“What happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus. For better or for worse,” Princeton University Professor Robert George said during a recent talk about how free speech ideas in higher education have filtered into the broader culture.
George, a well-known conservative, spoke Friday at the event “Faithful Free Speech: From Campus to the Hill,” hosted by the American Enterprise Institute and Faith and Law, a non-partisan organization that serves congressional staff, integrating faith and policy. AEI is a think tank based in Washington, D.C. that defends human dignity and prioritizes the values of the nation’s founding.
Pete Peterson, dean of Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy, spoke with George about the founders’ intention behind the First Amendment in connecting religion and speech.
George, the McCormick professor of jurisprudence at Princeton, quoted the Declaration of Independence, which says human beings’ rights are “endowed” by God.
“In other words, the role of government is to secure rights that government did not create,” George said. “Those rights don’t come from the hands of kings or presidents or parliaments or Congresses or Supreme Courts. They come from no merely human power.”
The government’s job is to secure these rights by making sure “people do not become predators against each other, that people don’t violate each other’s rights,” he said.
Recalling a quote from James Madison, George said, “Only a well-instructed people can be permanently free people. And the way we gain instruction is not simply by going to school. That’s important. It’s very important. But that’s not the only way.”
George continued, “We gain instruction by engaging with each other, by trading reasons and arguments, by doing business with each other in the proper currency of intellectual discourse.”
He urged Americans to pay attention to what is happening on college campuses because “what happens on campus really is vital to what happens in the broader society.”
He gave the example of how “hate speech” is now widely considered to be an exception to the First Amendment, an idea that began on college campuses.
George said his students at Princeton are high achievers, valedictorians and top-level SAT scorers. But when he teaches Constitutional law and asks what types of speech are not protected by the First Amendment, they often mention “hate speech.”
“There is no such category which in our Constitutional jurisprudence constitutes an exception, and for very good reasons,” he said.
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