Shortly after waking up in a garbage can behind Frist Food Gallery on Saturday night, Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, proudly announced to Tiger reporters that he had a “fucking ridiculous Newman’s Day.”
April 24th marked the latest in a long line of successful Newman’s Days for the conservative intellectual, who told the Tiger that he was “mostly done by like 4:00 [PM] and then pretty much went balls out to finish.” This marks the professor’s seventh consecutive completion of the challenge, tying the record set by former President Shirley Tilghman.
George’s day started at a morning party with President Christopher Eisgruber and Professor Eric Gregory. “ Rick and Chris started strong, but they just weren’t sure they were ready to go all the way—since it’s a weekday and shit. But I was just like, ‘Alright, bros, it’s college and I just want to party!’” Gregory and Eisgruber then “decided to fucking bounce,” leaving George to drink alone. “So I just kind of went for it on my own from there,” said the professor.
President Eisgruber independently confirmed George’s story in a later interview. According to Eisgruber, George seemed “astoundingly drunk” and “as crazy as that time when he compared same-sex marriage to marrying an inanimate object in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy”—although of course the tenured professor was in fact completely sober during that incident.
After the morning party, George went to work. The professor told Tiger reporters that he had some academic tasks he had planned to finish—he wanted to write the last two chapters of an upcoming book on moral values in American politics and scan over some student papers from a seminar he’s teaching on Christianity and philosophy.
When he arrived at his office, however, he discovered that he could not read or write due to blurred vision. “I realized I had my glasses on,” he said, “and I was just too hammered. After that, my secretary came in and said there were some things I needed to sign, and then I kinda browned out for a couple of hours and I don’t remember much.”
Laughing boisterously, George related a highlight of the day. “I do remember pissing on Alexander Beach. I saw this P-Safe officer running over and I thought he was gonna kill me. Unbelievable. I was so goddam drunk!” The professor also told reporters he had vague memories of trying to climb on the dinosaur in Guyot and of having an argument over prayer in schools with a lamppost.
George, who David Kirkpatrick of The New York Times called America’s “most influential conservative Christian thinker,” paused to rub his head and wipe some trash off his suit. “Jesus,” he chuckled, “I have no fucking clue how I got here. Fucking Newman’s Day.”
His secretary confirmed that yes, Professor George would be crashing TI houseparties again this year.
– MSS ’17