This year marks the fifteenth anniversary of the founding of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institution at Princeton University, a program that in the words of its founder, Prof. Robert George, “celebrates the founding principles that have made America great.”
By all accounts the Madison program is thriving. But the United States is not thriving if one is to interpret the pent up anger of the American electorate. Think about it, according to the most recent Monmouth University Iowa poll, the Republican or Republican leaning electorate gives 23% to Ben Carson, 23% to Donald Trump, 10% to Carly Fiorina and 9% to Ted Cruz. That adds up to a staggering 65% of conservatives that are calling for an out-of-Washington candidate for President (if one takes the description of a jack ass as allowing Ted Cruz to qualify in that category). This is not likely to hold up, but I am not out to predict the next president but to make the point that a significant number of conservatives are angry with the Republican establishment.
How is it then that a conservative program at an elite liberal university thrives as American Republican “conservativism” appears in crisis? The answer has to do with what you mean by Conservativism. That is, it has to do as much with content as it has to do with form: it matters what the Madison program stands for and how it is that it advances its ideas. There is no one more conservative than Robert P. George; there is no one more vocal about its conservativism than Robert P. George; and there is no question that the Madison Program embodies true to form the personality of Robert P. George. If conservative ideas are the problem, it would follow that the Madison Program would be in the doghouse at Princeton. Not so.
About ten years ago I was lunching with a very distinguished Princeton humanities professor then retired. This man had never met Robby George and although conservative economically, he was not so on social issues, and thus highly likely of different politics than George. Well, he went on to tell me how grateful he was for what George had done at Princeton. And this was his reason: because by institutionalizing unorthodox speech in the academy, he has written a permission slip for people like him to speak his mind.
Robby George never attacks the University where he teaches or any of the numerous faculty and students that strongly disagree with him, some of which likely would very much hope he would go elsewhere. But what is more, for Robby this is not a tactic it is a core principle. Were it simply a matter of form, his intellectual adversaries would have sniffed it out and he would reviled. But for Robby, the principle is that human beings best respond when they are challenged to raise the discourse to an intellectual exchange that respects the person that holds those ideas. Attack the ideas, and do it without respite. Respect the person. And fundamentally, this is what human beings want: to be members of a community where they are treated with respect.
It is a truism to say that Princeton faculty and students, and those that come to be associated with the Madison program learn from that example even though few would probably put it this way. A strange thing happened at Princeton University; while campus speech at universities across the country has turned more polarized and vicious, Princeton has turned more civil at least on one issues about which Robby has been most vocal, and most controversial lately, namely marriage.
I have seen first hand over the years how leaders of the pro-marriage Anscombe Society go out of their way to treat with respect members of the LGBTQ organization, inviting them to dialogue, and to co-sponsor events. I have noticed how the articles in the Daily Princetonian are more evenly distributed amongst dissenting views. What one needs to know also is that not an insignificant number of those students participate in the James Madison student fellowship program where at one time or another, they see the example of how Robby conducts his academic discourse. Conservatives make a big mistake being soft on the social issues because of fear of losing. What we need to do is be civil and convincing on how they make their case. Ask the students and scholar that know the Madison Program first hand.
• Luis Tellez is the Executive Director of the Witherspoon Institution at Princeton University and works closely with Professor Robert P. (Robby) George.
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