A Conservative Professor on How to Fix Campus Culture

Summary of A Conservative Professor on How to Fix Campus Culture

by WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

26m•October 6, 2025
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Summary — "A Conservative Professor on How to Fix Campus Culture"

Author/Host: WNYC Studios and The New Yorker
Episode: New Yorker Radio Hour (host: David Remnick)

Note: the provided transcript is partial and heavily corrupted with repeated lines. The summary below extracts the clear, repeated, and uncorrupted elements present in the text.

Overview

This segment profiles Robert P. George, a Princeton legal scholar and political philosopher, and discusses his views on current campus culture and how to restore civil debate. George is a prominent conservative public intellectual — known for opposing Roe v. Wade and same‑sex marriage, for mentoring political figures (including Ted Cruz), and for receiving a presidential medal — who nonetheless resists efforts to use government power to force universities to adopt a conservative agenda. He wrote Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment to offer a way back to more constructive public discourse.

Key points and main takeaways

  • Robert P. George is an active participant in the culture wars with a conservative record on issues like abortion and marriage.
  • He has taken a public stance against Donald Trump (co‑authoring a 2016 op‑ed calling Trump unfit).
  • George believes campus intellectual life has become too uniform and that this uniformity stifles debate.
  • He opposes government interventions (e.g., Trump administration measures) that punish universities to force adherence to conservative priorities on DEI, protests, or academic freedom.
  • His book seeks to chart a path toward civil, truth‑oriented discussion in a deeply fractured political and cultural environment.

Notable insights / paraphrased points

  • George is portrayed as both a conservative critic of cultural trends and as someone who resists using coercive state power to reshape higher education.
  • The central aim of his recent book: charting a course back to civil functioning debate and the pursuit of truth in the cultural moment.

(Direct verbatim quotes were not available in the corrupted transcript excerpts provided.)

Topics discussed

  • Campus culture and intellectual uniformity
  • Freedom of speech and academic freedom on college campuses
  • Government policy toward universities (Trump administration crackdowns on DEI and protest policies)
  • The role of public intellectuals in the culture wars
  • Robert P. George’s public record and his book Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth

Action items / recommendations (implicit in the piece)

  • Rebuild campus culture around open, civil debate and truth‑seeking (central theme of George’s book).
  • Resist coercive government measures that try to force ideological conformity on universities.
  • Address the problem of ideological uniformity on campuses through scholarly and institutional reforms rather than political coercion (implied approach).

Bottom line

Robert P. George combines conservative convictions on moral and legal issues with a principled opposition to heavy‑handed political efforts to remake academia. He calls for restoring pluralism and civil discourse on campuses and frames his book as a guide to achieving that in a polarized cultural moment.

If you want, I can locate and summarize specific recommendations from George’s book or provide a more complete summary based on the full, uncorrupted interview audio.