A Sense of Doubt blog post #3304 - Hillsdale College - The Christian Liberal-Arts School at the Heart of the Culture Wars
This may be the last of my saved articles from The New Yorker before I ended my subscription.
Sadly, from my home state of Michigan...
LOW POWER MODE: I sometimes put the blog in what I call LOW POWER MODE. If you see this note, the blog is operating like a sleeping computer, maintaining static memory, but making no new computations. If I am in low power mode, it's because I do not have time to do much that's inventive, original, or even substantive on the blog. This means I am posting straight shares, limited content posts, reprints, often something qualifying for the THAT ONE THING category and other easy to make posts to keep me daily. That's the deal. Thanks for reading.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/10/the-christian-liberal-arts-school-at-the-heart-of-the-culture-wars
The Christian Liberal-Arts School at the Heart of the Culture Wars
Conservative movements to reform education are often
defined by what they’re against. At a recent public briefing, the governor of
Florida, Ron DeSantis, decried the imposition of critical race theory and mandatory
diversity-and-inclusion training at the state’s schools. He pledged to counter
“ideological conformity” and “administrative bloat.” On the other hand, when
DeSantis and other Republican politicians try to articulate what they’re
for—what exactly they want education to look like—one name comes up repeatedly:
Hillsdale College. DeSantis has said that he probably wouldn’t hire someone
from his alma mater, Yale. But “if I get somebody from Hillsdale,” he said, “I
know they have the foundations necessary to be able to be helpful in pursuing
conservative policies.” In January, DeSantis’s chief of staff told National Review that the governor hoped to
transform New College of Florida, a public liberal-arts school, into a
“Hillsdale of the South.” One of the people involved in implementing the
reforms is a dean and vice-president at Hillsdale.
Hillsdale College, a school in southern
Michigan with roughly sixteen hundred students, was founded by abolitionist,
Free Will Baptist preachers in 1844. Today, the college is known as a home for
smart young conservatives who wish to engage seriously with the liberal arts.
The Hillsdale education has several hallmarks: a devotion to the Western canon,
an emphasis on primary sources over academic theory, and a focus on equipping
students to be able, virtuous citizens. There is no department of women’s and
gender studies, no concentrations on race and ethnicity. It’s a model of
education that some scholars consider dangerously incomplete. It’s also a model
that communities across the country are looking to adopt.
In the past two decades, Hillsdale has
vastly expanded its influence, partly through its ties to Republican politics.
The college has had a presence in Washington, D.C., for fifty years, and in
2010 it opened a second campus there, largely for graduate students, in a row
of town houses across from the Heritage Foundation. The faculty includes
Michael Anton, the former Trump Administration official known for his essay
“The Flight 93 Election,” in which he wrote that voting for Donald Trump was
the only way to save America from doom, and David Azerrad, a former Heritage
Foundation director who has described America as being run on a system of
“Black privilege.” In recent years, speakers at Hillsdale events have included
Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett, then a circuit-court judge.
Thomas, whose wife, Virginia, once served on the Hillsdale Board of Trustees,
has referred to the college as “a shining city on a hill.” Alumni have gone on
to serve in powerful government positions: Kevin McCarthy’s former deputy chief
of staff, three Supreme Court clerks from the last term, and speechwriters for
the Trump Administration all attended Hillsdale.
The school welcomes conservative
provocateurs—Dinesh D’Souza and Andy Ngo, among others—to speak at events, publishing
some of the talks in Imprimis, a monthly digest of speeches. In 2021,
Hillsdale tapped two of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration—an open
letter that advocated against widespread lockdowns early in the pandemic—to
help launch the Academy for Science and Freedom, “to combat the recent and
widespread abuses of individual and academic freedom made in the name of
science.”
The primary architect of Hillsdale’s rise
to prominence is the college’s president, Larry Arnn. “Education is the purpose
of society,” he told me. “If you want to help, as a citizen, your country, I
think that’s the way.” Last November, Arnn gave a speech in which he described
education as a cultural battleground, arguing that public schools have recently
“adopted the purpose of supplanting the family and controlling parents.” To
address this concern, Hillsdale has ventured outside of higher education,
helping to launch K-12 charter schools nationwide. Arnn has set an ambitious
mission for this project, one that suggests Hillsdale is only getting started
in its fight to reclaim American education: “We’re going to try to find a way
to teach anyone who wants us to help them learn.”
Iarrived at Hillsdale College
on the morning of freshman convocation. My drive to the main campus, which is
about two hours southwest of Detroit, led me past farms and cow pastures, and
along an unpaved road. As I pulled up, I was greeted by a bronze statue of a
Civil War soldier carrying a flag with a broken staff. More than four hundred
Hillsdale students fought on behalf of the Union, which the school says is the
most of any private college in the North—a fact that I would be reminded of
often during my visit.
The convocation was held in one of the
school’s athletic centers. Professors streamed past me in full regalia, looking
like brightly colored fish amid the schools of new students. A string quartet
played at the front of the room. (Hillsdale is not an a-cappella kind of place,
though a third of the students study music, often classical.) A curly-haired
senior kicked off the ceremony. “We’re always one graduating class away from
losing the student culture here,” she said from the lectern. “Hold yourself to
a higher standard, because it’s what you need. It’s what Hillsdale needs. It’s
what our country needs. It’s what God demands.”
Next up was the president. Arnn, who is
seventy, wore blue robes with a pin-striped suit and black tennis shoes that
looked vaguely orthopedic. He spoke to the crowd about the virtues of pursuing
truth. “There are things to know,” he explained. “They are beautiful things to
know that will make you better if you know them.” As he wrapped up his
comments, he noted that Winston Churchill was a “blubberer,” and that no one
should be ashamed of getting emotional as they said goodbye.
Parents wept as they clung to their
children. A bagpiper played the piercing melody of “Scotland the Brave,” making
it feel as though the kids were getting sent into battle at the foot of the
Highlands, rather than just being dropped off at school. Orientation advisers
hovered around the room, wearing T-shirts bearing Hillsdale’s motto, Virtus Tentamine Gaudet: “Strength rejoices in
the challenge.”
Arnn came to Hillsdale in
2000, while the school was emerging from national scandal. For twenty-eight years, the
college had been led by George Roche III, a prominent libertarian. His
daughter-in-law, Lissa Roche, who worked at the school, came to occupy a role
akin to First Lady of Hillsdale. She was also, evidently, in love with her
father-in-law. One day, she claimed that they had long been romantically
involved. (He denied the affair.) Shortly afterward, she took a revolver out of
her husband’s gun cabinet and went to the school’s arboretum, where she killed
herself. “It was traumatic,” David Whalen, an English professor and a former
provost, told me. “There’s no soft-pedalling it.”
George
Roche resigned, and a committee scrambled to find his replacement. Arnn—a
friend of one of the committee members, the conservative firebrand
William F. Buckley, Jr.—was at the top of the shortlist. At the time, Arnn
was the head of the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank in
California. (“If you’re looking for a conservative person who’s got an
education and can talk a bit, the field is small,” he told me.) He got the job.
Arnn grew up in Arkansas and studied under
Harry Jaffa, a combative scholar of the political philosopher Leo Strauss.
After helping found Claremont, Arnn played a major role in the passage of
Proposition 209, which effectively ended affirmative action in college
admissions in California. Arnn has deep ties to the G.O.P. establishment—he
told me that he got “close-ish” to taking a job as the head of the Heritage
Foundation—but he’s never been a creature of Washington. He has preferred to
cultivate his influence from afar.
In 2020, Trump formed the 1776 Commission,
in response to the rise of critical race theory and the Times’ 1619 Project; its aim was to promote
education about America’s “inspiring” founding. He picked Arnn to chair the
group, which included Mike Pompeo and Ben Carson as ex-officio members. A few
years before that, Arnn had published a book, “The Founders’ Key,” claiming
that the progressive movement had weakened the power of America’s founding
documents. It landed blurbs from Republican politicians such as Paul Ryan, Mike
Lee, and Tom Cotton, whose wedding Arnn says he attended. “We’re from
Arkansas,” Arnn said of Cotton. “We’re cousins.” (Not in the real way, Arnn
clarified, but in “the Arkansas way.” )
The word “conservative” doesn’t feature prominently in
Hillsdale’s promotional materials; the school simply describes itself as a
“small, Christian, classical liberal arts college.” When I asked Arnn and other
professors whether Hillsdale is conservative, they all gave the same, slightly
uncoöperative answer: yes, in the sense that Hillsdale is “conserving things.”
Many students identify as conservative, although the
ones I spoke with said that this manifests in different ways. Will McIntosh,
who grew up in Iowa as the son of a Baptist preacher, enthusiastically briefed
me on the virtues of the Austrian school of economics, one of Hillsdale’s
specialties. (Ludwig von Mises, a major figure in that movement, donated his
library to Hillsdale.) Colton Duncan, a devout Catholic from Ohio, rejects
libertarianism, saying that he and his friends frequently discuss how to
cultivate a moral economic system as an alternative to “woke capitalism and
neocolonialism.” The ardently pro-Trump contingent on campus appears to be
small, both among students and staff. Paul Rahe, a history professor, said he
doubted that a majority of the faculty voted for Trump in 2016. (Arnn endorsed
Trump after the Republican primary that year, joining a group of conservative
intellectuals who wrote that he was the candidate “most likely to restore the
promise of America.”) These days, the campus seems to favor DeSantis over
Trump, according to a recent survey by the student newspaper.
Some people are surprised to find, upon arriving on
campus, that there is relatively little appetite for partisanship. Politics
just “wasn’t in the mouths of my peers or the administration,” Tori Hope
Petersen, a 2018 graduate, told me. Arnn steers students away from partisan
acrimony. “There’s rumors going around that I’m not fully satisfied with the
condition of the government of the United States,” he said, to approving
laughter and applause, at a parents’ dinner after the convocation. “I want you
to know, we are going to discourage your child from being much involved in all
that.”
And yet, beyond its campus, Hillsdale has waded
directly into political conflicts, in large part by hosting speakers and
disseminating their hotly contested ideas via Imprimis, which has more than six million
subscribers—roughly twice as many as the Washington Post. Christopher Rufo, the researcher and
conservative activist who spearheaded the campaign against critical race
theory, gave a talk at the school last spring called “Laying Siege to the
Institutions,” in which he argued that conservatives will never win the fight
against progressivism “if we play by the rules set by the élites who are
undermining our country.” Roger Kimball, of the conservative arts journal The New Criterion, claimed in a lecture that
Democrats and the media vastly overhyped “the January 6th hoax,” noting that
“every honest person knows that the 2020 election was tainted.”
Hillsdale’s public image has made it difficult for
Arnn to remain in some scholarly circles. “Even prior to the Trump
Administration, he had given a lot of people in the academic world real pause,”
George Thomas, a professor at Claremont McKenna College and the director of the
school’s Salvatori Center, of which Arnn was a longtime adviser, told me.
“Flirtation with the disreputable right, flirtation with serious racism,
hysterical about progressives who disagree with you being threats to the
constitutional order.” Thomas happily let Arnn’s term on the advisory board
expire.
Several alumni told me a
version of the same theory about the divergence between Hillsdale’s internal
and external identities. The college refuses any government funding, including
federal aid to students, to avoid being subject to federal regulations such as
Title IX, which forbids sex-based discrimination in higher education. But to
attract people to a small liberal-arts college in Michigan—and to pay for their
cloistered learning—Hillsdale needs to be a household name. So, like Benjamin
Franklin lifting his kite and key in the lightning storm, Arnn harnesses the
power of the culture wars for his own purposes. “Some alums cringe when
Hillsdale is advertised on Fox News or Sean Hannity,” Brittany Baldwin, a 2012
graduate who worked as a speechwriter in the Trump White House, told me. “They
feel like it’s underselling what Hillsdale really is. But Dr. Arnn is very
smart, in the sense that he has found a way to reach millions of people who
otherwise would have never known about the school, by focussing on the values
that it has in common with many conservatives, who happen to be able to give
the school money.” When I asked Arnn if this assessment was correct, he
replied, “I’ve said almost exactly that to Rush Limbaugh!”
Arnn imagines Hillsdale’s project as a series of
concentric circles: undergraduate and graduate education at the center, the
school’s online courses as the next ring, and its events and speakers as
another. I understood how this works after talking with Will and Monica
Trainor, a couple from Texas who have sent four of their children to Hillsdale.
The Trainors discovered the school through Imprimis, and, when their eldest son was applying to
college, they visited the campus and fell in love. Now Monica uses the school’s
online Constitution course in her children’s homeschool curriculum, and she
keeps a stack of Hillsdale promotional flyers on hand, occasionally giving them
out to high-school seniors and parents in her community. “We spent eighteen
years instilling our values in our son,” Will explained. “We’ve seen too many
of our friends lose kids that have gone in with certain family values and have
come out not with those same values.”
Throughout the years, Arnn has accrued another
powerful set of Hillsdale allies: small-city-gentry types, who have often made
modest fortunes in obscure industries, and who have been persuaded to dedicate
some of their life’s earnings to the school despite not having attended. One
example is S. Prestley Blake, the co-founder of the Friendly’s
ice-cream-and-restaurant chain. In 2014, in honor of his hundredth birthday,
Blake built a replica of Monticello on his Connecticut estate, which he gave to
Hillsdale; the college turned it into the Blake Center for Faith and Freedom. Charles
Hoogland, a founder of the now defunct rental chain Family Video, and his wife,
Kathleen, funded Hillsdale’s Hoogland Center for Teacher Excellence. A few days
after the freshman convocation, the school hosted an event called Ladies for
Liberty, where female attendees paid a thousand dollars for four days of
firearms instruction and lectures on the Constitution. The event was, in part,
held at Hillsdale’s shooting range, which, thanks to donor largesse, has become
sophisticated enough to serve as an official training center for the U.S.
Olympic shooting team.
“You don’t get money by asking for it,” Arnn told me.
“You get money by showing them what you do.” Between 2000, when he took over,
and 2021, the latest year for which financial data is available, annual
contributions to Hillsdale increased more than sevenfold, putting the school’s
fund-raising on par with that of élite liberal-arts colleges outside of the Ivy
League. At an event last winter, DeSantis told Arnn, “The fact that you’re able
to raise money from people who didn’t necessarily go here or have kids here
shows you that people do value excellence. They value the truth.”
Recently, a new craze has
come to Hillsdale’s campus: weight lifting. Last summer, the college installed
exercise equipment in the dorms, in an effort to reduce stress and depression.
(“There’s been an explosion in student counselling since I’ve been here at the
college,” Arnn told parents. “I’ve never liked it.”) The lifting trend started
with Carl Young, a classics professor, whose faculty friends—mostly classicists
and philosophers, “all ninety-pound weaklings,” in Arnn’s words—began joining
Young at the gym. (Arnn has tagged along a few times.) One professor has joked
that there should be a philosophy-and-weight-lifting club called Will to Power.
I asked Young whether there’s an ideological motivation behind the
workouts—pushback against a culture where, say, men are weak and masculinity is
diminished. He looked at me blankly. “I don’t know about that,” he said.
Luke Hollister, a junior from Washington State who
serves as Hillsdale’s head student ambassador, gave me a campus tour. We swung
by the student union, the Grewcock Center, named for a Nebraska family who made
their fortune in mining and construction. (The center tops Arnn’s list of
buildings to renovate; he finds it so ugly that he has nicknamed it Arnn’s
Shame.) We ambled down the Liberty Walk, where statues of history’s great
heroes line the college’s well-manicured lawns: Ronald Reagan leans jauntily
against a column, Margaret Thatcher sits insouciantly among the trees. Donors
can sponsor a brick on the walk for a thousand dollars. (“Sadly, reports show
that increasing numbers of schools are indoctrinating students with a false and
dishonest narrative of our nation’s history, presenting America as essentially
and irredeemably flawed,” Hillsdale’s Web site reads. “Your Liberty Walk brick
shows that you’re on the battlefield of education, promoting the knowledge and
understanding necessary to preserve liberty.”)
Hillsdale has always been a Christian college, but
several alumni told me that the school has played up its religious identity in
recent years, perhaps as a way of enticing donors. (Arnn denied this, noting
that the school’s Christian roots are clear in its founding documents, although
he acknowledged that Hillsdale used to be “shy” about its religiosity.) The
college isn’t a Christian school in the vein of Liberty University, which the
Baptist pastor Jerry Falwell, Sr., founded to train “champions for Christ.” But
Arnn believes that a liberal-arts education requires students to grapple with
questions about the nature of God. A perennial debate among students on campus
is Protestantism versus Catholicism. Students tend to go on winding theological
journeys, often gravitating toward more liturgically formal expressions of
Christianity, such as Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. “You see a lot more
appreciation for tradition,” Michael Hoggatt, a junior from Wisconsin who grew
up evangelical, said. “Lower-church students tend not to have that sort of
catechesis.” When I met him, he was attending an Anglican parish, and now he’s
in the process of converting to Catholicism. On Instagram, an unofficial
Hillsdale meme account recently made a joke about new students: “catholic by
fall. ring by spring.”
In 2010, Hillsdale published a set of guidelines on
the school’s moral commitments. One states that “morally responsible sexual
acts” occur “in marriage and between the sexes.” The guidelines stress that
students are admitted “regardless of their personal beliefs,” though the school
discourages “ideological pressures or actions that press the College to abandon
its commitments or disrupt its good order.” So although there are L.G.B.T.Q.
students on campus, it is almost impossible for them to form clubs, and some
have found it hard to speak openly about their identities. One alumnus told me
that he was called into the dean’s office after he was seen placing his head in
his boyfriend’s lap on the campus lawn. Mary Blendermann, a Hillsdale graduate
who recently came out as gender fluid, described being socially ostracized as a
sophomore after she cut her hair short and started dressing in a more masculine
way. “People I used to sit with in the dining hall didn’t really want to sit with
me anymore,” she said. Kailey Andrew, another graduate, told me she had
received a short handwritten list of professors who were thought to support
L.G.B.T.Q. students—people who were safe to talk to, behind closed doors.
As I walked around campus, it was also impossible not
to notice the whiteness of the student body and the faculty. Every professor I
met was a white man, except Khalil Habib, a politics professor, who is Lebanese
Catholic. Hillsdale pointedly refuses to compile statistics on its students’
racial backgrounds. Shortly before Arnn was hired, officials from the Michigan
Department of Education visited the campus to determine whether the student
body was sufficiently diverse. Years later, Arnn, testifying before a
subcommittee of the Michigan state legislature, said that the officials had
been looking for “dark ones,” a phrase that he later apologized for using—kind
of. “No offense was intended by the use of that term except to the offending
bureaucrats, and Dr. Arnn is sorry if such offense was honestly taken,” the
school wrote in a statement. “But the greater concern, he believes, is the
state-endorsed racism the story illustrates.”
I asked Arnn whether the racial homogeneity on campus
is a detriment to the school. “If it is—and I’m not confident that it is—it’s
not as important as having people here who want to be here,” he replied. He
sees Hillsdale’s involvement with K-12 charter schools as an answer to the
long-standing problem of educational inequalities. “Start early,” he said.
“Give everybody a chance. That’s nearly all of what I want to do.”
Arnn told a story about starting a program, early in
his tenure, to bring students from inner-city Detroit to Hillsdale College.
“It’s on my list of dumb things I’ve done from which I’ve learned,” he said.
“They weren’t ready to come here. They hadn’t done any preparation. They
thought it was a magical place—fancy.” He paused for a moment. “It’s fancier
now!” Later, the college created the Frederick Douglass Scholarship, to support
first-generation college students, along with those from low-income households
or economically disadvantaged school districts. “Why should we favor a rich
Black kid over a poor white kid?” Arnn said. “I don’t want to tell a student
here that that’s the significant thing about them,” he said, referring to race.
Some students appreciate this approach. Amy Buffini, a
Black transfer student, told me that at her previous school, Point Loma
Nazarene University, everyone was hyperaware of race and afraid of “saying the
wrong thing.” She’s more at ease at Hillsdale. But Arnn’s tendency to downplay
race has also been controversial within the Hillsdale community. In the summer
of 2020, after George Floyd’s death, a few hundred alumni signed an open letter
calling for the college to make a statement in support of the idea that Black
lives matter. One alumna, the journalist Liz Essley Whyte, argued that proud
moments in Hillsdale’s history—such as when its football team refused to play
in the 1955 Tangerine Bowl because its Black players were not allowed to
participate—had been used to obscure instances in which the college had
published or hosted racists and segregationists, such as the white supremacist
Jared Taylor. Another alumnus, Will Smiley, an assistant professor at the
University of New Hampshire, wrote a letter suggesting that Hillsdale overly
catered to its conservative allies: “Perhaps the donors who once offered the
college independence from the government now impose a straitjacket of their
own.”
Arnn told me that the college didn’t make the
statement that the alumni wanted because the events of that summer were
“unfolding contemporary politics.” He went on, “How do you even know what you
think about them? George Floyd was not a particularly good fella. That matters,
right? And he was killed, and that matters—a lot. We’re not geared up around
here to respond to the news.” Besides, Arnn added, “we don’t much like it when
things are demanded of us.”
The atmosphere on
Hillsdale’s campus might feel familiar to some visitors, particularly those who
attended small liberal-arts schools decades ago. As Rahe, the history
professor, put it, Hillsdale is like “Williams College, 1955, with girls.”
Bradley Birzer, another history professor, said that Hillsdale is among a group
of “weirdo colleges,” including St. John’s, the University of Dallas, and the
liberal-studies program at Notre Dame, that still believe in teaching a canon
of great books.
When Arnn arrived, he established requirements in
theology and philosophy, along with a semester-long Constitution course. The
Political Science Department was renamed the Politics Department, on the notion
that political study should be normative and philosophical instead of
mechanical and data-driven. It was an explicit rebuke to the wonkish approach favored
by many academics. Adam Carrington, a politics professor, told me, “You won’t
see much in the way of quantitative methods—regression lines, things like
that.” Meanwhile, students studying biology, chemistry, and physics learn about
the human aspects of the scientific process, debating such topics as the role
of prizes in incentivizing certain kinds of research. Hillsdale kids tend to be
studious and eager. Habib, the politics professor, recalled that, during his
first semester of teaching, a student corrected a word in the translation of
Aristotle that the class was using.
According to Whalen, the former provost, Arnn
carefully selects faculty members who support the school’s mission of educating
students in the Western philosophical tradition. “He’s very clear about
everybody pointing in the same direction,” Whalen said. The college doesn’t
pretend to have faculty representing every school of thought; it doesn’t keep a
Marxist around just for the heck of it. Besides, “a course in Nietzsche would
probably be more controversial than Marx,” Birzer, the history professor, told
me, with a chuckle. “Nietzsche is sort of the bête noire within the philosophy
department, and somewhat within history, too. He’s the guy we love to hate at
the college.”
I sat in on a Western Heritage class—one of the jewels
of Hillsdale’s core curriculum—taught by Birzer. None of the students had
laptops out, and I didn’t see a single cell phone. The words “Occident” and
“Orient” were scribbled on a blackboard. Birzer’s students were learning about
Plato’s Crito. Birzer explained that Socrates argues that unjust actions are
always unjust, regardless of the circumstances. “Our modern thinkers tend to be
very, very subjective,” he said. “Socrates is the exact opposite: he says there
is capital-‘T’ truth, and our life is to pursue what that truth is, even when
it leads to our own harm or death.” He pointed out the similarity between
Socrates’ insight and that of another great figure of the West. “Socrates got
there about four hundred and fifty years earlier than Jesus did,” Birzer said.
“I’m not comparing the two—don’t get me wrong. Obviously, Jesus is fully man
and fully God.”
The course’s required textbook is “Western Heritage: A
Reader,” a collection of primary sources compiled by Hillsdale professors.
Other classes use an American-heritage reader, which is dominated by white
voices. The selected texts from the period following the Civil War include
sources making the case for the Old South and the New South, but they don’t
deal directly with the reign of racial terror carried out during and after
Reconstruction and into the twentieth century. At best, this is a problem
inherent to the study of famous primary texts: those powerful enough to write
history rarely focus on the stories of people at its margins.
Birzer recognized that “no reader is perfect”; in
courses where Reconstruction is taught, students are also assigned a textbook
by a Hillsdale professor to get more context on the hardships former slaves
faced during that period. When I visited, he and another Hillsdale professor
were in the process of recording lectures that students at other universities
will be able to take for credit, significantly expanding Hillsdale’s
educational footprint. In the lectures, “we’re going to confront the race issue
as openly and directly as we can,” Birzer told me. “We’re not going to
whitewash it at all. We’re going to talk about what happened in Tulsa. We’re
going to talk about race riots.” He was aware that many of the people likely to
watch the videos will be conservative and affluent—and might not know much
about the history of racial discrimination and violence in America. “A lot of
conservatives kind of dropped the ball on how to deal with that issue,” he
said. In his view, however, too much of the contemporary conversation about
race traffics in self-flagellation and apology. “We don’t want to sit there and
be these manly guys on World War II and then turn around and get sappy on
race,” he said.
According to Arnn, arguably the best professor at the
school is Justin Jackson, who teaches English. (“He looks like Rasputin,” Arnn
said. “And I think he’s kind of a liberal.”) Jackson told me that when he first
considered a job at Hillsdale, in the early two-thousands, he was circumspect:
“When you read the Web page, you think, Oh, do you read Homer through a Reagan
lens?” He worried about censorship. “You’re told all the time: conservatives
are going to crush your academic freedom.” But that hasn’t been his experience;
he said that the horror stories he hears about crackdowns on academic freedom
tend to come from his friends at more progressive institutions. (In recent
years, Arnn has made himself a Lady Liberty to the pre-cancelled; he described
a professor who started last fall as “a refugee from wokeness.”)
At more progressive schools, students have an instinct
to read texts “to show that there’s empire or colonialism or racism,” Michael
Roth, a liberal-arts scholar and the president of Wesleyan University, said.
“To me, that’s like shooting fish in a barrel. All you’re learning about is
your own superiority.” But, he added, “I do think it’s a mistake to imagine
that the Western tradition necessarily leads to the discovery of truth with a
capital ‘T.’ You can only do that if you ignore a lot of the world.” Reading
storied texts to justify your views as an American or a Christian or an
inheritor of the classical tradition—“that also is a way of justifying your own
parochialism,” he said.
Jackson is leery of the idea that professors might
encourage their students to adopt a particular world view. He wants students to
inhabit the literary worlds of the authors he teaches. “I try to teach a
hermeneutics of charity,” he said. “When we read texts, we aren’t in an
ideological fight with it.” Hillsdale, he believes, is “deeply humanistic.” The
texts are for everyone, equally.
In the past decade,
Hillsdale has exported its educational philosophy to K-12 schools across the
United States, as part of a larger movement to restore “classical education”—a
liberal-arts curriculum designed to cultivate wisdom and teach children to
pursue the ancient ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness. Hillsdale has
approved eighty schools to use the K-12 curriculum created by the college’s
professors. Schools that want more intensive help can send their teachers to a
summer training session on Hillsdale’s campus and consult with college staff.
Nearly all of these resources are free.
Hillsdale’s K-12 curriculum places a value on civic
education. In 2021, the school released the first iteration of its 1776
Curriculum, centered on the nation’s founding and history. Grade-school
students are given a list of great figures, such as George Washington, Crispus
Attucks, and Patrick Henry. Middle schoolers consider a draft of the
Declaration of Independence, to see what was added and removed by Congress.
High-school students are asked to read speeches and debates by Abraham Lincoln
and Stephen Douglas, along with a speech by Alexander Stephens, the
Vice-President of the Confederacy. The curriculum refers teachers of all grade
levels to Hillsdale College’s relevant online courses, and to books such as
“Land of Hope,” by the historian Wilfred McClay, which was written to counter
what McClay describes as the “radical,” “one-sided” narratives of texts that
are commonly used in classrooms today, such as Howard Zinn’s “A People’s
History of the United States.” (Arnn recently hired McClay.)
Hillsdale makes the K-12 curriculum available to
educators to use independently, but the results have been uneven. In South
Dakota, an emeritus politics professor at Hillsdale, William Morrisey,
facilitated a committee that used the college’s materials to revise the state’s
social-studies standards. They were criticized by the American Historical
Association as “excessively long and detailed in their prescriptions, yet
totally inadequate in their vision of what history learning entails,” omitting
“any and all forms of historical inquiry in favor of rote memorization.”
The 1776 Curriculum includes many references to
slavery, racism, nativism, and oppression. But these passages have a certain
inflection. Elementary-school teachers are instructed to explain, for instance,
that “America is and always has been a land of immigrants,” including those
“considered the indigenous or ‘native’ peoples of both North and South
America,” who “likely migrated from northeast Asia.” John Brown’s raid on the
armory at Harpers Ferry was evidence of a “breakdown in civil dialogue.” In the
middle-school and high-school material, racism is described as “the voluntary
acts of individual people.”
The 1776 Curriculum has become intertwined, in many
people’s minds, with Trump’s 1776 Commission, given their similar names, shared
aims, and mutual connection to Larry Arnn. And conservative politicians have
eagerly latched on to the school’s work. DeSantis has noted that “classical
academies are flourishing in the state of Florida. We hope to have many more.”
(The state currently has at least nine Hillsdale-affiliated schools.) Kari
Lake, a Republican who ran for governor in Arizona in 2022, said on the stump,
“I believe in the Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum.”
Last year, Bill Lee, the Republican governor of Tennessee,
announced a plan to launch Hillsdale-affiliated charter schools across the
state, calling Hillsdale “the standard-bearer in quality curriculum and the
responsibility of preserving American liberty.” A few months later, Hillsdale
hosted a reception in Williamson County, a wealthy area south of Nashville. At
the event, Arnn described the sorry state of American schools. “The
administrators you hire are all diversity people,” he said. “And that helps
you, by the way, with your federal requirements—that you have a certain number
by color.” Later, in a conversation with Lee, Arnn proclaimed that “teachers
are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.” Lee
took a drink from his water bottle and said nothing.
NewsChannel 5, a TV station in Nashville, aired a
“hidden-camera video” of the event and ran at least two dozen follow-up
segments on Hillsdale, speculating about its ideological motivations. A Johnson
City pastor wrote an op-ed in his local paper accusing Hillsdale of promoting
Christian nationalism. (When I asked Arnn about this, he said that Christianity
is premised on the freedom of religious faith, which is separate from the laws
of the land. “That means there’s no such thing as Christian nationalism,” he
said. “Couldn’t be.”) A local teachers’ union sent out mailers with Arnn’s face
Photoshopped onto the body of a man wearing a straw boater and a red-and-white
striped suit jacket, holding a clear bottle labelled “charter snake oil.” Arnn
attempted to clarify in an op-ed in the Tennessean. “Dumb can mean ‘unintelligent,’
which I did not mean,” he wrote. “Dumb also means ‘ill-conceived’ or
‘misdirected.’ ”
Just one Hillsdale-aligned charter school had
already opened in Tennessee, but it announced that it was parting ways with the
college. A charter-management organization attempted to open three others that
would have used Hillsdale’s curriculum, but the applications failed; it later
withdrew from an appeals process. (The organization is trying again for the
fall of 2024.)
Arnn’s daughter, Kathleen O’Toole, the college’s
assistant provost for K-12 education, insisted that the project is “not
narrowly political or partisan.” When it comes to American history, “we should
study the things that are embarrassing to us, and the things that are
shameful,” she said. “But we shouldn’t forget that there are also moments to be
proud of.” As for Arnn, he does not regret what he said about teachers. He
believes that teachers should be “symbols of wisdom” who are experts in their
subject matter, not just in the skills of teaching, which he thinks education
schools overemphasize. “I think it deprives teachers of something and students
of something,” he said. “We’re trying to program them.”
The whole episode illustrates the way in which Hillsdale’s
politics—and Arnn’s uncensored style—have complicated the school’s attempt to
foster a broad revival of liberal-arts education. Even other players in the
classical-school movement have hesitations about Hillsdale. Robert Jackson, the
executive director of the Great Hearts Institute, a network for
classical-school leaders, told me that Hillsdale envisions “a more distinct
political identity” for its schools than other classical schools do—and there
are hundreds of others, religious and secular, private and public. While he
respects people who work at Hillsdale, the school’s high-profile role in the
movement “potentially positions classical education as a partisan project,”
Jackson said. “We do not want to throw students into a kind of partisan affair
as a result of their education.”
Another friend of Arnn’s,
neither cousin nor Arkansan, is the former Vice-President Mike Pence. They
spoke “a fair amount” while Pence was in the White House, Arnn said. I asked
him whether Pence had called him in the days leading up to January 6th, seeking
advice on certifying the election. Arnn paused. “I think it would be indiscreet
for me to answer that question,” he said. “Let me say that I thought, on that
day, the election had been over for a month.” He went on, “I think the election
was fishy, changing the laws in big ways on the eve of the election. But it’s
done now.” Arnn called the issue of the supposedly stolen election a prudential
question—one about which people of shared values might disagree, in good faith.
He has designed Hillsdale as a refuge from such subjects. And yet the very
purpose of a liberal-arts education is to develop the wisdom to see clearly in
upside-down days—to separate contemporary ferment from foundational truths when
it really matters.
This past fall, Hillsdale launched the next phase of
its K-12 initiative: a graduate school of classical education that will train
the future leaders of the movement—headmasters, teachers, deans. The eleven
students in the graduate school’s inaugural cohort sat at a long table on their
first day of class. Nine were returning Hillsdale alumni. Whalen, the former
provost, was teaching a course called Humane Letters, focussed on texts that
“touch the hem of the garment of what is universally human.” The students listened
as Whalen read them poetry, about wintry fields and stately ships and beauty
for its own sake. A ceiling-high window gave a view of the trees. If you closed
your eyes, the classroom felt a bit like a cathedral.
Hillsdale is constructing a new building to house the
graduate school, which Arnn is hoping to expand next year. Along the Liberty
Walk, it will run from Reagan to Thatcher. ♦
An earlier version of this article included an incorrect
transcription of a word from a speech at Hillsdale’s convocation.
Published in the print edition of the April
10, 2023, issue, with the headline “The Citadel.”
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- Days ago = 3168 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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