Earlier this week, Emma Green had an in-depth profile of Hillsdale College in the New Yorker. Intriguingly titled “The Christian Liberal Arts School at the Heart of the Culture Wars,” the profile emphasized Hillsdale’s connections to the Republic Party. But while perhaps this was not the take-away that Green intended for the readers, the profile shows that there is more here than meets the eye. It was particularly apparent that one cannot run a school based on its political identity–although that identity has been helpful for fund-raising. Still, students do not choose to come to a college or university solely based on its politics–in other words, if Hillsdale were exactly the same in its politics, but with, say, a trade school curriculum instead of its focus on the liberal arts, I contend that it would not be the popular destination that it has become for certain types of students. I will expand more on this next week, but for the moment, a taste of the piece will suffice:
“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.
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.”
It seems–and even Green admits as much–that the campus proper is in many ways different from the public face of the institution beyond the campus. Students go to college to study, grow, and acquire certain credentials required for the modern professional life. Most do not go to college with a desire to discuss politics all day long. Green notes that this Janus-like existence, one face in and another face out, has made some students and alumni uncomfortable–yet another sign that they came to the school for the education, rather than the politics.
On the ground, though, this is a small liberal arts college, with all the attendant quirks that one finds in such a small close-knit community:
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.