Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and the founder and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. His courses, Civil Liberties and Constitutional Interpretation, have long been famed, loved, and sometimes feared by students for their intellectual rigor and exact grading. Over the course of his 40 years of teaching at Princeton, he has mentored and inspired scores of students. For our seasonal series on mentorship, I asked Professor George about his experience both as a mentor and a mentee.
Ignacio Arias Philippi (IAP): Who would you say were the biggest influences on you in your time at college and why?
Robert P. George (RPG): When I was in college, I had two professors who really taught me how to learn. The first was a professor of political science (still living, retired now), whose name is James Kurth. He arrived at Swarthmore from Harvard, where he had previously been teaching, the year I arrived as a first-year at Swarthmore—that was in the fall of 1973—and he did me an enormous service. After my first examination in his class (a midterm examination), he didn’t return my paper to me; he took me aside and said that he was surprised that my paper was not very good because my comments in class had been good. He wanted to know what had gone wrong on the paper. I replied that I was sorry that the paper wasn’t very good, but I had no excuses—I had plenty of time to complete the paper, I wasn’t distracted with anything else, and I hadn’t been ill. I just evidently didn’t do a very good job, for which I apologized. He began asking me about my background, especially my educational background, and it became clear to him that I was not nearly as well prepared for college as most of my Swarthmore classmates. So he made a project of me— he taught me how to learn, in many ways you could say he taught me to think. He certainly taught me how to write. And so, on the strength of the instruction, guidance, and example that he provided me, I was able to improve my performance.
The second professor at Swarthmore was a man now deceased, a professor of philosophy and religion whose name was Linwood Urban. He also happened to be an Episcopalian priest and a conservative. I figured out at some point that he was an Episcopalian priest; I did not know until years and years later that he was a conservative (he didn’t broadcast that), but when I learned it I wasn’t surprised, given his approach to matters of philosophy and religion. He worked with me very closely. One advantage of being at a small liberal arts college, at least in those days (I hope it’s still the same), is that we got an awful lot of attention from our professors. They worked with us one-on-one or in small groups. In fact, my largest class in my last two years as an undergraduate at Swarthmore had eight people in it. My seminar in my senior year with Mr. Urban, which was a seminar on philosophy of religion, only had four people and it was a virtual tutorial: an Oxford/Cambridge-style tutorial. We could do individual directed reading projects with our faculty members and I did one with Professor Urban.
So those were my principal influences when I was an undergraduate, and they were very important because I arrived at college very poorly prepared. No one in my family had been to college before I had been. Both of my grandfathers were coal miners, both were immigrants: one from southern Italy, one from Syria. Neither spoke English very well; they both worked in the mines and on the railroads. My paternal grandfather spent his entire life as a laborer. My maternal grandfather, after twenty-something years in mines, was able to save enough money to start a little grocery business, so he was able to get out of the mines. My father was, I suppose, saved from the mines by World War II. He was drafted at age 18 right out of high school— he didn’t even finish high school; the school later sent his parents a high school diploma for him. He didn’t attend a graduation— he was off fighting in Normandy. When he came back, he had the kinds of skills that he had gained in the military, and there were new opportunities in the aftermath of victory in World War II—the American economy was booming. So he didn’t have to go into the mines and, as a result of that, I guess I didn’t have to go to the mines. But he did not, because of his other circumstances, have the opportunity to take advantage of the G.I. Bill and go to college. So when I went to college it was completely new territory for anyone in my family, and I wasn’t very well prepared by my education in West Virginia. I had a very happy boyhood—that’s for sure—but it was an Appalachian boyhood: hunting and fishing and running around in the woods and playing bluegrass music (I’m a banjo player) and stuff like that. But I wasn’t taught, for example, how to write an essay, so I relied on my college mentors to bring me up to speed on those kinds of things.
IAP: Would you say it was also their influence that led you to study philosophy later on at Oxford?
RPG: Actually, no. Although, obviously, I got interested in philosophy under Mr. Urban’s tutelage, the crucial moment there was in a course taught by a different professor. He was certainly a good teacher, but not one who personally had a great of influence on my thinking; he was teaching an introductory survey course in political theory. And it really was a survey—we began with Plato, and we went all the way up to Rawls, with everything in between: from St. Augustine to Thomas Aquinas, figures from the Reformation, from the Enlightenment: Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century, as I said, all the way up to Rawls. I wasn’t especially interested in philosophy—I wasn’t uninterested—but I was probably taking the course, if I recall correctly, pretty much to fill a distribution requirement.
But early in the course we were assigned Plato’s dialogue Gorgias and that produced for me, sitting in the library—McCabe Library at Swarthmore College, on the second floor, I can take you to the corner, I was sitting on one of the leather sofas—reading the library’s copy of Gorgias because I wasn’t interested enough to buy my own copy, when my life was fundamentally changed. It was an epiphanal experience. I had come up believing— it was not my parents’ fault, but it was their understanding as well— that what education was about was social advancement, professional advancement, financial advancement, coming up in the world. If I got a good education at a prestigious college or university, I thought, “Well, I’ll be able to make more money, I’ll be able to have a professional job as a lawyer or something else.” I’d have greater social status than my family had in West Virginia—it was kind of a typical American story, typical immigrant family story. But I had adopted, as a result of that, a purely instrumental view of education— I didn’t even know there was an alternative, it wasn’t that I had rejected the alternative—I didn’t know there was an alternative. I just thought: “This is what education is about, and this is what argument and debate and discussion in class is all about.”
Well, anyone who’s read Plato, especially that dialogue Gorgias, knows it’s actually not just about getting ahead— it’s about getting at the truth of things, where getting at the truth of things is understood to be desirable, worthwhile, not merely as a means to other ends, though education is a valuable means to many other ends, but most fundamentally for its own sake. It’s the intrinsic value of knowledge as an inherent fulfillment of human persons, constituted the way we are as rational creatures. Once I was given that insight by that ancient Greek— it was almost like he was grabbing me by the lapels and shaking me— suddenly I could see it. There was no going back. Suddenly I realized: “Gosh, I haven’t really reasoned my way to any of my opinions—I have lots of opinions—but I’ve picked them up from the ambient culture or I’ve adopted them because I was thinking ‘these are the opinions that smart, sophisticated people hold and I want to be a smart, sophisticated person, so I should hold these opinions’.”
Suddenly, having grasped the inherent value of knowledge for the first time, and having come to understand debate and discussion as having as its true end not victory, or impressing people, or getting ahead, but rather getting at the truth of things, I realized: “I have to rethink everything I believe.” And it was both frightening and exhilarating. Because you do tend to invest emotionally in your beliefs, no matter how you came to hold them—whether you reasoned your way to them or just picked them up from the ambient culture—and your membership in certain communities that are integrated around shared beliefs, depends on sharing these beliefs. So suddenly when everything is on the table and you have to think everything through and try to earn your way to your opinions it’s exhilarating but also scary, it’s also frightening—you don’t know who you’re going to be when you go through this process, what communities you will no longer belong to, or what new communities you’ll find yourself in. And in the event, some of my opinions—especially my religious opinions—actually strengthened, and some of my opinions—especially my political opinions—fundamentally changed. I had been very active in the Democratic party as a high school student and twice served as governor of the West Virginia Democratic youth conference. I was involved in young Democrat activities in what was at least then regarded as liberal politics, which I came to believe could not stand rational scrutiny and so I found myself shifting politically in a different direction. So that’s how it all happened.
IAP: That’s remarkable. You’ve actually anticipated a question I was meaning to ask you about influential books. Saint Augustine talks about how he read Cicero’s Hortensius. He says it “inflamed [him] to love, and seek, and obtain, and hold, and embrace not this or that sect, but wisdom itself whatever it were.” Would you say the Gorgias was your Hortensius?
RPG: Right down the line. I could say exactly the same thing that Augustine says there. And I didn’t go looking for it. I was in that library because I needed to read this text to perform on whatever exam. I didn’t go looking for it— this ancient Greek grabbed me by the lapels, shook me, and made me see. So there you are. I didn’t know right at the time that “now I should be a professor,” but, if I trace my way back from where I am now, with the professional and vocational discernment I did and the choices I made, if you trace it back, it would take me back to that sofa on the second floor of McCabe Library of Swarthmore reading Gorgias.
IAP: I was also meaning to ask you about your mentors later on at Oxford and elsewhere, what stood out to you about your mentors there?
RPG: I went from Swarthmore to Harvard to do both a master’s degree in theology—mostly because I wanted to study medieval philosophy and that was the best way to study medieval philosophy—and to do a law degree. I had a very kind professor —again he was not a great influence on me in terms of my thinking—but a very kind professor named Arthur McGill, who was a professor of theology in the Harvard Divinity School. He assisted me by enabling me to get credit for directed readings on some topics that I was interested in, especially some areas of epistemology. So I decided which books I wanted to read, old and new, and then he would meet with me several times over the course of the semester so that I could get credit for the work that I was doing, although it was independent work. That was the way the rules were structured at Harvard in those days. And those were very helpful conversations—they were not right in the areas of his expertise which is why his thought didn’t influence me that much—but it was a great kindness that he did. It’s something a professor can do for a student, and he did for me.
Over at the law school, I got my introduction to analytic philosophy of law. I read some philosophy of law in college, but I had not been introduced in college to the writings of the modern philosophers of law that would become my central focus when I did my doctoral work in Oxford— H.L.A. Hart, Ronald Dworkin, Joseph Raz, John Finnis, Neil MacCormick— it was at Harvard when I was first introduced to this tradition, the modern analytic tradition of jurisprudence. My teachers were Charles Fried, Richard Parker, Lewis Sargentich, Henry Steiner, and especially Harold Berman. I studied as much jurisprudence as I could with those professors and they were very helpful to me, but they were not the kinds of influences to me that Professors Urban and especially Kurth had been at Swarthmore.
To get those kinds of mentors again, I had to go to graduate school, and I found them in Professors Finnis and Raz, who were my doctoral supervisors at Oxford. My views and my understandings, my approaches to philosophy of law, were in very fundamental ways shaped by my engagement with them, both in their writings and personally, in what in Oxford lingo are called “supervisions.” Supervisions are tutorials, but where the students are grad students rather than undergrads. If you’re an undergraduate, your meeting with a professor is called a tutorial: if you’re a graduate student, it’s called a supervision. But it’s actually the same thing— you present a paper and then they tear it apart, and then you try to defend it. But that was a wonderful experience. Oxford in those days was the world headquarters for the study of jurisprudence, especially analytical jurisprudence; there were great figures there in addition to Finis and Raz—H.L.A. Hart, the man who virtually singlehandedly revived the analytic tradition of jurisprudence at midcentury, was still there—he had retired but he was still an active participant in discussions and seminars that were led by professors Dworkin, Finnis, and Raz, for example. Other important figures in analytical jurisprudence in those days were constantly coming through, like Neil MacCormick who I think at the time was at the University of Edinburgh, but he would frequently be in Oxford to participate in discussions. Also, some of my fellow graduate students themselves became superstars in this tradition of analytic jurisprudence: Jeremy Waldron who is now at NYU, Leslie Green, I think he is now at one of the Canadian universities [Queen’s University Kingston, and Balliol College, Oxford]. But it was a wonderful place to be—my fellow graduate students were the best, and my professors were the best. It was like I’d died and gone to heaven. Such an exciting place to be if you were interested in analytic philosophy of law.
IAP: So you’ve distinguished between two types of mentors. Those who pointed you to influential texts or sources and those who gave you more personalized attention . . .
RPG: Let me put it this way: Professor Kurth really taught me how to think in an analytical way, in a disciplined, precise analytical way. Professor Urban helped introduce me to traditions of thought that I would not otherwise have encountered, especially among the medieval, Reformation, and Renaissance thinkers. Professor McGill at the divinity school didn’t introduce me to new authors or traditions of thought, his own thinking didn’t really influence me that much, but he did me that nice service of enabling me to get credit for studying what I really wanted to study and then he met with me to provide a discussion partner for these readings, even though these weren’t in his particular area of expertise. Professors Fried, Berman, Sargentich, Steiner, and some others introduced me to the analytic tradition of jurisprudence, which became my intellectual home: the area in which I do my own work and have made my own career. And then it is simply impossible to exaggerate the influence that Professors Raz and Finnis had on me: especially by insisting on the absolutely highest degree of logical rigor and precision in thinking. Professor Kurth introduced me to that, but these guys, they demanded the most rigorous thinking. My supervision papers would be returned to me with massive red or green ink on them because they wouldn’t let me get away with a thing: they wouldn’t let any of their students get away with any less than a tightly, rigorously argued point. And, of course, the substance of their thinking, they were both making (Finnis, who is still alive, continues to make, but Professor Raz unfortunately has died) they were both making supremely important intellectual contributions to the field and I was wrestling with the substantive arguments that they were putting on the table and the concepts that they were introducing— Raz’s concept of exclusionary reasons as a key concept in the understanding of law, developing further insights from his teacher and Finnis’s teacher, H.L.A. Hart. So those are the different ways in which my mentors gave me these gifts and contributed to my formation.
IAP: That part about intellectual rigor and presenting the best possible, most polished argument sounds familiar. Would you say that they influenced your own teaching in turn?
RPG: No question about it, especially Professor Kurth. I sometimes catch myself, when I’m teaching, whether it’s in a lecture or in a tutorial-type setting, office hours, I realize I’m just doing what professor Kurth did. And at a deeper level I’ve always been, from my college days, profoundly grateful for what these men did for me. Supremely grateful. I’ve always felt they didn’t have to do those things—they didn’t have to make a special project of me, but they did. And I can never repay them for that. I can tell them, and have told them, how grateful I am: I can never fail to mention at appropriate occasions publicly their contributions to my life, and to the formation of my intellectual life. But the only way that I can really do anything in the direction of genuinely repaying what they did is to do my best to do for my students what they did for me. I think about that very, very often. So I never see my students as a burden. I’ve got so many things going on in my life. My life is very different from Professor Kurth’s or Professor Urban’s: they were teachers in a small college and they both were publishing scholars, consistent with what you can do when you have the teaching load you have at a small college. But most of their time was occupied with teaching. I’ve had not only an active career in scholarship, as well as teaching, but I’ve served on government commissions, chaired government commissions, served on foundation boards, I’ve been involved in various sorts of social causes, all of which means that I don’t have as much time for my students as they had— nor, frankly, do any professors at a research university like Princeton have as much time as, at least in those days, a professor at a liberal arts college had for their students. But even when I’m pressed, which I usually am, I never perceive my students as burdens or the time I have to invest in them as burdensome, even though it’s limited— necessarily, unavoidably, regrettably, limited. I don’t see it as a burden.
IAP: Certainly, I would say you’ve been wildly successful at offering that degree of critical thinking.
RPG: I don’t know if I can claim any credit for it, but I have had wildly successful students. My students are my pride and joy. And again, while on one side I feel grateful to my own teachers, and I try to repay my debt to them by doing for my students what they did for me; I’m also just overwhelmed with gratitude for my students. I see them out there making contributions in all sorts of domains, including the academic ones, but in politics, in business, in law, and all sorts of things.
You know, Lou Gehrig, the great New York Yankees hitter, famously said that he was the luckiest man in the world, but he wasn’t—I’m the luckiest man in the world! I get to take satisfaction in observing the achievements of Sherif Girgis, Ryan Anderson, Melissa Moschella, Ana Samuel, Meir Soloveichik, Yoram Hazony, Joel Alicea, Micah Watson, David Tubbs, Christopher Green, and on and on and on. You know, I’ve had students who have big careers in politics and law and other fields—the ones I’ve just mentioned are mostly in the academic field—it’s enormously gratifying to me. I’m just very proud of them and grateful to them. I feel I’ve made an investment in them and the investment has paid off a million times over—that if there were a way to account for this in money, I would be a billionaire, because of the great investments I’ve made in these students.
IAP: And that’s precisely the beauty of education. You’ve planted a seed that you now get to watch flourish: also, like the Parable of Talents, the interest has accrued.
RPG: What I’m proudest of them for is that they are truly determined courageous truth-seekers and truth speakers. Look at Ryan Anderson or Sherif Girgis, or Melissa Moschella, or Meir Soloveichik, or Daniel Mark—they’re fearless, and they’re not ideologues. They’re trying to get at the truth of things. And they’re not tribalists, they’ll tell the truth as they see the truth, let the chips fall where they may. And they’re not afraid to tell it when it’s an unpopular truth in the worlds in which they operate. It doesn’t get better than that.
IAP: While you’ve mentioned truth-seeking, truth-speaking, and medieval philosophy, I’ve noticed a bit of an Augustinian thread in your courses. In City of God, Augustine mentions how Alexander was not so great and how his empire was just mass-scale theft. I think you have made similar comments about why we look at Alexander as great, especially in our day and age when plunder and conquest are not so well-received. And in Confessions he talks about this quest for the truth which begins when he reads the Hortensius and then comes to wrestle with the arguments of the Manicheans and the Christians, and eventually away from the Manicheans and towards Christianity. What role, if any, would you say that the thought of Saint Augustine plays in your philosophy or in your teaching? Or is this more of a happy coincidence?
RPG: I’ve certainly appreciated and learned from Augustine’ writings—and not just Confessions, although certainly that—but City of God and his other writings as well. My Protestant friends especially would be startled by your attributing to me influence from Saint Augustine. They think I’m not Augustinian enough! Cornel West, for example, thinks I’m not nearly Augustinian enough, I’m too Thomist. I’ll confess to being an Aristotelian Thomist—all Thomists are Aristotelian Thomists, really— but I’ve never seen Augustine as presenting some sort of radical alternative to the Aristotelian Thomist view. When people in my professional world do the classifications of who’s where on the chart they wouldn’t put me in the Augustinian camp, they would put me in the Aristotelian/Thomist camp, and that’s okay. It shows how inadequate those boxes are.
IAP: Right— these influences aren’t mutually exclusive.
RPG: Exactly.
IAP: One last question on the topic of gratitude: how can students show gratitude to their professors?
RPG: In the lives they lead. This applies far beyond just the people who become academics themselves. Whether you go into politics, whether you go into business, whether you go into law, the sciences. The greatest gift to me a student can make is by being what I see my job as helping to form my students to be: namely, a determined truth-seeker and a courageous truth-speaker. That’s all I really ask of my students. I don’t ask that they agree with me—I can be wrong about things, maybe they are right if they disagree with me. At the end of the day, I want people to be independent, I want people to think for themselves. I don’t want to make automatons; I don’t want to make disciples. They can disagree with me, they can criticize me— I’m fine with that. I would be unhappy, though, if they were tribalists, if they were not dedicated to seeking the truth and doing their best to live by the truth and then speaking the truth, as best they grasp it, courageously. I would be embarrassed if my students were cowards. I would be embarrassed if my students didn’t care what the truth was, or were just trying to get ahead, or advance their particular tribe’s cause or interests. I wouldn’t be very happy about that.
IAP: Of course not. On that note, thank you very much, professor.
Interview responses hsve been edited for clarity.
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My conversation with Professor George reminded me of what I most enjoyed about taking his courses. His exhortation to pursue truth first and foremost was an inspiring one, and his story made a deep impression on me (especially as an aspiring teacher). Great teachers and great books can be life-changing, and the value of reading courses is not to be underestimated. Conducting this interview was both a pleasure and a privilege.
—Ignacio Arias Philippi, Humanities Correspondent
