Tuesday, July 28, 2020

No, Hillsdale College Doesn’t Need To Join The National Reckoning On Race

No, Hillsdale College Doesn’t Need To Join The National Reckoning On Race
Excerpt: There is a reason Hillsdale College, a tiny liberal arts college in rural Michigan (and my alma mater), has been in the news recently. It is not because anything particularly newsworthy has happened there of late, but because the college, almost alone among education institutions in America, has had the temerity to push back against demands from a handful of alumni that it issue statements “admonishing white supremacy,” as if Hillsdale’s failure to stage a performative struggle session makes it complicit in “systemic racism.” To its credit, the college responded last month with a brilliantly understated open letter, first published in the school newspaper then in the Wall Street Journal, arguing that everything Hillsdale does, “though its work is not that of an activist or agitator, is for the moral and intellectual uplift of all.” Rather than cheap virtue-signaling, the college pointed to its actual work of educating men and women in the classical liberal arts as evidence of its commitment not just to equity and justice, but to “the great principles that are, second only to divine grace, the solution to the grave ills that beset our times.”

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