Two of the foremost public intellectuals in American life, from two very different schools of thought, Robert P. George and Cornel West have both spoken individually throughout their careers at Chautauqua. Now, this “ideological odd couple” return to the Institution as part of the Chautauqua Lecture Series to open a week on friendship and, more notably, the 2023 Summer Assembly Season with a conversation on their own friendship and how such civic friendships, woven across divides, can do more than just strengthen our social fabric, but preserve and strengthen American democracy itself.

Robert P. George is the sixth McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, a program founded under his leadership in 2000. A frequent Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, he has served as chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom as well as a presidential appointee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the President’s Council on Bioethics. In addition, George has served as the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology. He was also a Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award.

George is a recipient of the U.S. Presidential Citizens Medal, the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland, the Irving Kristol Award of the American Enterprise Institute, the Canterbury Medal of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Sidney Hook Memorial Award of the National Association of Scholars, the Philip Merrill Award of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the Bradley Prize for Intellectual and Civic Achievement, the Irving Kristol Award of the American Enterprise Institute, the James Q. Wilson Award of the Association for the Study of Free Institutions, and one of Princeton University’s highest honors — the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. His selected publications include Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality; In Defense of Natural Law; and Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Challenges of Liberal Secularism.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Swarthmore, George holds J.D. and M.T.S. degrees from Harvard University as well as D.Phil., B.C.L., D.C.L., D.Litt. degrees from Oxford University.

Cornel West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary, where he teaches on the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as courses in Philosophy of Religion, African American Critical Thought, and a wide range of subjects — including but by no means limited to the classics, philosophy, politics, cultural theory, literature and music. His passion is to communicate to a vast variety of publics in order to keep alive the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. — a legacy of telling the truth and bearing witness to love and justice.

The recipient of an American Book Award, West is a long-time member of the Democratic Socialists of America, for which he served as an honorary chair and a co-founder of the Network of Spiritual Progressives. He is on the advisory board of the International Bridges to Justice and has received a special recognition from the World Cultural Council. West is also a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and its World Policy Council, and a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. West, who has written 20 books and edited 13, is best known for his classics, Race Matters and Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism, and for his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. His most recent book, Black Prophetic Fire, offers an unflinching look at 19th- and 20th-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies.

In addition to professorships and fellowships at Yale University, Dartmouth College, Pepperdine University, and the University of Paris, West is the former Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton.