Someone stole our editor-in-chief’s backpack last weekend.
How appropriate, then, that only a few days later, Associate Professor of English John Somerville would give a lecture about the dubiously notorious (or, maybe, notoriously dubious) “Hillsdale Bubble.” For you freshmen, that’s the notion that Hillsdale College exists in an ideological vacuum of right wing politics, classical literature, and pre-sexual revolution cultural norms.
But somone forgot to tell that to the Judas who snuck into the Collegian office last Friday night. He left that holy-of-holies with two weeks worth of notes, a copy of Dante’s “Inferno,” and a tablet computer, effectively popping our cherished bubble.
There is certainly something different about Hillsdale College, maybe even something bubble-like. We’ll spare you the cliche jokes about getting a C- in Jackson or freshman year Fridays spent at swing club. For the sake of this editorial, accept the premise: Hillsdale is kind of different, in ways much more meaningful to us, the students, than defending truth or educating liberty or whatever.
So is our metaphorical bubble a bad thing? In most cases, we would argue it is not. That being said, this is no rebuttal of Somerville’s speech.
In his lecture, sponsored by the Fairfield Society’s Gadfly Group (which was founded by our own Jack Butler — there’s your plug Jack, you’re welcome), Somerville advocated challenging your convictions and not heedlessly pledging allegiance to dogma. Someday, he said, you’re going to meet someone much smarter than you who happens to be, God forbid, a liberal. What then? If you haven’t asked yourself tough questions, then how well do you expect to answer his?
We don’t think there are as many unquestioning dogma lemmings at Hillsdale as Somerville’s lecture might have implied. But his speech is important all the same.
As Hillsdale students, we live in a four block by four block world where we trust our peers enough to leave our book bags, helpless and alone, in the library while we trot off to lunch with our friends.
That paradigm, which is based on trust and affects our intellectual discourse, is not shared by most people in the “real world.”
Some of those people will even steal your backpack.
So prepare. We don’t encourage you to do this because you don’t do it already, but instead because you can always do it more. The Hillsdale Bubble is a relatively safe place in which we can do these things and not fall down the rabbit hole of post-modernism.
Question your beliefs, ask yourselves the hard questions.
And for God’s sake, contact our editor if you find his backpack.