August 6, 2025 • 35 mins
In this episode, Tudor welcomes Robert P. George, a prominent conservative legal scholar, to discuss the importance of cultivating civic friendship, especially in academic settings. They explore the lack of viewpoint diversity in universities, the impact of DEI programs, and the dangers of indoctrination. Robert shares personal anecdotes about wisdom versus education, the lessons of history, and the alarming rise of anti-Semitism. They emphasize the need for faith and values in education and discuss how to reverse the current trends by encouraging truth-seeking among students. The Tudor Dixon Podcast is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network. For more visit TudorDixonPodcast.com
Purchase Robert P George's NEW Book HERE
Watch The Tudor Dixon Podcast on Rumble
Follow Clay & Buck on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/clayandbuck
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Tutor Dixon Podcast. We are so happy
to welcome back Robert P. George. He is one of
America's leading conservative legal scholars and the founder of the
James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.
Also happens to be friends with a progressive Cornell West,
which seems impossible, but that's kind of what we're going
(00:21):
to talk about today, because you have co authored a
joint op ed in The Washington Post about cultivating civic
friendship at universities, which I totally love. Welcome back, Thank you,
it's great to be back with you, Tutor. I say
that it's interesting that you are friends because that's kind
of the conversation that you continue to have, is that
(00:44):
because we disagree with someone on certain points does not
mean we should never speak to them or have feelings
of anger toward them.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Absolutely right. Look, we're all together in this veil of tears,
doing the best we can. Every single one of us
is a frail, fallen, fallible human being. All of us
know this much that we aren't right about everything. There's
some things we're wrong about. We just don't know which
(01:13):
things those are. You know, we believe what we believe,
knowing that some of our beliefs are can't they can't
all be correct, So some of our beliefs are going
to be incorrect. Now, how are we ever going to
make some progress? Will ever perfectly get into a situation
where we only have true beliefs in our head? But
how can we get to a situation where we can
swap out as many false beliefs as we can and
(01:35):
replace them with true beliefs. We're certainly not going to
get there if you only talk to people who already
agree with you and who confirm you in everything you say.
What Brother Cornell West and I have in common, despite
our vast political differences, is a desire to get at
the truth of things, and a willingness to be challenged,
to be criticized, to subject our views to rational scrutiny
(01:57):
by intelligent people on the other side, all in the
hope that we can swamp out the beliefs that are false,
at least some of them, and replace them with beliefs
that are that are true. Anybody who recognizes their own
fallibility has very good reasons to be open to engaging
with people you disagree with even on the most profound issues,
(02:19):
even on the issues that you care most about. If
you have in common that you're truth seekers, then you've
got something more fundamental uniting you. Then whatever it is
that divides you over politics or religion, of morality or
whatever it is. Well.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
But if you're in a university where there is, as
you've pointed out, a lack of viewpoint diversity, and you
have not only professors but suitents across campus that are saying,
if you don't fit into this box, we don't want
you to come anywhere near the box, then how do
you how do you do that? And you've pointed out
that universities should increase their viewpoint diversity, which I thought
(02:54):
was interesting because we've talked about these programs with affirmative
acts and DEI and all of this that was supposed
to create diversity at these universities, but it actually ended
up kicking people to the side who actually deserved a
spot there. But viewpoint diversity is something different, and that's
it's a conversation I don't think many people have had
(03:17):
that If you look at these universities, there really isn't
a diverse group of thinkers there. It's really one way
in our way or the highway, and that's that's kind
of leading these kids to the point where they don't
try to be true seekers.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Well, that's exactly right, and Cornell West, who's on the
progressive side, joins me in pointing that out and saying
that we've got to do something about it. We say
that in our new book Truth Matters, and we say
that in our recent op ed piece in the Washington Post.
(03:56):
Although Cornell's on the progressive side, he sees every bit
as much as I do that there's a big problem
when you have a faculty like the Harvard faculty that
has only three percent of its members who identify as conservative.
When you have that kind of an ideological imbalance, the
bottom line is that the students who are there to
(04:16):
educate are basically going to be hearing one side. Even
if you have some professors who are doing their best
to represent to fairly views that they themselves disagree with,
you're going to end up with one sided education. You're
going to end up with something much closer. I hate
to say this, tutor, but it's true, something much closer
to indoctrination than education.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
So you pointed out that indoctrination is the opposite of education.
There's no education there.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
At allthesis, it's the very antithesis of education. And I
often say, tutor, I'd much rather that my students be
ignorant than that they'd be indoctrinated. If they're ignorant, well,
then maybe I can teach them something, get them thinking
about something, expose them to some ideas, get them in
a position to gain some knowledge. But if they're indoctrinated,
(05:04):
then before I can ever start teaching them anything, I've
got to try open their minds as if I were
doing it with a crowbar. And that's a big step.
When you've got somebody who's steeped in ideology, whose mind
has been shut down by conformism and group think. Before
you can ever get to actually educating them, you've got
(05:25):
to get their minds open. So give me ignorance anytime
over in doctrination. I can work with ignorance in doctrination
makes it triply difficult.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
It's interesting because obviously a big part of Donald Trump
his campaign and becoming president was saying, we don't want
this indoctrination. We don't want these programs that are keeping
certain students out of places, and he kind of shut
down DEI across the country. But just in the past
couple of weeks, some of I don't know if you've
(05:57):
seen some of these videos that have been coming out
where universities actually continue to have their DEI programs and
there's undercover journalists that are going in and saying, well,
tell me about what your program is like now that
DEI has been shut down, And they said, oh, don't worry,
we're just rebranding it. But this isn't going over well
with this administration. So what is university life like with
(06:21):
Donald Trump as president?
Speaker 2 (06:24):
Well, first of all, let me say a word about DEI.
Whatever good intentions people might have had in trying to
increase on university campuses, diversity, equity and inclusion. That's what
DEI stands for, diversity, equity and inclusion. The net result
was the opposite of those things. Instead of diversity, we
got conformism instead of equity, we got unfair treatment. Instead
(06:51):
of inclusion, we got the exclusion of people who dissented
from the dominant orthodoxies the ideologies on the campus. So
if it was an experiment, it is a failed experiment.
And the way to deal with a failure is not
to rebrand it, it's to get rid of it and
(07:12):
replace it with something valuable. Now, what would be valuable,
What would be valuable, is making sure that you have
such a diversity of views represented on your faculty and
in your student body that everybody on campus, faculty members
and students alike, can never rest comfortably in their opinions.
(07:33):
Their opinions will always be challenged because there's because there
are going to be lots of people on the campus
who will challenge their opinions. And that's the way we
break out of groupthink and conformism. That's the way we
advance knowledge. Most of the great advances of knowledge of
history have come when people were willing to question what
(07:56):
up until that point was a kind of dogma, a
kind of a ste abolished view. That's every bit is true,
by the way, titor in the sciences, as it is
in the other fields and the humanities and the social sciences.
So we really need to go for aim for viewpoint diversity. Now,
does that mean we should do affirmative action for conservatives. No,
(08:20):
what we should do is maintain the highest standards, but
treat people fairly. The reason Harvard is only three percent
conservative on its faculty. Only three percent of the faculty
identifies conservatives. Is simply and straightforwardly discrimination over many years, now,
many decades against people who dissent from the progressive orthodoxies
(08:43):
on campuses like Harvard. Will end it with a discrimination.
Enough with that, and then let's look out around the country.
This is my advice to the Harvard leadership, or to
the Princeton leadership, or the leadership of the University of
Illinois or any other university. My advice is this, look
up throughout the country, and you'll see scholars out there
(09:04):
who your institution has passed over for ideological reasons, or
that have been passed over by your peer institutions for
ideological reasons, and then say we're sorry about that. We
want you to come join our faculty. That's not affirmative action.
That's not lowering standards for conservatives. That's not special treatment.
(09:26):
That's writing some old wrongs in order to give the
university really what it needs if it's to fulfill its
educational mission, and giving it what it needs means making
sure that there is a robust dialogue, a robust exchange
of ideas on the campus, so everybody is thinking and
(09:47):
nobody is resting content and conformism and group thing.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
So let me ask you this, how do we what
do we do with about all the students that have
gone through this and they have an attitude of of
I'm superior and therefore I am right. And I say
that because I've had so many people who have experienced
this in their lives. You know, you go to undergrad
with friends, and then they go to one of the
(10:13):
IVY graduate schools and they come back to you and
they say, I've been educated more than you at a
better university than you. I am now in an elite class.
And because of that, I can tell you you are
wrong and you're bad. And those are people who I
believe the way they speak is in doctrination. They come
(10:36):
out with this, you know, all white people are bad,
and we have to fix the wrongs of the past,
and you know, you have to have an open border,
and you have to have all these things. And like
you said, I mean, we can disagree, but they're not disagreeing.
And they are now in the workplace and they are
now running campaigns and they're putting their voting for people
(10:57):
who they believe believe in this in doctrine status. And
I am concerned about that period, which seems like it's
like a ten year period of graduates who fall into that.
Maybe more well, Tutor, let me tell you a little
personal story.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
My father did not complete high school. He got a diploma.
It was sent to his parents while he was off
fighting in Normandy and Brittany in World War Two. When
he turned eighteen, they shipped him off to Europe to
fight before he'd even finished his high school, sent his
parents a diploma, and then when he came back. His
father had been a coal miner. When he came back,
(11:36):
fortunately he didn't have to go into the mines because
he had some training from the military. And of course
we had a booming economy after the war. But he is,
I say, didn't even complete high school. Now I have.
I have a graduate degree from Swarthmore. I've got a
lot of greater master's degree from Harvard, and I have
three doctorates from Oxford. Okay, I'm supposed to be really
(12:00):
smart guy, right, I got all these credentials. I wish
I had half the wisdom of my father. Joseph M. George.
I don't if you wanted to. If somebody came to me, say,
one of my own children came to me and said,
I've got a really tough personal, existential ethical question here.
(12:23):
I need your advice. I'd say, well, I'm going to
give you the best advice I can. But I also
want you to talk to your granddad because he's wiser
than I am. And this is what young people have
to learn today. Fancy degrees and fancy education doesn't necessarily
equal wisdom. And you can have wisdom if you haven't
(12:45):
even been to college. My father, we just lost him
last year at age ninety eight. He had it in spades.
And that's just one example of countless examples that you
and I and everybody else could give of profoundly wise
people to his people, good people who don't have fancy degrees.
And I'll tell you what fancy degrees also don't make
(13:06):
you virtuous. I can tell you about a lot of
people who are really lacking in virtue. But have you know,
doctorates from Yale and a lot of degrees from Stanford
and medical degrees from Harvard and all of that stuff.
So I think we just need to straighten people out
about that.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on
the Tutor Dixon Podcast. It's interesting because my great grandfather
actually he ran away at sixteen to join the navy.
He was a child coal miner in Pennsylvania, so they
had in common. He had gone into the coal mines
(13:45):
when he was eight years old and started working. And
because they were tiny back then, they sent the tiny
kids into the tiny veins of the mine and they
would they would mine with their hands, they would dig
with their hands, so his fingernails were always gone. And
he told us these stories, you know, and it just
it's interesting to me because those were the things that
(14:06):
we wanted to learn when we were little. The school
was not nearly as interesting as going and sitting with
Grandpap and having him tell us about how horrible that was,
and that that caused him to join the navy at sixteen.
Li about his age. Join at sixteen, he became a
navy diver, which was one of the most dangerous jobs.
And then when he returned to Pittsburgh, he became a
(14:28):
diver for the government and he would fix the bridges,
go down and weld the bridges in the river, which
was also incredibly dangerous. Became an alcoholic, and then one
day woke up after not returning home and found the
Lord and from that day on read the Bible every year,
all the way through and never took another drink. And
(14:49):
those were the stories that created this sense of like,
I can do great things because look at what he did.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Exactly right. Those heroes are inspiring. My dad was like that,
your grandpat. We have so much to learn from them.
And it's so idiotic of people to think that we
today are better than those people, or wiser, or we're
more virtuous. We're not. We really should be their students.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
Yeah, absolutely absolutely, I mean there's just there's so many
there's so much that you can learn from history, and
yet we're not. We don't seem to be you talk
about bringing civics back, but there is there are true
historical learnings that we seem to be missing out on.
I know you've commented on Mamdanie. I've seen it on
(15:43):
your ex account. There are things that he has come
out and said that sound wonderful. They sound so great,
but they've been done before and they don't work. But
how do you convince people that these plans are not
real plans?
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Well, there are lessons to history. I'll take mom Donnie's
idea that we should have publicly owned, city owned grocery stores.
We have plenty of people in our country today, people
like Gary Kasparov, the great tennis, tennis, chess chess champion,
(16:21):
brilliant man. We have people like Casparov who can tell
you exactly what life was like in the Soviet Union
with government run grocery stores. There was very little food
in the grocery stores, and you had to line up
from here to Tuesday in order to have a shot
(16:42):
at getting a morsel or two from the little food
that was available in the stores. If there's something that
we have now tested, if there's an experiment that we've
done and we've proven that it doesn't work, that is
the experiment with collectivism or social where that form of
socialism called communism, where the government owns the means of production,
(17:06):
or owns the shops, or owns the stores, it doesn't work.
By contrast, the market system has lifted millions of people
from Chile to India and all over the world where
markets have been introduced, lifted millions of people out of poverty.
So it's not as if we have to start from
(17:27):
scratch here with no knowledge we have knowledge. The experiment
has been run time and time again. Socialism in the
Soviet Union, socialism in Korea, socialism in Vietnam, socialism in China,
socialism in Cuba, socialism now in Venezuela. You can't find
a time when it worked. Now, we need to draw
the lessons from that, and we can't leave our young
(17:48):
people in ignorance about those things. They should be studying
the period in Russia from say nineteen seventeen the Bolshevik
Revolution to the collapse in the late nineteen eighties and
early ninety ten nineties of the Soviet Empire. We don't
want our kids to be ignorant of that history.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Yeah. Well, that's another thing that I think, even when
we see this increase in anti Semitism in the United
States and even in Europe, I mean, it's been somewhat shocking.
I think how quickly it took hold. I've told this
story before, but in twenty eighteen, I interviewed Holocaust survivors
and the one woman didn't speak the entire time, just
(18:31):
her husband spoke. But she was also in a concentration camp.
And when I went to leave the room, she grabbed
my arm and looked at me and in a very
nasty tone, she said, they hate the Jews, and they'll
do it again. And I remember thinking, gosh, that would
never happen again, naively, you know, naively, thinking that time
(18:52):
is done and there is not that hatred out there.
And then you know, you hear heard these rumblings for
years about anti Semitism, but not until October seventh do
I think we really went whoa, my gosh, this is
very this is running rampant, and it's at our universities.
I mean, we saw all the protests last year, and
(19:13):
that to me was an outside effort organized to go
into our universities and see that there was a weakness there,
go in there and start to teach one of those untruths.
And when you were speaking up against it, you were
the one that was silenced. If you were speaking to say,
you know, stop the hatred, you were the one that
was silence, as opposed to the people who were out
(19:35):
there saying, you know, globalize the Intifada. And now you
have even this situation in New York where that conversation
has come up and this man has not said he
condemns that. He said, people think of the definition differently,
but there is no different definition if you know history,
isn't that right?
Speaker 2 (19:54):
Yeah? I mean we know what the antifada is. It's
the effort to destroy the Jewish state, effort to destroy Israel,
to create a situation from the so called river to
the sea, although most of the protesters can't tell you
which river and which see degree, a situation from the
river to the sea that is non Jewish, where the
(20:15):
Jews are erased from that part of the world. So yes,
I mean anti Semitism is one of those ancient curses
that never remains in the grave. It's like a vampire.
You think you've killed it, you think you've stigmatized it,
you think you've put it on the margins, but then
it comes back again, you know, out of the coffin,
(20:37):
and here it is, and we have it again. And
you know what frightens me, Tutors, is we have it
today both on the extreme fringe of the right and
on the left.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Yes, yes, it's.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Not just in one on one side of the of
the political spectrum. You know. In addition to the book
that Cornell West and I have out Truth Matter, so
I have a new book of my I own out
called Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth. And one of the
chapters in the book I devote to a prophecy, a
prediction that was made in eighteen thirty by the German
(21:12):
Jewish Christian poet Heinrich Heine. Heine looked at his situation
there in Germany in the eighteen thirty, one hundred years
before Hitler, and he said, what I see is Biblical faith,
Biblical principles collapsing in the minds and hearts of our people.
They're being pushed out, and that's being replaced with a
(21:34):
kind of almost revival of the pagan the Teutonic paganism
of pre Christian Germany. And he predicted, he prophesied that
as a result of this loss of faith, is collapse
of biblical faith. There will come a time when tyrannical forces,
(21:55):
secular tyrannical forces, will take control in Germany. And as
he and this is a near quote, a situation will
arise that will make the bloody French Revolution look like
an innocent Idel, like an innocent walk in the park.
And sure enough, one hundred years later, what he predicted
happened to Nazis, the Holocaust, the mass killings of the
(22:20):
Second World war. All of it came true. Now, how
did he foresee it? How did he prophesy it? He
himself explained it, even back in his own time before
it actually played out. He said, thought precedes action as
lightning precedes thunder. When you see the lightning, the thunder's
(22:43):
going to come. What's the lightning? What he saw was
the collapse of biblical faith, and he knew as a
result of that violence and evil, a return to the
warlike pagan traditions of pre Christian harmony would be back.
And it's exactly what happened.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
But that's what we see right now. I would say
in New York with the massive numbers that came out
for the idea of defunding the police, having the government
take over all of these I mean, they've openly branded
it as socialism, but he said sees the means of production, which,
(23:25):
as you pointed out, as communism. This is I think
a combination of ignorance and indoctrination. I mean, I think
that there are a lot of people out there who
are very ignorant to how impactful their vote is when
they put somebody in power who wants to change that.
The way the country has run from the time of
(23:47):
its founding, and these are changes that are radical changes.
And what I argue is the most important city in
the world because it's the financial hub of the world, right,
and so you have somebody.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
You know, that's why it was attacked on nine to eleven.
It wasn't attacked because it happened to be on the
East Coast or you know, on the Atlantic seaboard or
anything like that. I mean, it was attacked because it
was the financial hub of the United States and of
the world. That's exactly right, and that.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Is very scary that that's the target.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Very scary, and it'll be targeted again, I fear. But
back to the point you were making about anti semitism
and the revival of anti Semitism. I saw this and
I spoke out against this in the universities fifteen years ago.
It wasn't yesterday that it started. I told people, it's here.
(24:43):
I see it. It's maybe just barely below the surface,
but just barely. On the day after that horrible attack
by Hamas on those innocent children and others on October
the seventh, a day after thirty three student groups at Harvard,
thirty three left wing student groups put out a statement
(25:07):
blaming the rapes and murders and kidnappings on Israel, on
the Jewish state. Can you believe that they said that?
Speaker 1 (25:16):
I mean, sadly I can today.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
With Israel for babies being murdered, for women, girls being raped.
This shows you how drained the situation was, how deep
the anti Semitism was even before yesterday.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
M hmm, yeah, because how could you convince people to
sign that if it hadn't already been there?
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Well, exactly right, its October eighth. You would think that
that on that day, of all days, people would be
having sympathy for the people of Israel, sympathy for the
Jewish people, people who were killed for no reason other
than they were Jewish or thought to be Jewish. Some
people who were killed there weren't even Jewish, but they
were killed because they were either Jewish or thought to
be Jewish. Of all days, there should be sympathy on
(26:02):
that day, surely, But no, there wasn't sympathy. There was
anti semitism thirty three student groups at Harvard.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on
a Tutor Dixon podcast. So can this be reversed? Because
yesterday we posted something on DEI in Universities, and I
noticed that one of the comments was it's too late,
There's nothing we can do now, And I just thought,
I can't believe that.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
No, we can turn this thing around. We really can't.
I mean, good stuff is happening now. Most people don't
know about this, but there are programs and institutes and
centers being built at universities now across the country that
are providing within these universities, even indeed Harvard certainly my
(26:50):
own institution here at Princeton, but also University of Florida,
and University of Texas and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill,
and University of Tennessee and Arizona State, University of the
Ohio State University programs and institutes being built that are
really modeling for the entire university. What a genuine deep
liberal arts education is all about. Wrestling with the big questions,
(27:11):
wrestling with the questions of what it means to be human,
having complete free speech so you can challenge any orthodoxy
requiring only that you do business in the proper currency
of intellectual discourse by giving reasons and making arguments and
marshaling evidence. Where students are genuinely educated and not indoctrinated.
And these programs tutor are attracting terrific enrollments and majors.
(27:36):
There's a big student market for genuine, deep, real education
that is not indoctrination, and our job is to provide it.
And we're starting to see it all over the country.
My program here at Princeton, the James Madison Program in
American Ideals and Institutions does that. The program in Human
Flourishing at Harvard does that. The Hamilton School at the
University of Florida does that. The Civitas Program at the
(27:58):
University of Texas does that. The Salmon P. Chase Center
at the Ohio State University. These are all things that
we should know about and that we should be cheering on.
Speaker 1 (28:08):
And that's what I was going to say. Having the
support of people out there, because people have been suddenly
speaking up about this, and you see a lot of folks,
a lot of parents saying, we don't want to send
our kids to an indoctrination camp. You see a lot
of conservatives speaking up against it, and even on the
news you see people speaking up against it. Does that
help to push these programs forward?
Speaker 2 (28:28):
It certainly does it, certainly does. We need the support
of everyone we can get on this. I mean, I'll
give you the example again of my own university and
the program that I founded twenty five years ago now
was the first of these programs. It's been the model
for so many others. Princeton is not a large university.
We're actually a liberal arts college kind of masquerading as
(28:49):
a big university. We only have about seventy five hundred students,
including our graduate students, so we're a third the solace
at Harvard or Yale or Stanford, and I don't know,
maybe a fifth or even less the size of big
state universities like Ohio State or University of Florida or
University of Texas. And yet, in this very small university,
(29:10):
my program, the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions,
had last year three hundred and twenty five undergraduate fellows
of the program, three hundred and twenty five Princeton students
who were eager to get an education that was not
in doctrination, where they were free to dissent from campus orthodoxies,
to question the dogmas that are dominant on the campus,
(29:34):
to really be challenged and to challenge others. There's a
tremendous student market for the good stuff. Well let's just
give them the good stuff.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Good's that is exactly what we need to hear. So
I for everybody out there listening, what you're doing is working.
There is a chance that you can send your kids
to universities and get them back. And yeah, I was
just saying, I said the other day on this program.
Her the other night, I was putting her to bed
and she said, my friend, her friend, she's going into
(30:05):
her freshman year in high school and her friend is
going into her senior year. And she said, my friend said,
it goes so fast. And she said, and then you
go to college. And she said, but the kids that
go to college, they don't come back as Christian. Mom.
And I was like, that doesn't have to be the case.
But it's interesting to me that a senior in high
school was talking about that concern with a freshman in
(30:28):
high school, Like they are really genuinely saying, what's going
to happen. We have to be particular about what we
choose and where we go because we don't want somebody
to change who we are. I think that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
That's kind of a prescient comment on the part of
that high school senior. But here again I can tell
you about my own university. We have a thriving Catholic chaplaincy.
We have several thriving Evangelical chaplaincies. We have a thriving
Orthodox Jewish chapel. And see for there are chaplaincies Jewish
(31:04):
and Christian, both Catholic and Protestant within the Christian community
that really represent an alternative to the kind of secular,
progressive orthodoxy. And again they're attracting hundreds and hundreds of students.
That's super encouraging.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
It is absolutely okay. So tell us where to get
the new book, give us the name again, and tell
us where to get it.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Well, the book that Cornell West and I have out
is called Truth Matters. Truth Matters Cornell West and Robert George,
and that's available from all the online booksellers. It's available
in a very inexpensive paperback and a pretty well priced,
fairly priced hardcover as well. So Truth Matters by Robert
George and Cornell West. And then my own book, which
(31:48):
is just out a few days ago, is called Seeking
Truth and Speaking Truth. And you can acquire Seeking Truth
and Speaking Truth at any of the online bookseller Amazon,
Barnes and Noble, any of the others, or from the
publisher which is in Counter Books, which is offering the
book at a very nice discount right now. And both
(32:10):
of these books tutor truth matters and seeking truth. In
Speaking Truth, we have written my case, my book in
Cornell's the other case, the book Cornell and I did together.
We have really written these books not for our fellow academics,
not for scholars, but for general audiences. This is for
anybody who's interested in ideas, anybody who's interested in how
(32:32):
we can turn things around in academic life, how we
can bring up our young people to be determined truth
seekers and courageous truth speakers. And I'd especially encourage parents
and grandparents to get these books into the hands of
your high school or college age children and grandchildren. These
books are really written, above all for them, for the
(32:55):
kinds of kids who are now tempted to say things like, well,
you have your truth and I have my truth, but
there's no such thing as the truth. That's a very
pernicious idea. There really is a truth. We never get
at it perfectly, we never get at it fully, but
we can make progress, and we can get nearer and
nearer to the fullness of truth, and we can correct
(33:17):
our errors. But only if we think carefully, think critically,
think well, think logically, think precisely. Question. These dogmatic orthodoxies
resist in doctrination. And that's the message that we're bringing
in these books to our young people. And they're written
for young people to be able to read. So if
you have a grandchild, if you have a child who's
(33:37):
in high school or in college, get one or both
of these books and get them into their hands.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
So I haven't read the new one yet, I have
to get that one. The Truth Matters is really it's
great because it's from your perspective, and it's from Cornell
Wells West's perspective, and every chapter is going back and
forth and just the conversation and the interview style of
what you both, how you both respond to these questions,
and the conversation that you're having together of truth and
(34:08):
seeking truth, and how you both individually do it. I
think that's the beauty of it, is that you're seeing
the fact that two people who have very different viewpoints
on things are able to sit down and have a
really thriving friendship in these discussions, even if the discussions
are that you disagree on certain things. To me, that
(34:28):
is so critical for students to see right now, Like
if you have a kid that's in high school. I
have one that, like I said, is going into high
school and one that's going into her junior year, and
I want them to read that so that they can
understand as they're kind of learning that there's going to
be discourse in universities and colleges and they're planning to
go there, prepare them. This is the best way for
(34:50):
them to be prepared. Read this and they're going to
be ready. They'll have an understanding before they go. And
I think it's great. So I'll get the new one
Truth Matters. I loved and Robert P. George. I always
love having you on. Thank you so much for being here.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Well, it's my pleasure.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Thank you, tutor absolutely, and thank you all for joining
us on the Tutor Dixon Podcast. For this episode and others,
go to Tutor Dixon podcast dot com, the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and you
can watch the video on Rumble or YouTube at Tutor Dixon.
Have a blessed Day
Welcome to the Tutor Dixon Podcast. We are so happy
to welcome back Robert P. George. He is one of
America's leading conservative legal scholars and the founder of the
James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.
Also happens to be friends with a progressive Cornell West,
which seems impossible, but that's kind of what we're going
(00:21):
to talk about today, because you have co authored a
joint op ed in The Washington Post about cultivating civic
friendship at universities, which I totally love. Welcome back, Thank you,
it's great to be back with you, Tutor. I say
that it's interesting that you are friends because that's kind
of the conversation that you continue to have, is that
(00:44):
because we disagree with someone on certain points does not
mean we should never speak to them or have feelings
of anger toward them.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Absolutely right. Look, we're all together in this veil of tears,
doing the best we can. Every single one of us
is a frail, fallen, fallible human being. All of us
know this much that we aren't right about everything. There's
some things we're wrong about. We just don't know which
(01:13):
things those are. You know, we believe what we believe,
knowing that some of our beliefs are can't they can't
all be correct, So some of our beliefs are going
to be incorrect. Now, how are we ever going to
make some progress? Will ever perfectly get into a situation
where we only have true beliefs in our head? But
how can we get to a situation where we can
swap out as many false beliefs as we can and
(01:35):
replace them with true beliefs. We're certainly not going to
get there if you only talk to people who already
agree with you and who confirm you in everything you say.
What Brother Cornell West and I have in common, despite
our vast political differences, is a desire to get at
the truth of things, and a willingness to be challenged,
to be criticized, to subject our views to rational scrutiny
(01:57):
by intelligent people on the other side, all in the
hope that we can swamp out the beliefs that are false,
at least some of them, and replace them with beliefs
that are that are true. Anybody who recognizes their own
fallibility has very good reasons to be open to engaging
with people you disagree with even on the most profound issues,
(02:19):
even on the issues that you care most about. If
you have in common that you're truth seekers, then you've
got something more fundamental uniting you. Then whatever it is
that divides you over politics or religion, of morality or
whatever it is. Well.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
But if you're in a university where there is, as
you've pointed out, a lack of viewpoint diversity, and you
have not only professors but suitents across campus that are saying,
if you don't fit into this box, we don't want
you to come anywhere near the box, then how do
you how do you do that? And you've pointed out
that universities should increase their viewpoint diversity, which I thought
(02:54):
was interesting because we've talked about these programs with affirmative
acts and DEI and all of this that was supposed
to create diversity at these universities, but it actually ended
up kicking people to the side who actually deserved a
spot there. But viewpoint diversity is something different, and that's
it's a conversation I don't think many people have had
(03:17):
that If you look at these universities, there really isn't
a diverse group of thinkers there. It's really one way
in our way or the highway, and that's that's kind
of leading these kids to the point where they don't
try to be true seekers.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Well, that's exactly right, and Cornell West, who's on the
progressive side, joins me in pointing that out and saying
that we've got to do something about it. We say
that in our new book Truth Matters, and we say
that in our recent op ed piece in the Washington Post.
(03:56):
Although Cornell's on the progressive side, he sees every bit
as much as I do that there's a big problem
when you have a faculty like the Harvard faculty that
has only three percent of its members who identify as conservative.
When you have that kind of an ideological imbalance, the
bottom line is that the students who are there to
(04:16):
educate are basically going to be hearing one side. Even
if you have some professors who are doing their best
to represent to fairly views that they themselves disagree with,
you're going to end up with one sided education. You're
going to end up with something much closer. I hate
to say this, tutor, but it's true, something much closer
to indoctrination than education.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
So you pointed out that indoctrination is the opposite of education.
There's no education there.
Speaker 2 (04:43):
At allthesis, it's the very antithesis of education. And I
often say, tutor, I'd much rather that my students be
ignorant than that they'd be indoctrinated. If they're ignorant, well,
then maybe I can teach them something, get them thinking
about something, expose them to some ideas, get them in
a position to gain some knowledge. But if they're indoctrinated,
(05:04):
then before I can ever start teaching them anything, I've
got to try open their minds as if I were
doing it with a crowbar. And that's a big step.
When you've got somebody who's steeped in ideology, whose mind
has been shut down by conformism and group think. Before
you can ever get to actually educating them, you've got
(05:25):
to get their minds open. So give me ignorance anytime
over in doctrination. I can work with ignorance in doctrination
makes it triply difficult.
Speaker 1 (05:35):
It's interesting because obviously a big part of Donald Trump
his campaign and becoming president was saying, we don't want
this indoctrination. We don't want these programs that are keeping
certain students out of places, and he kind of shut
down DEI across the country. But just in the past
couple of weeks, some of I don't know if you've
(05:57):
seen some of these videos that have been coming out
where universities actually continue to have their DEI programs and
there's undercover journalists that are going in and saying, well,
tell me about what your program is like now that
DEI has been shut down, And they said, oh, don't worry,
we're just rebranding it. But this isn't going over well
with this administration. So what is university life like with
(06:21):
Donald Trump as president?
Speaker 2 (06:24):
Well, first of all, let me say a word about DEI.
Whatever good intentions people might have had in trying to
increase on university campuses, diversity, equity and inclusion. That's what
DEI stands for, diversity, equity and inclusion. The net result
was the opposite of those things. Instead of diversity, we
got conformism instead of equity, we got unfair treatment. Instead
(06:51):
of inclusion, we got the exclusion of people who dissented
from the dominant orthodoxies the ideologies on the campus. So
if it was an experiment, it is a failed experiment.
And the way to deal with a failure is not
to rebrand it, it's to get rid of it and
(07:12):
replace it with something valuable. Now, what would be valuable,
What would be valuable, is making sure that you have
such a diversity of views represented on your faculty and
in your student body that everybody on campus, faculty members
and students alike, can never rest comfortably in their opinions.
(07:33):
Their opinions will always be challenged because there's because there
are going to be lots of people on the campus
who will challenge their opinions. And that's the way we
break out of groupthink and conformism. That's the way we
advance knowledge. Most of the great advances of knowledge of
history have come when people were willing to question what
(07:56):
up until that point was a kind of dogma, a
kind of a ste abolished view. That's every bit is true,
by the way, titor in the sciences, as it is
in the other fields and the humanities and the social sciences.
So we really need to go for aim for viewpoint diversity. Now,
does that mean we should do affirmative action for conservatives. No,
(08:20):
what we should do is maintain the highest standards, but
treat people fairly. The reason Harvard is only three percent
conservative on its faculty. Only three percent of the faculty
identifies conservatives. Is simply and straightforwardly discrimination over many years, now,
many decades against people who dissent from the progressive orthodoxies
(08:43):
on campuses like Harvard. Will end it with a discrimination.
Enough with that, and then let's look out around the country.
This is my advice to the Harvard leadership, or to
the Princeton leadership, or the leadership of the University of
Illinois or any other university. My advice is this, look
up throughout the country, and you'll see scholars out there
(09:04):
who your institution has passed over for ideological reasons, or
that have been passed over by your peer institutions for
ideological reasons, and then say we're sorry about that. We
want you to come join our faculty. That's not affirmative action.
That's not lowering standards for conservatives. That's not special treatment.
(09:26):
That's writing some old wrongs in order to give the
university really what it needs if it's to fulfill its
educational mission, and giving it what it needs means making
sure that there is a robust dialogue, a robust exchange
of ideas on the campus, so everybody is thinking and
(09:47):
nobody is resting content and conformism and group thing.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
So let me ask you this, how do we what
do we do with about all the students that have
gone through this and they have an attitude of of
I'm superior and therefore I am right. And I say
that because I've had so many people who have experienced
this in their lives. You know, you go to undergrad
with friends, and then they go to one of the
(10:13):
IVY graduate schools and they come back to you and
they say, I've been educated more than you at a
better university than you. I am now in an elite class.
And because of that, I can tell you you are
wrong and you're bad. And those are people who I
believe the way they speak is in doctrination. They come
(10:36):
out with this, you know, all white people are bad,
and we have to fix the wrongs of the past,
and you know, you have to have an open border,
and you have to have all these things. And like
you said, I mean, we can disagree, but they're not disagreeing.
And they are now in the workplace and they are
now running campaigns and they're putting their voting for people
(10:57):
who they believe believe in this in doctrine status. And
I am concerned about that period, which seems like it's
like a ten year period of graduates who fall into that.
Maybe more well, Tutor, let me tell you a little
personal story.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
My father did not complete high school. He got a diploma.
It was sent to his parents while he was off
fighting in Normandy and Brittany in World War Two. When
he turned eighteen, they shipped him off to Europe to
fight before he'd even finished his high school, sent his
parents a diploma, and then when he came back. His
father had been a coal miner. When he came back,
(11:36):
fortunately he didn't have to go into the mines because
he had some training from the military. And of course
we had a booming economy after the war. But he is,
I say, didn't even complete high school. Now I have.
I have a graduate degree from Swarthmore. I've got a
lot of greater master's degree from Harvard, and I have
three doctorates from Oxford. Okay, I'm supposed to be really
(12:00):
smart guy, right, I got all these credentials. I wish
I had half the wisdom of my father. Joseph M. George.
I don't if you wanted to. If somebody came to me, say,
one of my own children came to me and said,
I've got a really tough personal, existential ethical question here.
(12:23):
I need your advice. I'd say, well, I'm going to
give you the best advice I can. But I also
want you to talk to your granddad because he's wiser
than I am. And this is what young people have
to learn today. Fancy degrees and fancy education doesn't necessarily
equal wisdom. And you can have wisdom if you haven't
(12:45):
even been to college. My father, we just lost him
last year at age ninety eight. He had it in spades.
And that's just one example of countless examples that you
and I and everybody else could give of profoundly wise
people to his people, good people who don't have fancy degrees.
And I'll tell you what fancy degrees also don't make
(13:06):
you virtuous. I can tell you about a lot of
people who are really lacking in virtue. But have you know,
doctorates from Yale and a lot of degrees from Stanford
and medical degrees from Harvard and all of that stuff.
So I think we just need to straighten people out
about that.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on
the Tutor Dixon Podcast. It's interesting because my great grandfather
actually he ran away at sixteen to join the navy.
He was a child coal miner in Pennsylvania, so they
had in common. He had gone into the coal mines
(13:45):
when he was eight years old and started working. And
because they were tiny back then, they sent the tiny
kids into the tiny veins of the mine and they
would they would mine with their hands, they would dig
with their hands, so his fingernails were always gone. And
he told us these stories, you know, and it just
it's interesting to me because those were the things that
(14:06):
we wanted to learn when we were little. The school
was not nearly as interesting as going and sitting with
Grandpap and having him tell us about how horrible that was,
and that that caused him to join the navy at sixteen.
Li about his age. Join at sixteen, he became a
navy diver, which was one of the most dangerous jobs.
And then when he returned to Pittsburgh, he became a
(14:28):
diver for the government and he would fix the bridges,
go down and weld the bridges in the river, which
was also incredibly dangerous. Became an alcoholic, and then one
day woke up after not returning home and found the
Lord and from that day on read the Bible every year,
all the way through and never took another drink. And
(14:49):
those were the stories that created this sense of like,
I can do great things because look at what he did.
Speaker 2 (14:59):
Exactly right. Those heroes are inspiring. My dad was like that,
your grandpat. We have so much to learn from them.
And it's so idiotic of people to think that we
today are better than those people, or wiser, or we're
more virtuous. We're not. We really should be their students.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
Yeah, absolutely absolutely, I mean there's just there's so many
there's so much that you can learn from history, and
yet we're not. We don't seem to be you talk
about bringing civics back, but there is there are true
historical learnings that we seem to be missing out on.
I know you've commented on Mamdanie. I've seen it on
(15:43):
your ex account. There are things that he has come
out and said that sound wonderful. They sound so great,
but they've been done before and they don't work. But
how do you convince people that these plans are not
real plans?
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Well, there are lessons to history. I'll take mom Donnie's
idea that we should have publicly owned, city owned grocery stores.
We have plenty of people in our country today, people
like Gary Kasparov, the great tennis, tennis, chess chess champion,
(16:21):
brilliant man. We have people like Casparov who can tell
you exactly what life was like in the Soviet Union
with government run grocery stores. There was very little food
in the grocery stores, and you had to line up
from here to Tuesday in order to have a shot
(16:42):
at getting a morsel or two from the little food
that was available in the stores. If there's something that
we have now tested, if there's an experiment that we've
done and we've proven that it doesn't work, that is
the experiment with collectivism or social where that form of
socialism called communism, where the government owns the means of production,
(17:06):
or owns the shops, or owns the stores, it doesn't work.
By contrast, the market system has lifted millions of people
from Chile to India and all over the world where
markets have been introduced, lifted millions of people out of poverty.
So it's not as if we have to start from
(17:27):
scratch here with no knowledge we have knowledge. The experiment
has been run time and time again. Socialism in the
Soviet Union, socialism in Korea, socialism in Vietnam, socialism in China,
socialism in Cuba, socialism now in Venezuela. You can't find
a time when it worked. Now, we need to draw
the lessons from that, and we can't leave our young
(17:48):
people in ignorance about those things. They should be studying
the period in Russia from say nineteen seventeen the Bolshevik
Revolution to the collapse in the late nineteen eighties and
early ninety ten nineties of the Soviet Empire. We don't
want our kids to be ignorant of that history.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
Yeah. Well, that's another thing that I think, even when
we see this increase in anti Semitism in the United
States and even in Europe, I mean, it's been somewhat shocking.
I think how quickly it took hold. I've told this
story before, but in twenty eighteen, I interviewed Holocaust survivors
and the one woman didn't speak the entire time, just
(18:31):
her husband spoke. But she was also in a concentration camp.
And when I went to leave the room, she grabbed
my arm and looked at me and in a very
nasty tone, she said, they hate the Jews, and they'll
do it again. And I remember thinking, gosh, that would
never happen again, naively, you know, naively, thinking that time
(18:52):
is done and there is not that hatred out there.
And then you know, you hear heard these rumblings for
years about anti Semitism, but not until October seventh do
I think we really went whoa, my gosh, this is
very this is running rampant, and it's at our universities.
I mean, we saw all the protests last year, and
(19:13):
that to me was an outside effort organized to go
into our universities and see that there was a weakness there,
go in there and start to teach one of those untruths.
And when you were speaking up against it, you were
the one that was silenced. If you were speaking to say,
you know, stop the hatred, you were the one that
was silence, as opposed to the people who were out
(19:35):
there saying, you know, globalize the Intifada. And now you
have even this situation in New York where that conversation
has come up and this man has not said he
condemns that. He said, people think of the definition differently,
but there is no different definition if you know history,
isn't that right?
Speaker 2 (19:54):
Yeah? I mean we know what the antifada is. It's
the effort to destroy the Jewish state, effort to destroy Israel,
to create a situation from the so called river to
the sea, although most of the protesters can't tell you
which river and which see degree, a situation from the
river to the sea that is non Jewish, where the
(20:15):
Jews are erased from that part of the world. So yes,
I mean anti Semitism is one of those ancient curses
that never remains in the grave. It's like a vampire.
You think you've killed it, you think you've stigmatized it,
you think you've put it on the margins, but then
it comes back again, you know, out of the coffin,
(20:37):
and here it is, and we have it again. And
you know what frightens me, Tutors, is we have it
today both on the extreme fringe of the right and
on the left.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Yes, yes, it's.
Speaker 2 (20:50):
Not just in one on one side of the of
the political spectrum. You know. In addition to the book
that Cornell West and I have out Truth Matter, so
I have a new book of my I own out
called Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth. And one of the
chapters in the book I devote to a prophecy, a
prediction that was made in eighteen thirty by the German
(21:12):
Jewish Christian poet Heinrich Heine. Heine looked at his situation
there in Germany in the eighteen thirty, one hundred years
before Hitler, and he said, what I see is Biblical faith,
Biblical principles collapsing in the minds and hearts of our people.
They're being pushed out, and that's being replaced with a
(21:34):
kind of almost revival of the pagan the Teutonic paganism
of pre Christian Germany. And he predicted, he prophesied that
as a result of this loss of faith, is collapse
of biblical faith. There will come a time when tyrannical forces,
(21:55):
secular tyrannical forces, will take control in Germany. And as
he and this is a near quote, a situation will
arise that will make the bloody French Revolution look like
an innocent Idel, like an innocent walk in the park.
And sure enough, one hundred years later, what he predicted
happened to Nazis, the Holocaust, the mass killings of the
(22:20):
Second World war. All of it came true. Now, how
did he foresee it? How did he prophesy it? He
himself explained it, even back in his own time before
it actually played out. He said, thought precedes action as
lightning precedes thunder. When you see the lightning, the thunder's
(22:43):
going to come. What's the lightning? What he saw was
the collapse of biblical faith, and he knew as a
result of that violence and evil, a return to the
warlike pagan traditions of pre Christian harmony would be back.
And it's exactly what happened.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
But that's what we see right now. I would say
in New York with the massive numbers that came out
for the idea of defunding the police, having the government
take over all of these I mean, they've openly branded
it as socialism, but he said sees the means of production, which,
(23:25):
as you pointed out, as communism. This is I think
a combination of ignorance and indoctrination. I mean, I think
that there are a lot of people out there who
are very ignorant to how impactful their vote is when
they put somebody in power who wants to change that.
The way the country has run from the time of
(23:47):
its founding, and these are changes that are radical changes.
And what I argue is the most important city in
the world because it's the financial hub of the world, right,
and so you have somebody.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
You know, that's why it was attacked on nine to eleven.
It wasn't attacked because it happened to be on the
East Coast or you know, on the Atlantic seaboard or
anything like that. I mean, it was attacked because it
was the financial hub of the United States and of
the world. That's exactly right, and that.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Is very scary that that's the target.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
Very scary, and it'll be targeted again, I fear. But
back to the point you were making about anti semitism
and the revival of anti Semitism. I saw this and
I spoke out against this in the universities fifteen years ago.
It wasn't yesterday that it started. I told people, it's here.
(24:43):
I see it. It's maybe just barely below the surface,
but just barely. On the day after that horrible attack
by Hamas on those innocent children and others on October
the seventh, a day after thirty three student groups at Harvard,
thirty three left wing student groups put out a statement
(25:07):
blaming the rapes and murders and kidnappings on Israel, on
the Jewish state. Can you believe that they said that?
Speaker 1 (25:16):
I mean, sadly I can today.
Speaker 2 (25:18):
With Israel for babies being murdered, for women, girls being raped.
This shows you how drained the situation was, how deep
the anti Semitism was even before yesterday.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
M hmm, yeah, because how could you convince people to
sign that if it hadn't already been there?
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Well, exactly right, its October eighth. You would think that
that on that day, of all days, people would be
having sympathy for the people of Israel, sympathy for the
Jewish people, people who were killed for no reason other
than they were Jewish or thought to be Jewish. Some
people who were killed there weren't even Jewish, but they
were killed because they were either Jewish or thought to
be Jewish. Of all days, there should be sympathy on
(26:02):
that day, surely, But no, there wasn't sympathy. There was
anti semitism thirty three student groups at Harvard.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on
a Tutor Dixon podcast. So can this be reversed? Because
yesterday we posted something on DEI in Universities, and I
noticed that one of the comments was it's too late,
There's nothing we can do now, And I just thought,
I can't believe that.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
No, we can turn this thing around. We really can't.
I mean, good stuff is happening now. Most people don't
know about this, but there are programs and institutes and
centers being built at universities now across the country that
are providing within these universities, even indeed Harvard certainly my
(26:50):
own institution here at Princeton, but also University of Florida,
and University of Texas and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill,
and University of Tennessee and Arizona State, University of the
Ohio State University programs and institutes being built that are
really modeling for the entire university. What a genuine deep
liberal arts education is all about. Wrestling with the big questions,
(27:11):
wrestling with the questions of what it means to be human,
having complete free speech so you can challenge any orthodoxy
requiring only that you do business in the proper currency
of intellectual discourse by giving reasons and making arguments and
marshaling evidence. Where students are genuinely educated and not indoctrinated.
And these programs tutor are attracting terrific enrollments and majors.
(27:36):
There's a big student market for genuine, deep, real education
that is not indoctrination, and our job is to provide it.
And we're starting to see it all over the country.
My program here at Princeton, the James Madison Program in
American Ideals and Institutions does that. The program in Human
Flourishing at Harvard does that. The Hamilton School at the
University of Florida does that. The Civitas Program at the
(27:58):
University of Texas does that. The Salmon P. Chase Center
at the Ohio State University. These are all things that
we should know about and that we should be cheering on.
Speaker 1 (28:08):
And that's what I was going to say. Having the
support of people out there, because people have been suddenly
speaking up about this, and you see a lot of folks,
a lot of parents saying, we don't want to send
our kids to an indoctrination camp. You see a lot
of conservatives speaking up against it, and even on the
news you see people speaking up against it. Does that
help to push these programs forward?
Speaker 2 (28:28):
It certainly does it, certainly does. We need the support
of everyone we can get on this. I mean, I'll
give you the example again of my own university and
the program that I founded twenty five years ago now
was the first of these programs. It's been the model
for so many others. Princeton is not a large university.
We're actually a liberal arts college kind of masquerading as
(28:49):
a big university. We only have about seventy five hundred students,
including our graduate students, so we're a third the solace
at Harvard or Yale or Stanford, and I don't know,
maybe a fifth or even less the size of big
state universities like Ohio State or University of Florida or
University of Texas. And yet, in this very small university,
(29:10):
my program, the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions,
had last year three hundred and twenty five undergraduate fellows
of the program, three hundred and twenty five Princeton students
who were eager to get an education that was not
in doctrination, where they were free to dissent from campus orthodoxies,
to question the dogmas that are dominant on the campus,
(29:34):
to really be challenged and to challenge others. There's a
tremendous student market for the good stuff. Well let's just
give them the good stuff.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Good's that is exactly what we need to hear. So
I for everybody out there listening, what you're doing is working.
There is a chance that you can send your kids
to universities and get them back. And yeah, I was
just saying, I said the other day on this program.
Her the other night, I was putting her to bed
and she said, my friend, her friend, she's going into
(30:05):
her freshman year in high school and her friend is
going into her senior year. And she said, my friend said,
it goes so fast. And she said, and then you
go to college. And she said, but the kids that
go to college, they don't come back as Christian. Mom.
And I was like, that doesn't have to be the case.
But it's interesting to me that a senior in high
school was talking about that concern with a freshman in
(30:28):
high school, Like they are really genuinely saying, what's going
to happen. We have to be particular about what we
choose and where we go because we don't want somebody
to change who we are. I think that's interesting.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
That's kind of a prescient comment on the part of
that high school senior. But here again I can tell
you about my own university. We have a thriving Catholic chaplaincy.
We have several thriving Evangelical chaplaincies. We have a thriving
Orthodox Jewish chapel. And see for there are chaplaincies Jewish
(31:04):
and Christian, both Catholic and Protestant within the Christian community
that really represent an alternative to the kind of secular,
progressive orthodoxy. And again they're attracting hundreds and hundreds of students.
That's super encouraging.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
It is absolutely okay. So tell us where to get
the new book, give us the name again, and tell
us where to get it.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
Well, the book that Cornell West and I have out
is called Truth Matters. Truth Matters Cornell West and Robert George,
and that's available from all the online booksellers. It's available
in a very inexpensive paperback and a pretty well priced,
fairly priced hardcover as well. So Truth Matters by Robert
George and Cornell West. And then my own book, which
(31:48):
is just out a few days ago, is called Seeking
Truth and Speaking Truth. And you can acquire Seeking Truth
and Speaking Truth at any of the online bookseller Amazon,
Barnes and Noble, any of the others, or from the
publisher which is in Counter Books, which is offering the
book at a very nice discount right now. And both
(32:10):
of these books tutor truth matters and seeking truth. In
Speaking Truth, we have written my case, my book in
Cornell's the other case, the book Cornell and I did together.
We have really written these books not for our fellow academics,
not for scholars, but for general audiences. This is for
anybody who's interested in ideas, anybody who's interested in how
(32:32):
we can turn things around in academic life, how we
can bring up our young people to be determined truth
seekers and courageous truth speakers. And I'd especially encourage parents
and grandparents to get these books into the hands of
your high school or college age children and grandchildren. These
books are really written, above all for them, for the
(32:55):
kinds of kids who are now tempted to say things like, well,
you have your truth and I have my truth, but
there's no such thing as the truth. That's a very
pernicious idea. There really is a truth. We never get
at it perfectly, we never get at it fully, but
we can make progress, and we can get nearer and
nearer to the fullness of truth, and we can correct
(33:17):
our errors. But only if we think carefully, think critically,
think well, think logically, think precisely. Question. These dogmatic orthodoxies
resist in doctrination. And that's the message that we're bringing
in these books to our young people. And they're written
for young people to be able to read. So if
you have a grandchild, if you have a child who's
(33:37):
in high school or in college, get one or both
of these books and get them into their hands.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
So I haven't read the new one yet, I have
to get that one. The Truth Matters is really it's
great because it's from your perspective, and it's from Cornell
Wells West's perspective, and every chapter is going back and
forth and just the conversation and the interview style of
what you both, how you both respond to these questions,
and the conversation that you're having together of truth and
(34:08):
seeking truth, and how you both individually do it. I
think that's the beauty of it, is that you're seeing
the fact that two people who have very different viewpoints
on things are able to sit down and have a
really thriving friendship in these discussions, even if the discussions
are that you disagree on certain things. To me, that
(34:28):
is so critical for students to see right now, Like
if you have a kid that's in high school. I
have one that, like I said, is going into high
school and one that's going into her junior year, and
I want them to read that so that they can
understand as they're kind of learning that there's going to
be discourse in universities and colleges and they're planning to
go there, prepare them. This is the best way for
(34:50):
them to be prepared. Read this and they're going to
be ready. They'll have an understanding before they go. And
I think it's great. So I'll get the new one
Truth Matters. I loved and Robert P. George. I always
love having you on. Thank you so much for being here.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Well, it's my pleasure.
Speaker 1 (35:05):
Thank you, tutor absolutely, and thank you all for joining
us on the Tutor Dixon Podcast. For this episode and others,
go to Tutor Dixon podcast dot com, the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and you
can watch the video on Rumble or YouTube at Tutor Dixon.
Have a blessed Day
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show News
Hosts And Creators
Clay Travis
Buck Sexton
Show Links
WebsiteNewsletterPopular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Special Summer Offer: Exclusively on Apple Podcasts, try our Dateline Premium subscription completely free for one month! With Dateline Premium, you get every episode ad-free plus exclusive bonus content.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.