Finally Cheerful

A glance at the Madison Program's apparatus reveals a "coloration" more akin to the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute than the benign, albeit slightly right-of-center academic institution George has described. Perhaps it is no wonder a favorable but factual January 1 profile of George in the Trenton Times described his program as "a conservative think tank."

Besides packing the Madison Program's advisory council with right-wing donors (as many partisan think tanks do with their boards of directors), George has assembled a collection of visiting fellows rife with academic neophytes and unknowns--many of whom have also been fellows of foundations like Olin and Bradley. Unlike most other academic centers on campus, the Madison Program accepts no endowment money from Princeton. The school, therefore, pays nothing for the services of Madison fellows, and their academic credentials are left to George to determine.

One of George's fellows, Matthew Holland, a political science professor at Brigham Young University, has not written a single book. According to Holland's biography, his "current research project examines what it might mean for public policy and constitutional interpretation in America today if liberal political theory took as seriously as the founders did the notion that freedom was something to be preserved as well as enjoyed."

Many of the Madison Program's visiting fellows have taught courses in Princeton's politics department or precepted for other professors. This spring the program will bring the University of Toronto's Rabbi David Novak to campus to teach a course on natural law in Judaism and Christianity. Novak is another close ally of George's. In 1994 they signed a manifesto against homosexuality that stated, "The gay and lesbian movement...have unloosed a great moral agitation in our culture."

George has attracted ideologically like-minded students to the Madison Program by offering them "junior fellowships." Many of these junior fellows are simultaneously affiliated with Opus Dei, according to the Daily Princetonian. Many of the staff members of The Princeton Tory are Madison junior fellows, as is the president of the Princeton College Republicans. This is what National Review's Kurtz meant when he hailed the program for giving social conservatives "a place to go."

By intensifying conservatism's imprint on Princeton's curriculums, George claimed to me that he has ingratiated himself with the school. "Alumni and members of the university community, including people in the development office," he said, "have reported to me that my presence in the university and as the leader of a program has been remarked on favorably as showing that Princeton is a place that truly values intellectual diversity."

It's a good thing Princeton approves--or appears to approve--of what George is doing. Because as Philanthropy suggests, the Madison Program's refusal to accept a university endowment prevents the school from exercising leverage over it. "Without an endowment," the magazine writes, "there is nothing for the university to seize if it were to take over the Madison Program. At the slightest threat to the program's integrity, the foundations and philanthropists supporting it can pull their money."

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