Academic Career
George joined the faculty of Princeton University as an Instructor in 1985. The following year he became a tenure-track Assistant Professor. In 1988-89 he spent a sabbatical leave at Oxford University as a Visiting Fellow in Law, working on his book Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality, which was published by Oxford University Press in 1993. The book challenged key premises of contemporary liberal political philosophy, and drew praise even from thinkers working firmly within the liberal tradition. One prominent political philosopher, Jeffrie Murphy, stated that “Robert George has, I must admit, made me nervous about my commitments to liberalism.” In 1994, George was awarded tenure at Princeton and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor. In 1999, he was elevated to the rank of Professor and installed in Princeton’s McCormick Chair of Jurisprudence, a celebrated endowed professorship previously held by Woodrow Wilson, Edward S. Corwin, Alpheus T. Mason, and Walter F. Murphy. George founded Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions in 2000 and continues to serve as its Director.
George is an award-winning teacher at Princeton, where his courses are heavily subscribed and, according to the Princeton University Undergraduate Course Guide, are among the most highly rated in the university. Since 2007, George has been teaching with his Princeton colleague Cornel West, a leading left-wing public intellectual, in undergraduate seminars on leading thinkers in western intellectual history. Readings have included Sophocles' Antigone, Plato's Gorgias, St. Augustine’s Confessions, Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto, Dubois’ The Souls of Black Folk, Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, Strauss’s Natural Right and History, and King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. The George-West collaboration has drawn attention both on and off campus, and is widely noted as an example of how scholars can work together across ideological lines of division to enhance the quality of higher education.
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