Cornel West and Robert P. George in Conversation

The Center for American Civic Leadership and Public Discourse at the University of South Carolina is pleased to welcome Cornel West and Robert P. George. The center’s first keynote event brings together two scholars well known for their friendship across disagreement. Cornel West and Robert P. George will speak at USC on September 12, 2025 about their longstanding collaborations and their recent book, Truth Matters: A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division, which models intellectual engagement and constructive disagreement.

Doors open at 6 p.m. The program will begin promptly at 6:30 p.m. This event is free and open to the public, but pre-registration is suggested.

About Cornel West

Cornel West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary. 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.

His numerous books include his classics, Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. His most recent book, Black Prophetic Fire, offers an unflinching look at nineteenth and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies.

About Robert P. George

Robert P. George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He was chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, the United States Commission on Civil Rights, and UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology. He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award.

About the Center

The Center for American Civic Leadership and Public Discourse aspires to promote three kinds of literacy that are essential to a well-ordered and flourishing polity:

Dialogic literacy provides the skills needed to make a rational argument. These skills enable participants in important debates to recognize the difference between reasoned belief based on evidence and mere opinion. And they shape the effort needed to make disagreement both civil and constructive.

Cultural literacy requires knowledge of the sources, texts and traditions that go into making us who we are as a people, including who we are as a people who often disagree with one another. Our founding documents, and the philosophic, political, literary, and religious traditions out of which they emerged, aimed to identify core values and aspirations central to the American character. These values and aspirations were intended to bind us together even when other significant commitments – moral, political, religious – might be in conflict.

Civic literacy brings the other two forms of literacy to bear on the central questions of citizenship: what does it mean to be a good citizen, and what are the tasks of good citizenship? The questions of citizenship cannot be answered without sound reasoning and productive debate; and answering those questions well requires that we draw from the inherited wisdom of our common culture. But civic literacy requires something more: a commitment to work for the sake of the common good. The Center for Civic Leadership and Public Discourse hopes to inspire those who share in our mission to renew their commitment to work for the common good of our University, our State, and our Nation.

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