@blatham,
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”...
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