Hillsdale College is one of an exceedingly small number of colleges that does not take federal money of any kind. As highlighted on their website, they offer an education “designed to equip human beings for self-government.” They teach that “freedom can only last if you and I choose to act as people of character.” They do this without bowing down to demands from our federal government of what a college education should be.
Founded in 1844 by Baptists, Hillsdale is a non-sectarian institution whose teachings are “informed by Christianity’s moral teachings.” Its founders were abolitionists and feminists so the college has admitted blacks and women since its founding.
As Andrea Widburg notes,
“Hillsdale is a bastion of intellectual liberty, founded on a moral and historic bedrock dedicated to the equal rights of all people, regardless of race or sex.”
Recently, as McCarthyism has reached new heights during the recent riots, Hillsdale College has been pressured to issue a statement supporting Black Lives Matter (BLM). Of course, this violates the very bedrock foundations of an enlightened education, that of intellectual independence. It would obliterate the idea of reasoned debate and intellectual inquiries.
The fact that Hillsdale College was founded on the principle that all lives matter is not enough. The fact that Hillsdale has been faithful to its founders’ mission for over 170 years carries no weight. The mantra of the day is “Silence is violence.”
So, Hillsdale has spoken.
Amidst the events of recent weeks, a number of alumni and others have taken up formal and public means to insist that Hillsdale College issue statements concerning these events. The College is charged with negligence — or worse.
It is not the practice of the College to respond to petitions or other instruments meant to gain an object by pressure. The College operates by reasoned deliberation, study, and thought. The following observations, however, may be helpful and pertinent.
The College is pressed to speak. It is told that saying what it always has said is insufficient. Instead, it must decry racism and the mistreatment of Black Americans in particular. This, however, is precisely what the College has always said.
The College is told that invoking the high example of the Civil War or Frederick Douglass is not permitted. Perhaps it is thought that nothing relevant can be learned about justice and equality from the words and actions of great men and women in history. Instead, the College is guilty of the gravest moral failure for not making declarations about … justice and equality.
The College is told that it garners no honor now for its abolitionist past — or that it fails to live up to that past — but instead it must issue statements today. Statements about what? It must issue statements about the brutal and deadly evil of hating other people and/or treating them differently because of the color of their skin. That is, it must issue statements about the very things that moved the abolitionists whom the College has ever invoked.
It is told that failure to issue statements is an erasure, a complicity, an abandonment of principle. The silence of the College is deafening.
The College founding is a statement — as is each reiteration and reminder of its meaning and necessity. The curriculum is a statement, especially in its faithful presentation of the College’s founding mission. Teaching is a statement, especially as it takes up — with vigor — the evils we are alleged to ignore, evils like murder, brutality, injustice, destruction of person or property, and passionate irrationality. Teaching these same things across all the land is a statement, or a thousand statements. Organizing our practical affairs so that we can maintain principles of equity and justice — though the cost is high and sympathy is short — is a statement. Dispensing unparalleled financial help to students who cannot afford even a moderate tuition, is a statement. Helping private and public schools across the country lift their primary and secondary students out of a sea of disadvantages with excellent instruction, curricula, and the civic principles of freedom and equality — without any recompense to the College — is a statement. Postgraduate programs with the express aim of advancing the ideas of human dignity, justice, equality, and the citizen as the source of the government’s power, these are all statements. And all of these statements are acts, deeds that speak, undertaken and perpetuated now, every day, all the time. Everything the College does, though its work is not that of an activist or agitator, is for the moral and intellectual uplift of all.
There may be something deafening in the culture—certainly there are those who cannot hear — but it is not from the silence of the College.
There is a kind of virtue that is cheap. It consists of jumping on cost-free bandwagons of public feeling — perhaps even deeply justified public feeling — and winning approval by espousing the right opinion. No one who wishes the College to issue statements is assumed to be a party to such behavior. But the fact that very real racial problems are now being cynically exploited for profit, gain, and public favor by some organizations and people is impossible to overlook. It is a scandal and a shame that compounds our ills and impedes their correction. Hillsdale College, though far from perfect, will continue to do the work of education in the great principles that are, second only to divine grace, the solution to the grave ills that beset our times.
That is an eloquent, moving argument against the race-baiters, hate-mongers and other flotsam that are destroying our country. This should be required reading at every Board of Directors meeting of every corporation in America. This also goes for every institution of higher learning in this country. Most of those people have abandoned constitutional and biblical principles in a rush to appease the violent demands of the Democrats and their foot soldiers in the BLM movement.
Hillsdale College’s incorruptible dedication to reason and principle is a shining light on the hill.