The current issue of the New Yorker features a lengthy article by Emma Green, identified in the contributors’ notes as the writer covering “education and academia” for the magazine, entitled: “The Citadel: Why conservative politicians love Hillsdale College.” Hillsdale College is a small old Christian liberal arts college in a small town at the bottom of Michigan. There are dozens of rather similar institutions scattered throughout the country, but Hillsdale has separated itself from the pack in the national consciousness, so to speak, through ambitious and successful programs of fund-raising and self-advertisement. Hillsdale presents itself, accurately, as founding its education on the study of the liberal arts as an ethical and spiritual enterprise. It is unapologetic in linking its educational theory and practice to the Christian cultural traditions that gave birth to the medieval universities and to practically all the institutions of higher education founded in this country before the Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862, which aimed to advance the “agricultural and mechanical arts” so necessary to western expansion. So you could say that Hillsdale maintains many of the characteristics of the mainstream of American liberal arts colleges in earlier generations or that it has become a conservative outlier in the scene as presently evolved. The canny exploitation of this status by Hillsdale’s president and trustees, together with effective fundraising and public relations, has thrust the institution into an ambiguous national prominence.
The reason I presume to write about Hillsdale is that I do have a little personal knowledge of the place based on a three-day academic conference in which I participated in the fall of 2017. That is not much experience, but more than that of some of the school’s public critics. The general theme of the conference was the rise and fall of the Soviet Union as viewed from a century after the Bolshevik Revolution (or coup d’êtat) of October 1917. My own lecture was about the content, publication history, and reception of Arthur Koestler’s famous novel Darkness at Noon (1940), a book that had an unusually powerful political and cultural effect, especially in its post-war French language edition first published in Paris in 1945.* Leaving my own contribution aside, I thought the quality of the papers excellent. Were they “conservative”? Undoubtedly, if you equate anti-Communism with conservatism, as many intellectuals strangely continue to do. “Every anti-Communist is a dog,” said Jean-Paul Sartre. To which one can but reply “Bow-wow” and footnote The Black Book of Communism (Harvard, 1999). A public hyperconservative like Roger Kimball talking about the Polish anti-Marxist philosopher Leszek Kolakowski or the traditionalist Roman Catholic theologian Daniel Mahoney analyzing Solzhenitsyn’s epic history of the Soviet slave labor camps is likely to come across as “conservative.” Both gave excellent lectures packed with facts and ideas, neither of which are a “conservative” or “progressive” monopoly. The speaker with whom I hung out the most was Sir Antony Beevor, the only military historian whose works I have read extensively. One of his many famous books is Stalingrad (1999). His talk for the conference considered the Soviet role in the World War from a more comprehensive point of view.
There was to be sure lots of “conservative” stuff all about us. The trustees had put up big bucks for the construction of a new house of worship; the work was in progress. I doubt if many other colleges are building chapels at the moment. There was a statue of Margaret Thatcher. I doubt if there another campus with one of those. The student dress code took me back to my own undergraduate days in the ‘Fifties—though perhaps it reflected not a daily norm but the special occasion of a campus conference. The students were courteous and alarmingly deferential to a visiting professor they had never heard of. While I had no deep conversation with any student, I was impressed by their general knowledge of the major events, personages, and geography of the European theater in the second World War—subjects as opaque to most undergraduates I know as the battle plan at Thermopylae.
There was one possible ambush. At a plenary lunch or maybe dinner there was a short lecture by a distinguished Hillsdale alumnus, Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, a sort of private army. His articulate lecture gave a thumbnail sketch of the history of military mercenaries and extolled the efficacy of what he claimed was a sizeable mercenary component in current use by our government under the euphemism of “private contractors” in the War on Terror. As a child I had read with enthusiasm Arthur Conan Doyle's The White Company, about dashing mercenaries in the Hundred Years' War. Contemporary privateering was not a subject I had thought about before, and I was not immediately persuaded that private armies are by and large Good Things today. But then I was never a Navy Seal. The talk was certainly off the topic of the conference--if indeed it was ever conceived to be a part of it. But even Erik Prince—brother of Betsy DeVoe, as he is usually and irrelevantly identified in news stories--had no visible horns sprouting from his brow. However, let the search continue. I see that Mr. Prince has just failed to prevail in a libel suit about an anonymous, indeed Q-anonish charge that he attempted to collaborate with Putin’s favorite mercenaries, the murderous Wagner Group. Does anyone ever win libel suits in this country?
As would be true of any “adult education” event at any college, there were many probably wealthy alumni in the audience. The difference I noted here was that most of them were not alumni of this college. The two with whom I had the most serious conversations were from Harvard and Yale! Our conversations were not about conservatism or liberalism, Trumpism or anti-Trumpism, but about historical issues raised in my lecture; yet both made clear in other ways their belief that their “own” institutions already had plenty of money, and that they chose to direct their personal support toward the concept of the “liberal arts” such as they believed was being followed at Hillsdale.
In the last two presidential elections the split in the gross popular vote between the two top contenders was roughly 52% (D)//48%(R), with the recipient of fewer votes actually winning the presidency in the first instance—election being determined constitutionally not by popular vote but by the votes of duly authorized electors. By any measure, these figures reveal a closely divided electorate along a “conservative”/ “progressive” axis. I need hardly point out that similar ratios will not be found among the administrators and faculties of America’s liberal arts colleges. It is, of course, a strange way to talk about college faculties—strange, but unfortunately highly relevant and probably even necessary in the current cultural and political moment. The tenured faculties of humanities departments are in effect highly independent, closed, self-perpetuating corporations for whom the word “diversity” as applied to intellectual and cultural disposition generally means “more people like me.”
What has made life on our campuses seem to so many to be increasingly monotone, constrained, and timid has, however, created opportunities for a few visionaries. A number of prominent politicians are now extolling the virtues of an old-fashioned liberal arts education they may show scant evidence of possessing themselves. A glowing future is guaranteed for that college that can establish itself as the Numero Uno brazenly conservative, unwoke, politically incorrect, morally traditional, and full-throated patriotic institution in the country. It will have nearly half the nation as its potential donor base for starters. There actually are quite a few schools with some aspirations in that direction, but I’m not sure they are aware that the race is on. The savvy President and other administrators at Hillsdale seem very much aware, and they are way out in the lead. Just think of how the PR people at some of our most respected liberal arts colleges--Wesleyan, Mount Holyoke, Davidson, Rhodes, Grinnell, or Reed, say-- would savor a long New Yorker article--even one treating them as anthropological curiosities. So long as the extraordinary variety of American institutions of higher learning, traditionally one of our great strengths, is in cultural contraction, and it is now, places that are really different have a chance to be noticed. The long expected consumer backlash inevitable with seventy thousand a year tuitions and endless administrative bloat may well have a cultural as well as a financial dimension. Let a hundred flowers bloom.
*The talk was a much shortened adaptation of a chapter of my book The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War (N.Y., Norton, 2009).
