The Chronicle: A glance at the March 13 issue of The Nation: Princeton as a foothold for the right
Robert P. George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University, is turning that university’s campus into “a testing ground for the latest phase in the right’s effort to politicize the academy,” says Max Blumenthal, a writing fellow with the Nation Institute.
At Princeton, Mr. George is well liked, says Mr. Blumenthal. He is considered an “accomplished legal and moral philosopher who has earned the admiration of conservative intellectuals and mainstream academia.” Yet there is also another side to the man, he writes, one that is “less tolerant, ferociously partisan, and intimately connected to wealthy organizations that wish explicitly to inject their politics into the universities.”
As a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, Mr. George has supported the Bush administration’s policies on limiting federal support for stem-cell studies and opposing same-sex marriage, Mr. Blumenthal writes. At Princeton, the author adds, the professor exercises his conservatism through his directorship of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.
The semiautonomous program, part of the department of politics, describes itself on its Web site as an initiative that fosters scholarship and debate on questions of constitutional law and “the application of legal and ethical principles to contemporary problems.” Mr. Blumenthal, however, says the program is not dedicated to neutral scholarship but actually functions “as a vehicle for conservative interests.”
The Madison Program has had a number of conservative supporters, he says, such as the now-defunct John M. Olin Foundation, which donated $525,000 in 2000, and the Bradley Foundation, which gave $400,000 in 2002 and 2003. In those years, more than $330,000 came from what Mr. Blumenthal describes as conduit groups for “the secretive, cultish Catholic group” Opus Dei. All such money, he adds, has been used “to support gatherings of movement activists, fellowships for ideologically correct visiting professors, and a cadre of conservative students.”
Mr. George denied to Mr. Blumenthal that the Madison Program had accepted money from Opus Dei, but was unsure whether it had received support from groups affiliated with the organization. He also said it was “misleading to call the program a conservative program,” Mr. Blumenthal writes, but said the program took “a certain coloration” from his own conservatism.
Mr. Blumenthal apparently is not convinced. The Madison program, he insists, “has become the blueprint for the right’s strategy to extend and consolidate power within the university system.”
The article, “Princeton Tilts Right,” is available at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060313/blumenthal
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