Hello and welcome to Voices of Freedom, a Bradley Foundation podcast. I'm Rick Graber, President and CEO of the Bradley Foundation. On the podcast, we'll explore issues that affect our freedoms with a focus on free enterprise, free speech, and educational freedom. So let's get started.

Attending a four-year university was once the most logical path toward learning how to think critically and engage with new ideas. Yet, sadly, many college campuses today have become hostile to viewpoint diversity and tolerant of radical extremism. Often this has come at the expense of respecting individual rights, including the most fundamental rights guaranteed by our Constitution, of course, free speech and religious liberty. Yet it's also fair to say that higher education may be at a tipping point, making it ripe for reform. Our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom is perhaps the country's leading champion of academic freedom, free speech, and religious freedom. Robbie George is the McCormick Professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University and the Director of Princeton's James Madison program in American Ideals and Institutions, which was founded by Robbie in 2000. Robbie holds numerous distinctions and awards, including the US presidential Citizens Medal and a 2005 Bradley Prize. He also serves on the Bradley Foundation Board of Directors, now as our longest serving Director. Time flies. Welcome, Robbie. It's great to have you.

Thank you, Rick. It's wonderful to be back on Voices of Freedom. Thank you for your leadership of the foundation. We've got a great board at the Bradley Foundation. As the now senior member, not in age, but in number of years, I want to claim full credit for our great board because I voted on every single one of you. Every single one of those votes was a great vote.

We do have a wonderful board that is dedicated and respects our donor intent, the Bradley Brothers. It really has allowed the Bradley Foundation to remain true to their ideals and to their wishes. There are a lot of foundations in this country that can't say that.

That's certainly true, and that's a determined effort. When I myself came onto the board back in the Middle Ages, the thing that was drilled into my head was that we must be faithful to the intent of Lined and Hairy Bradley, they established this foundation to uphold the principles of American exceptionalism, our constitutional ideals, our economic system, which made their prosperity and the prosperity of so many millions possible, lifted so many people out of poverty. Respect for the rule of law, our institutions of Republican democracy, respect for the autonomy and integrity of civil society. And we have remained resolutely faithful to those principles. The members of the board are people who share those principles. We stand by them and we think that the future of the nation depends on fidelity to those principles.

Absolutely. It's an honor to serve with all of you. But let's start with you, Ravi. Let's talk about you a little bit. You grew up in West Virginia, and I know as a teenager, you performed with folk groups and bluegrass bands and coffee shops and clubs and state fairs, and you still do for that matter. But it sure seems to me that It's a very long road from coffee shops in West Virginia to Princeton in the world of academia. How on earth did that happen?

Well, it's an American story, I suppose. Yeah, I was born and brought up in the heart of Appalachian, West Virginia. Both of my grandfathers were coal miners. Probably the reason I'm not in the minds today is World War II. Now, I wasn't born until 10 years after World War II, but my father was conscripted into the service, into the army, to fight in Europe when he turned 18 in 1944. And off he went, first basic training, and then to England, and then across the channel, where on the Troop carrier, the Leopoldville, The carrier was struck by a German torpedo and went down. About half the men aboard were lost. But my father was among the lucky ones who was not only rescued by a British patrol boat, but was uninjured. So he was sent on to fight, and he served with great distinction and valor in Normandy and in Brittany, and then with the occupation after the war. Now, when he came back to the United States, he had some opportunities. He had some training. Things were such that he was able to avoid going down into the coal mines like his father and eventually, and his future father-in-law.

But he didn't have the opportunity to go to college, so I I was the first in my family to go to college. My mom and dad thought that that was a very important thing to do. I'm the oldest of five, all boys, and they very much wanted us to go to college. When the time came, I, as the pioneer, the oldest son, went in to see my college guidance counselor, and she handed me a big fat book called Barron's College Guide. I looked at all these colleges. I couldn't read all 3,000 profiles, I read those dozen or so that were listed in the book as Most Competitive. I didn't know much about those places, but I read about them. As it happened, a couple of them really appealed to me by the profile. One was a liberal arts college outside of Philadelphia called Swarthmore, where I applied and was accepted. It was there that I became interested in liberal arts education, in philosophy, in particular in legal and political philosophy. Then things went the way they went from there. I went from Swarthmore up to Harvard to law school, and I got a master's degree while I was there in law school as well.

Then off to Oxford University to study philosophy of law for my doctorate. I like to say, Rick, that when I arrived at Swarthmore College, I was shoeless with my Banjo on my back. The shoeless part is merely metaphoric. I did have shoes on. But the Banjo on my back was literal. I did earn money when I was a kid, instead of by mowing lawns or having a newspaper run. I earned money by playing the Banjo with bluegrass bands, especially with dance bands, square dances, and fire halls, and rod and gun clubs and things like that. So I got a blessed life. In a certain way, it's what American exceptionalism is really all about. It's about the social mobility that I and my brothers experience. One generation, you're coal miners, and then two generations from there, in my case, I'm a former professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University. That's not fundamentally about me, Rick. That's fundamentally about America. Because my story is not the exception. My story is the norm. When I tell that story to any audience, I know that I can count on just about everybody in that audience having a similar story about their parents or grandparents or great-grandparents and what America made possible for them.

Rick, I came by my patriotism the same way I came by my Banjo playing. I came by it honestly.

You're right. It's a great American story that has played out in a lot of different ways, but in a lot of ways similar as well. Outstanding. Robbie, you've written that the university should be an institution for truth-seeking. Students attend college at a time in their lives where they've got time, they've got freedom, they've got capacity to be exposed to new and different ideas, to think critically, to challenge pre-existing beliefs. Do you think, and you're in the middle of this, is the environment at most of today's universities still really conducive to truth-seeking?

I wish I could say that the answer to that question is yes, Rick, but it's not. We are desperately in need of reform in higher education to return to our foundational principles, to return to our mission as truth-seeking institutions. I think my fundamental role as a teacher is to help the young men and women entrust it to my charge, entrust it to my care by their families, help them to form themselves to be determined truth seekers and courageous truth seekers. Now, I hope they go on to great things. I hope that they make a lot of money. I hope that they get jobs at Goldman Sachs or wherever they want be, that they have high social standing and prestige and all those things. But those are secondary. Those are the things that matter, and they're worth aspiring to, but not the things that ultimately matter. College is a time to begin thinking about the things that ultimately matter. Certainly, liberal arts colleges or institutions designed to do that. The things that are worthwhile, not simply as means to other ends, like wealth and status and power and prestige and celebrity and so forth, but the things that matter for their own sake that are intrinsic to our flourishing as human beings: family, faith, friendship, knowledge, beauty, integrity, honesty, dignity.

These are what ultimately matter. What we, at our best in universities, do is help our students to lead what the great founders of our tradition of learning in the West called the examined life. We want our students to think about what matters, to think critically about what matters, not just to accept whatever they're told, but to think critically, to examine their own values, their own beliefs, their own feelings and emotions, their own ideas, and be a genuine thinker, an independent thinker. Again, a determined truth seeker and a courageous truth speaker. But we're We're not doing that, or at least we're not doing it as much as we should be doing it. Our institutions have gone two, four in a different direction, and it's time to return to the original founding vision, the original mission.

That's a common theme we'll come back to a couple of times during our conversation, Robbie. Let's drill down a little bit on a recent event. Senior leadership at more than a few universities have come under, I would argue, a very well-deserved fire for their handling of the pro-Palestinian protests last fall and this spring. We've watched three Ivy League presidents resign their posts under pressure since October seventh. Certainly, there have been some major donors that have recented or held back gifts. Do you think that's a blip? Or do you think universities are now starting to understand that they have to change the way they handle extremist behavior on campus?

I think what these events have focused the minds of administrators on is the real problems that come when we allow faculty and students and administrators to politicize education Just as you can go wrong by overdoing the professionalism at the cost of truth-seeking, you can go very, very wrong by politicizing the university at the cost of truth-seeking. We are not supposed to be institutions that train radical activists or even non-radical. Activism on campus is fine. It's great that there's a Republican club and a Democratic club. I don't care if there's a libertarian club or a socialist club. Those things are fine to the extent that they do not interfere with or impede or attempt to take over the truth-seeking mission, the intellectual mission of the university. But in too many classes, we're not getting genuine education, critical thinking, learning. We're getting indoctrination into political ideologies. And administrators have let that go on much too often. And they paid a price for it this past spring. Really, what came to light above all, Rick, was hypocrisy. When those three university presidents testified before Congress in that catastrophic for them and their institutions hearing. What they said about their university's free speech requirements wasn't untrue.

It wasn't false. It was true when they said, Well, look, it really depends on the context of certain sorts of expression, whether it is prohibited by our academic codes of conduct and whether regulation is permitted by our free speech rules. The trouble was not that what they said was false, but that the invocation of those free speech rules came across as hypocritical because it was hypocritical. And that was because in so many cases, at all three of those universities, they had violated the free speech of faculty who dissented from the standard progressive ideological agenda or the woke agenda. You can't be invoking free speech to protect Hamas demonstrators. When you have thrown free speech out the window in the case of people who have conservative views about economics or social policy or foreign policy, or questions of DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, or affirmative action, or whatever it is. There's got to be one standard, and it's got to be the same for everybody, whether you're on the left or on the right, whether your cause is Palestine your cause is economic free markets. There's got to be one standard in universities. I don't want the universities to put their thumb on the scale in favor of conservatism, but I don't want to put their thumb on the scale in favor of progressivism or woke ideologies either.

They had been putting a thumb on the scale, and it was always to the left, and they got called out on it. They got caught. That hypocrisy was exposed for everybody to see?

Yes. Same type of question. Higher education has come under well-deserved scrutiny for overzealous DEI departments. You talked about DEI. Some universities, though, are now limiting DEI programs. In fact, the University of North Carolina, or all the public universities in North Carolina, have gone so far as to eliminate mandated DEI offices. Do you think we're at a point where tuition paying parents and taxpayers have just had enough of policies that overlook and ignore America?

We're not quite at that point yet. That's right. But I hope we get there, and I hope we get there fast. I think those universities, they're cutting back or eliminating things like mandatory DEI statements for university faculty, which are nothing more than loyalty oaths. They're McCarthyite tactics to secure in the university a certain ideology as dominant. Same with so much of the DEI apparatus. Let's be clear about what's really going on here. They're not protecting diversity, equity, and inclusion. They're doing the reverse of that. Those policies and practices and programs and offices really have as their goal the elimination of dissenting points of view, not the expansion of diversity, the imposition of a monolithic perspective. They don't produce equity in any reasonable or responsible sense of that word. They produce bias. Don't talk to me about inclusion when so much of the goal seems to be to exclude evangelical Christians, Orthodox Jews, faithful Catholic, economic or social Conservatives. There There's something almost, which is worse than ironic, about the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion when it's used to undermine the very goals of genuine diversity, genuine equity, and genuine inclusion. It's substituting exclusion for inclusion.

Are you senior enough that they just don't bother asking you anymore for such statements?

They never did. I suppose they knew me well enough. I should probably put this on the record. A lot of conservative scholars, academics professors, or people who aspired to positions in academia have been victims of discrimination and bias. Their careers have been, if not ruined, badly damaged. Their progress and advancement has been impeded. But I've been blessed, Rick. I have not. I have to give credit where it's due. This is to the credit of Princeton University. They knew when they hired me because I didn't hide it, Rick. I did not lay low. I didn't stay in the closet until I got tenure. From the moment I stepped onto the campus to give my job talk, I made clear that I am dissenting from the liberal orthodoxy on the campus. They hired me anyway. Then seven years later, they awarded me tenure, and then a few years after that, promoted me, installed me in one of the university's most celebrated endowed chairs, the McCormack Professorship of Jursberg, and then allowed me to create my own program the James Madison program in American Ideals and Institutions, which is been the model.

But it was definitely different. It was definitely different times, right?

I mean, that takes us up as far as the year 2000. But even since then, I cannot say that I've been discriminated against. They've shallowed the university's awards and honors on me, recognition for my teaching. They have never attempted to limit or restrict what I could teach, what I could say in class, how I challenge my students. And of course, the majority of students are students on the left, and they get a pretty rigorous challenge for me. I'll do the same to my conservative students. They're smaller in numbers, but they get a challenge, too, because I think that's the job of the professor, to challenge people's beliefs, to get people to think about them, to learn to be independent and critical thinkers. We have, in recent years, hired and tenured some really outstanding Conservatives including some young Conservatives. I want you to keep your eye out for some young people here who were recently tenured, Greg Conti in political theory, Boris Hannon, Flora Schampi. These probably are names that don't mean anything to you now, but they are Conservatives who are now tenured professors at Princeton who are going to become quite well known in the future.

That's terrible. I'm happy here. Now, is it perfect? No, it's far from perfect. Are there abuses here? Plenty of abuses. Are there double standards? We still have some. We've eliminated a lot, but we still have some. Is there a need for improvement? Is there a need for reform? Absolutely. But the picture is not at all completely dark.

That's correct. I know a lot of people are questioning whether college is still a good investor. In some ways, it's not hard to understand why. The average cost of attending an in-state public university for four years is somewhere around 27,000 $1,000 a year. The cost to attend an Ivy League school can be as much as $90,000 a year. A lot of money. In addition to be saddled with debt, a lot of students leave with degrees that don't translate into high salaries, at least not quickly. What's your view? College still a wise investment?

The price of college has vastly outstripped the cost of living index. I mean, it's way above the standard inflation rate. Much of that, I think, is the fault of misguided government programs, including loan programs that incentivize colleges and universities, first to raise prices and then to expand these bureaucracies beyond all reason. Some universities have as many bureaucrats, as many members of the staff as they have students. Of course, those people have to be paid, and they need their benefits and so forth. That's why the cost of education has risen so much quickly and so much higher than even the cost of eggs and milk. That's got to be reformed, Rick. Our friend and former Bradley board colleague, Mitch Daniels, in his role, which he was in until recently as President of Purdue University. He did a great job. He showed us the way, how he was growing his loss. That's exactly right. I think that needs to be emulated by all universities. But that can only be done if we not only stop this bureaucratic bloat, if we turn it around. We need to lessen the number, certainly, percentage of bureaucrats at almost all universities, to tell you the truth.

It's a problem pretty much across the board. Now, I think parents are willing to pay for genuine education, even a high cost. They're willing to make sacrifices. Mine work. I'm going to guess yours. Mine, too. Willing to make sacrifices for genuine education. They're not going to make sacrifices and pay a lot of money to have their children indoctrinated into woke ideologies, left-wing ideology, or for that matter, right-wing ideology, which doesn't happen given who controls the universities. But if they're going to pay this money, they rightly expect a genuine education where their children learn to think for themselves and not a catechism class where they're just endocrine into a particular political or social point of view.

Seems like a very fair expectation. We talked about your students, and let's turn to free speech as it applies to your students. Free speech, of course, on many college campuses is under attack, almost cease to exist. I know every year you issue a welcome message to your students to encourage them to speak freely. And in it, you state, My job is not to tell students what to think or induce or encourage them to think as I do. It is rather to help students to think more deeply, more critically and for themselves. What I ask of students is open-mindedness, tolerance of those whose opinions differ from yours, a willingness not only to challenge others, but to be challenged in turn, and a genuine and deep desire to learn, and to learn by seriously engaging authors and fellow students whose ideas differ, even Radically Differ, from your own. What reaction do you get to that letter? Have any of your colleagues followed your lead on this?

Yes. Actually, I have taken to posting that statement of mine, which goes on my website for my courses each semester, and I also have a version of it that goes on my syllabus. I've taken to posting it on social media and encouraging professors not only at Princeton, but around the country, to just borrow freely from it. Here's one case where I want them to plagiarize. Please plagiarize. I have gotten a wonderful response from professors all across the country, and not just Conservatives, Rick. Old school liberals who are scandalized by what they're seeing out there as we are. They say, This is a great idea. I'm going to put this on my own syllabus. They take me up on my offer to plagiarize it. They need to adapt it, of course, to their own university. But I'm just delighted by that. I want to see this little gospel, if I may call it that, spread still further. Quite a few of my colleagues here at Princeton have done it, but it goes well beyond Princeton now.

That's great.

How about the students? Do you get a reaction from students?

Absolutely. Do you find when they walk into the class that they're ready for this conversation?

Yes, they are. I think they're excited about it. I think it's like you're able to let your hair down. You can actually say what you think. I have a reputation, as you may know, Rick, is a pretty rigorous grader.

Oh, yes, I know that.

The grade of C still exists in a lot of classes. It's extinct everywhere. It pretty much is, from what I understand. The grade of B is becoming extinct now. Students know that I'm a rigorous grader, but they know something else, and that is that they're agreeing or disagreeing with my views. And they know what my views are. I'm a very public person, as you know, Rick. So they are aware of what I think. But they know, and this pleases me, they know that their grade will not be affected in the slightest by whether they agree or disagree with me. And that gives them the confidence to genuinely speak their mind, explore ideas, challenge me. Now, I'm going to be challenging them. But part of the educational experience is also that they get to challenge me. I love that. Here at Princeton, we get really brilliant students. They make me think. The challenge is the issue or serious challenge. I haven't had my mind changed on anything. It's your fault with my students, but they do make me think. I have to scramble to answer the questions that they raise.

Yeah, great. Your letter also mentions that students should be willing to share and defend unpopular views. You talked about this in a recent New York Times piece. Yet many students are apprehensive to speak about their religious or political beliefs. They're afraid of limiting job prospects. They're afraid of being canceled. This, of course, isn't just young people we're talking about. Why do you think it's so important for people to get over their fears of advocating for what they believe in?

For this reason, Rick, and First, I want to say just what a big problem self-censorship is. It's not just at Princeton, it's everywhere. People are afraid. As you say, they're afraid that it may, speaking their minds, might damage their professional futures. In some cases, this is very regrettable and horrible. In some cases, they genuinely fear that a professor will give them a bad grade or a worse grade because they dissent from the professor's own opinion. But I think the more important factor than those, Rick, the one that I'm really worried about is very often students self-censor because they fear of being cast into the role of an outsider on campus. They're afraid that they'll alienate their friendship groups. They're afraid of their fellow students. That worries me. It's one thing to be afraid of an unshaped professor or even of your job prospects. But if you're unwilling to speak your mind because your own friends won't tolerate dissenting opinions, then that worries me about the culture. And culture here is really what matters. Now, what matters, I'm going to get to the heart of your question now. Why should we worry about this? It's because the whole point of coming to the university is to seek the truth.

That's it. And to learn to be a truth seeker, to learn to be a lifelong learner. If we do our jobs correctly in universities, what we do doesn't end after four years. You leave after four years. But we have formed you as a lifelong learner. Now, you can't do that if you're unwilling to speak your mind. You can't do that in a circumstance where no one will question for fear. No one will question whatever the prevailing orthodoxy is. And that would be as true if that prevailing orthodoxy, Rick, were on the right as it is when it's on the left. It happens to be on the left in these institutions today. But any time the prevailing orthodoxy cannot be questioned, it's considered sacrosanct or people fear dissenting from it because they'll lose friends or social connections or jobs or get a bad grade or whatever, then learning is not going to take place. And that's the whole reason for being of this university or any university. It's the cause of learning. So why worry about it? Why worry about self-censorship? Because learning is undermined. The very point of this enterprise is damaged. John Stuart Mill, the great liberal, one of the founding fathers of liberalism, usually not somebody we, Conservatives, in But he said something profoundly true, which I wish everybody would remember, that free speech is not simply a matter of, to put it in our American language, now, Mill as an Englishman wouldn't say this, but I'll put it in our terms, is It's not just a matter of having a First Amendment, having the formal right to free speech.

That's important. It's good. I'm glad we have the First Amendment. We're seeing today what an advantage it is over Britain, where there's a huge assault from the government on free and no first amendment to protect, or no first amendment principle to protect the English people. But Mill made the point that it's protective rules about free speech are one thing, but they're insufficient. They're important, they're necessary, but they're not sufficient. What you need is a culture of free speech, a culture in which people are free to exercise their right to speak for themselves, to question other people's beliefs, to raise questions about whatever the dominant beliefs are. Our founding fathers warned about constitutional principles. They obviously believed in the importance of constitutional principles. They gave us our constitutional principles. That they warned that they could become your Parchment Guarantees. Words on a page, Parchment Guarantees. They only come to life if people are willing to add on. We'd be nowhere if we had the formality of First Amendment. But in practice, in culture, everybody's afraid to actually speak freely. Well, the First Amendment does us no good then.

Yes.

So we need to create a culture of free speech. And if that culture should exist anywhere, Rick, the very first place that should exist is on college campuses.

Do you find that you have to break down those fears with your students? Are your students different in December than they were in September?

Yeah, it takes a little time. It does take a little time. Because when you're not accustomed to speaking your mind, you're not accustomed to raising questions about prevailing opinions, dominant opinions, you're a little nervous about it. Even if you've got a professor who's encouraging you and ensuring you that nothing bad is going to happen to you, you really can't speak your mind. You'll know, Rick, elsewhere in the materials that you've been quoting me from, I make the invitation to people to please be the devil's advocate. Even if you don't believe a certain unpopular view, do our class a favor by exploring it to see how far it can be defended. You might talk yourself into it. You might not talk yourself into it, but you might defend it so well that you talk somebody else into it. You're going to do us all a favor by getting that position out on the table and just seeing how far it can be defended, how far it will hold up. But it does take a little time for students to feel comfortable about that. When And they've been, basically, for all intents and purposes, in Hyde.

Yes. Fascinating. Last question. And, Robbie, I try to end on high notes with these conversations. And I think I know how you're going to respond to this. And you've alluded to it already in our chat today. Is there a reason for hope that change is coming to higher education in America? I've heard you talk about increasing opportunities for conservative scholars across the country. There's a lot of work to do here, but is there hope?

There is hope. There's some good things happening out there. Let me give you some of my reasons for hope. Number one, I think parents now are more aware of the problems of politicization and endocrination in universities than they were even three years ago. That's progress. Number two, I think parents Parents are being more fully involved with their kids, their sons and daughters, when it comes to the question of where I should go to college. They're no longer focusing as much on what's going to get me or my kid that job at Goldman Sachs or into Harvard law school and a job at Kravat, Wayne & Morris, Oliver & Cromwell, and more concerned, and this is a great thing, more concerned with what's going to happen to the soul of my student, what's going to happen to the mind of my son or daughter. Parents weren't really tuned into that all that much three years ago. They are now. Parents, number one, students themselves, of course, are more aware of those issues than they were. Number two, donors. Something I had so much trouble figuring out for... I've been in this business now. I'm entering my 40th year at Princeton.

Something for 35 years or more that I just couldn't figure out was, why do donors freely give money with no restrictions to colleges and universities where their values, the donor's own values, are being systematically undermined, ridiculed, trashed. I don't get that. Well, it seems to me in the last two, three years, really in the last year, in a certain way, above all, donors have woken up. And they're now saying, Well, wait a minute. If that's what's going to go on at this university, if it's going to be catechism class for a particular ideology, and if the values being taught are going to be the values that undermine my values, then I'm not going to give me any money. Or at a minimum, I'm going to target my giving, which is the intelligent thing to do. I would encourage people who've been blessed with resources and have a philanthropic spirit not to stop giving money to higher education. Target it. Send it to the places and to the programs that are providing genuine education, teaching students to be critical thinkers, to think deeply, to think critically, to think for themselves. So that's number two. Number three, and this is just an objective fact, if we look around the country, there are institutions being built either as alternatives to existing institutions.

Here, for example, I'm thinking of the University of Austin in Texas, or within existing universities, both private universities and public universities, that model for the rest of the university what it means to be a genuine educational institution, where we've thrown the politics out and we're doing real education. This is especially true in the civic education area. Just in the past five years, we've seen the creation of new institutes for civic studies, studies in law, politics, philosophy, history, economics, and so forth. Many of them modeled on my program at Princeton, I'm very proud to say, modeled on the James Madison program at the University of Florida, at the University of Texas, at Arizona State University, at the University of North Carolina, now, most recently at the University of Tennessee and the Ohio State University. In fact, in the case of Ohio, their institute's being built not only at Ohio State, which is the flagship, of course, but at several of the other state universities. There are similar sorts of institutes now at many private universities, the program in Human Flourishing at Harvard, the program in Moral philosophy at University of Chicago, the program in Marketing Economics at the University of Pennsylvania and on and on.

They're setting the example, Rick. They are showing that it can be done, that real education can be restored. What's to argue with? People will say, people who have given up hope will say, Well, it's just impossible. It never happened at Princeton. It never happened at Harvard. We never got that at the University of Florida. Well, I mean, the evidence is now in. We've got these institutes, and they are flourishing, and students are walking to their classes. Our executive director at the Madison program in Princeton, the wonderful Dr. Shiloh Brooks, who came to us from the University of Colorado just a couple of years ago. Last semester, Rick, he taught a course in statesmanship, where he looked at great figures in the history of political leadership, going back into Antiquity and all the way into the modern period with people like Lincoln and Winston Churchill. At Little Princeton University, and remember, we're really a small liberal arts college pretending to be a big university. There are only about 7,500 students, including our graduate students. We're about the third the size of Harvard and Yale. But here at Little Princeton, We had 265 students sign up for Shiloh's course in statesmanship.

Now, he's a brilliant teacher, and many of the students came because he's a brilliant teacher. But beyond his being a brilliant teacher, they knew they were getting genuine education, not indoctrination. They were studying things that really matter, the thought of a figure like Lincoln, the thought of a figure like Churchill. They saw the opportunity to learn about figures from antiquity who's Names they recognize, but they knew nothing about. I mean, it was by far the largest course taught in the politics department, and it was one of the largest courses taught in the entire university. So there is a market. The students are interested Understood. I guess what we're doing is we're vindicating that old slogan in the real estate business, Build it and they will come. Well, we built it and they are coming, Rick.

That's terrific. Robbie George, thanks so much for spending some time with us today. Thanks for your courage and leadership on these just critical issues to the future of our country. We truly do appreciate it.

Thank you so much, Rick, and thanks for everything the Bradley Foundation does.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Voices of Freedom. Join us next month on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast for our next conversation on issues impacting our freedom in America's foundational principles. And make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. I'm Rick Rick Graber, and this is a Bradley Foundation podcast.