be that the federal government is going to use this as a pretext to round up Arabs and put them in concentration camps. Our students did not jump to extreme conclusions of any kind. I think their reaction was balanced and thoughtful. I was impressed. I was in fact more impressed by the students than the faculty. I mean the students were just trying to make sense of all of this in a very careful, cautious way. They were loath to draw conclusions. They wanted to think about it and wanted to talk about it, but very rarely did they offer an opinion on exactly what ought to be done. Now eventually, of course, we have to get down to forming opinions because we have to do something, and in democracy you can't have people who are always saying "on the one hand, this; but on the other hand, that." But for students at Princeton University in 2001 or 2004-05 being a little hesitant about drawing conclusions too quickly is not a bad thing.

CW: In my freshman seminar, we begin with Paideia and Paideia in the end is inseparable from a certain kind of patience. But it's a wise patience, you know, John Howard Yoder, one of the great Christian thinkers in the 20th century wrote an essay called, Patience as a Method of Moral Reasoning. Of course, his ŇmethodÓ was an art, but in the end you do have to make decisions, you must engage in ethical action.

See I go back much further though because my engagement with Princeton began in 1973, and there's no doubt in '73 Princeton students were much more politically active. It was a different historical moment.

RG: Kennedy’s assassination.

CW: Robert Kennedy in June of that year, and so on.

RG: Cambodian invasion.

CW: Cambodian invasion, it was just a very different historical moment. I think the common thread is that the Princeton students are just immensely talented, sharp, and interested, and that's a good thing. That's a very good thing, and that's what brings me and this brother together in terms of a sense of wonder, a sense of awe, a sense of not just curiosity but perplexity of things and still know we have to somehow think critically and care compassionately. And I see that among the Princeton students, even given the eighties when I was here before, where I saw much more materialism and hedonism than I did in the seventies. I think the Reagan years were years in which you got the preoccupation with individualism and careerism much more operative among young people. And these days I see unbelievable hunger for an open dialogue, a kind of thirst for debate across political orientations and ideological schools. They don't want to be pigeon-holed. They don't want to be somehow consumed under one label, and I think in many ways that's a good thing.

RG: I don't know whether there's more religious involvement or spiritual fervor on campus now than there was when I arrived in 1985, or whether it's always been there but is just more visible now. It's certainly true that I encounter more open expressions of religious faith and religious activism than I did back then, not only among our evangelical students but also among our Catholic students. Among our Jewish students I see a higher percentage who are more interested and active in the religious tradition, and I'm beginning to see it with Muslim students who are now visibly here, visibly practicing their faith, identifying as Muslims. I find all of this very interesting because it is something the faculty will have a certain difficulty assimilating. It's foreign to a great many of our colleagues

CW: I think that is part and parcel of the kind of revival of religious sensibility that is true across the nation as a whole. It's always a challenge to an intelligentsia that's been deeply seduced by certain secular sensibilities and orientations to have to deal with these waves of religious revival. Sometimes on very good ground so you recognize they're dangerous because all forms of vicious dogmatism and bigotry are dangerous. There's no doubt about that, for democracy and for human rights. But on the other hand you have to recognize that you just can't live in a secular bubble, that there are sophisticated and caring persons who believe in Yahweh, who believe in a Christian God, who believe in Allah, who are atheist agnostics. And there are vicious gangsters who are atheists and agnostics just as there are vicious gangsters who are Christian, and Islamic, and Jewish and so on. The secular intelligentsia, especially faculties at elite institutions have to acknowledge this.

RG: I think it's difficult because if you've got a secularist world view then you're likely to perceive religious activism or even religious expression by students as a betrayal of the mission of the university. Then you have the question: "How do I deal with that justly, and how do I deal with that just as a practical matter in my classroom? How do I deal with papers and examinations that reflect religious sensibilities, and how can I be fair in grading those papers?" I think that's something secularist faculty will not be able to avoid facing as religious involvement increases on the campus. In many cases, I don't think it's going to be easy.

CW: In an ironic way my own Religion department may have a privileged role in this regard because we actually study religion as a phenomenon in human history from a variety of different perspectives. So there's history, anthropology, philosophy as well as theology. Our students themselves can be evangelical, can be fundamentalists, can be agnostic, can be latitudinarian, but we've got to look for quality of mind. We've got to look for engagement with material, and we can't impose ideological conclusions.

RG: You do have a lot of history, and that's another change I've seen which I think is for the better since I've been here. It's in the Department of Religion, and I think Jeff Stout, who's not a believer, and Martha Himmelfarb, who is, deserve a great deal of the credit for this. When I got here the Religion Department was regarded by many religious students, Catholic and Evangelical, as hostile territory. The professors were perceived as being eager to discredit religious faith and to undermine religious conviction. That has changed. In part it's hiring. It's hiring people like Leora Batnitzky and Eric Gregory; and in part I think it's just a self-conscious effort by the Department to make it more hospitable to believers. Now that doesn't mean that the Department is going to suppress difficult questions for people of faith. They don't do it that way.

The two-hour dialogue between Dr. West and Professor George resulted in a twenty-nine-page transcript. Even after the tape ran out and the discourse formally ended, West and George continued to speak for another hour and half. Indeed, rather than ending, we hope that dialogue between faculty members in the pages of Green Light has just begun.