An open letter to Conor Friedersdorf about Hillsdale College

Below is my letter to Conor Friedersdorf in response to his petition for feedback from Hillsdale students, alumni, and faculty on the apparent moral relativism demonstrated by its President, Dr. Larry Arnn. 

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Dear Conor,

Thank you for raising these important questions about Hillsdale College. They are ones that have troubled me over the eleven years since I graduated from there.

I agree with your analysis of the Orwellian doublespeak in Pence’s address at Hillsdale’s commencement and the implicit utilitarian moral relativism in his defense of Pence during the interview with Hugh Hewitt. I would like to provide some larger context for this by answering your final question: “How does his at-least-partly transactional alliance with movement conservatism and its donor base affect Hillsdale College, for better or worse?”

You correctly identify a real tension between the public face of Hillsdale College, which drives its fundraising with striking success, and the education provided there. It was evident as a student. At the time, many of us recognized Arnn’s role was primarily to raise funds from donors. His speeches are often full of platitudes that elide the actual moral complexity of acting with wisdom and charity in the world. Were students to turn in similarly simplistic essays to faculty in the English or History departments, they would receive poor grades.

What we learned in the classroom was not the same as the material presented to donors. We engaged the complexity and multi-vocal western tradition in earnest discussion, weighing the competing claims of authors long dead. Professors also pushed us to think critically about the ways in which such ideas had been used, for good and for ill. For example, I remember a professor commenting one day that he had been asked if a few donors could sit in on our class and listen to our discussion. He had refused, and explained to us that any prospective donor would be horrified by our discussion. Their presence would prevent our progress because the donors’ shock and frustration would take over the class. The tension between actual education and the platitudes the donors desired made it was best to deny them access to what was going on in the classroom.

The public side of the college rarely touched life on campus. An exception where it did intersect with the student experience, and not always for the better, was in the requirement that students attend a lecture series hosted by the campus known as the Center for Constructive Alternatives (or CCA). The topics and speakers brought to campus were sometimes quite good, and sometimes quite bad. I remember considerable outrage on campus when a CCA speaker indicated that the only way to contract AIDs was through sodomy, which was followed by an aside that she did not know what people in Africa were doing with those monkeys to begin the epidemic. Such experiences did not improve our education and led to frustration among many students.

Since graduation, I have continued to appreciate the rigor of my education at Hillsdale and its emphasis on the traditional liberal arts. The classes were thoughtful, the reading assignments varied and rich, and the discussions with students and faculty were lively and challenging in every sense of the word. I treasure the friendships cultivated through those experiences.

At the same time, however, I have long been concerned that the public face of Hillsdale increasingly undermines important aspects of this education, in addition to doing potential harm to the employment prospects of alumni.

These concerns inspired meaningful discussion among alumni in 2012. At the time, Rush Limbaugh was attracting significant scrutiny for his comments regarding the Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke. Hillsdale College was one of the few advertisers that continued to support him through the scandal, and this was attracting national attention. I was among several students who wrote to their director of marketing to ask that Hillsdale distance itself from Rush Limbaugh. I never received any response and the college continued its relationship with Limbaugh, but the incident was one that demonstrates how Hillsdale’s connection to the popular conservative media to cultivate donors has required a form of pragmatic moral relativism for several years. I have posted that e-mail on my blog in case you would like to see it.

More recently, the rise of Donald Trump has deepened the moral quagmire. Several individuals affiliated with Hillsdale endorsed Trump during the 2016 election, although it is notable that most of them were on the public (rather than the teaching) side of the college. I list Timothy Caspar (who runs the CCAs mentioned above), Larry Arnn, and Douglas Jeffrey (editor of Imprimis) among the public-facing side of the college. Only three regular faculty members endorsed him, two in political science and one in history (and the latter has since retired). I take the relative paucity of faculty support for Trump as a sign of the meaningful difference between the views of the teaching faculty of the college and the positions adopted by Arnn (and through CCAs and the monthly newsletter Imprimis) to attract powerful donors for the college.

The pro-Trump face of the college has begun to cause trouble on campus. I know, for example, that at least a few self-described neo-Nazis arrived on campus as freshmen in the fall of 2017. As I understand it, they had a meeting with the Dean of Men and were prevented from forming an official student organization. The goal seems to be to prevent knowledge of neo-Nazism at Hillsdale from spreading off-campus. That it is there, however, makes sense given the college’s consistent public support for the Trump administration. It would appear to be a good educational choice for high school graduates attracted to the message of Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos, among others. What other college would seem more fertile ground for members of the alt-right? I will not be surprised if a scandal related to alt-right activity on campus develops in coming years.

Finally, I do think that the moral relativism of the Trump administration is a problem, both for those who serve in it and for those who support it. I have been blogging this summer about this and other issues, although my focus has been on the consequences of evangelicals’ embrace of Trump. There is an important (and powerful) minority of Hillsdale alumni that are well-placed within the administration and as staffers and officials throughout legislative and judicial branches of government. There are also, however, many of us that work in education, in religious ministry, and in non-profits, who, though poorly compensated, remain committed to serve our communities and the public as we champion truth, beauty, and goodness. I fear that those who have found power through the Republican Party have had to compromise their moral integrity, but I do hope that the existence of both sets of alumni are recognized. That said, those of us who have chosen to pursue virtue will be less capable of donating than those who sought power and wealth, so our influence with the institution is likely to be less.

As Vice President Pence noted, the motto of Hillsdale College is Virtus Tentamine Gaudet, or strength rejoices in the challenge. The morally amorphous stance taken by Arnn on the behavior of a President who consistently shows the temerity of one lacking virtue suggests that Hillsdale as an institution lacks the strength to risk offending the donors that it has cultivated. I worry that if educational institutions like Hillsdale are so unable to stand up for what is true, where will our culture as a whole cultivate the commitment to truth? In the age of the 24/7 news cycle and polarized media, I find the loss of an institution like Hillsdale in the defense of truth deeply tragic. I fear a world in which everyone accepts that money speaks louder than truth, while continually insisting that this is not so.

You may print my name if you choose to quote me. If you do so, please include a link to my blog, where I will have posted this letter so that others have access to the full context.

Sincerely,

Phillip D. Fox, PhD

Hillsdale Class of 2007 Salutatorian