Consider Michigan’s Hillsdale College, where our founder John J. Miller leads the journalism program and which will never subject your student to Washington’s various regulatory whims.
The New York Times, of all places, has a glowing profile of the nominally Christian college founded by abolitionists prior to the Civil War, visited by Frederick Douglass (whose statue is being added to campus this spring), and which has expanded its mission into classically oriented K-12 charter schools nationwide.
Though President Larry Arnn – once considered a top candidate for President Trump’s education secretary – told donors that the new administration offers a “beginning to restore limited government,” it’s Hillsdale’s focus on the Great Books and America’s founding documents that should assure you it will remain steady in any resurgence of big-government conservatism.
The most popular of Hillsdale’s free online courses, Constitution 101 — 10 weeks of lectures by faculty members, with recommended readings — has been taken by more than 800,000, according to the college, and has offered intellectual ballast to Tea Party activists. “By educating millions of Americans on our founding principles of liberty,” the college writes of its goals, “America can begin to turn around and restore lost liberty.” …
Dr. Arnn seems to personify Hillsdale, teaching the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare and publishing books on Churchill and the Constitution. An ebullient man with a short beard who speaks with faint traces of his native Arkansas, he has been known to swoop down on hapless victims in the cafeteria and pose the core question of the Classics: “What is The Good?”
In his office, beneath a portrait of Churchill, he did not gush over Mr. Trump but stressed what he sees as the overriding imperative. “If he attacks the regulatory state,” Dr. Arnn said, “that will be for the good.”
Worried about cost? Even though it doesn’t take federal money (and the concomitant Title IX and other regulations), Hillsdale is a steal:
Hillsdale is well financed with private donations, and college officials said that 95 percent of students this year received grants averaging $17,206, to offset the $35,722 for tuition, room and board.
In a commonly expressed sentiment, Kaitlyn Johns, a senior economics major with a music minor, said she came to Hillsdale “because I felt like I would actually be challenged here.” …
Classes are small and personal. “The entire freshman class is reading the same stuff at the same time, and the class spills over into the lunchroom,” said Paul A. Rahe, a history professor.
No mandatory courses on diversity in this curriculum:
It includes more than a dozen mandatory survey courses on topics like the Western heritage (with readings from Hammurabi to Hobbes) and American heritage (the Mayflower Compact to inaugural addresses by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Reagan). Students also must study core principles of biology, chemistry and physics and take the trademark class on the American Constitution.
Yet it’s not remotely one-sided:
Still, in several classes that I observed, the teachers encouraged spirited exchanges and broached topics far beyond conservative dogma. Dr. [David] Whalen, for example, an English professor as well as provost, ended his course “Great Books in Continental Literature” with a look at Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame.” “What happens if there is no meaning there, but you have an absurd need to express meaning?” he asked of Beckett’s vision. One student drew a comparison to the music of John Cage, which he had studied in another class.
The course on the Constitution includes intense study of the Federalist papers and the later statements of Progressives like John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson and F.D.R.
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