Politics at Hillsdale: Superb, valuable, and well-rounded

Home Opinion Politics at Hillsdale: Superb, valuable, and well-rounded

“Our student body, as a whole, avoids asking the hard questions about what justice requires of our society.”

When I read that gem of a line from last week’s Collegian op-ed —  “The liberal arts must include opposing thinkers” —  I was incredulous. Garrett West’s argument that all Hillsdale students live in an ideological echo chamber with little serious exposure to philosophers and philosophies they disagree with is bunk and needs to be addressed.

According to the author of the piece, this college needs a more “diverse conversation” which considers “seriously” thinkers like “John Rawls, G.W.F. Hegel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Karl Marx.” The only problem with the author’s claim? That conversation is already happening on campus.  Every thinker the op-ed claimed Hillsdale students weren’t reading I have studied in-depth in class.

For an hour and fifteen minutes every Monday and Wednesday in my Modern Political Philosophy II course, Dr. Pestritto goes through core portions of major texts from Kant, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx line by line, argument by argument. Two-thirds of my American Political Thought class with Dr. West was spent on the American progressives and post-modern liberals, none of whom would ever be confused with supporters of the Founders or their vision of government. Dr. West placed special emphasis on the influential liberal thinkers John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. He required us to read large portions of their most significant writings so that we might better understand the impact of their arguments.

I can’t speak for the other fields of study, but I do know that, in my politics courses, I’ve been exposed to dozens of thinkers and writers who stand outside the generally “conservative” disposition of the college. My politics professors have challenged me to read those authors closely, even sympathetically. In doing so, my ability to think critically has sharpened immensely.

The op-ed’s sweeping claim of widespread ideological blindness among students angered me. Not only did it unfairly insult my own liberal education, but in doing so wrongly implied that my professors were intellectually dishonest, either hiding opposing arguments out of fear of their effects or a refusal to leave their own bubbles of thought. That claim, considered in light of my own experience in the politics program, is utterly fallacious.

I’ve taken 8 of the 11 required courses for a politics major and my syllabi don’t lie — by sheer volume I’ve read far more Hegel than Locke, far more Nietzsche than Strauss. The politics professors do ask their students hard questions about justice. They present the evidence and ask us to work through it. They force us to read closely and to think critically. Of course, my professors hold positions and defend them in class, but that does not mean we don’t approach opposing thinkers or that we treat them as “sub-par intellects unworthy of…thoughtful reading.”

While colleges across America churn out political science students primed to man the machinery of the modern administrative state and fully indoctrinated in the dogmas of the liberal holy trinity of race, class, and gender, Hillsdale stands apart. The politics education at this college is superb and well worth pursuing. It is anything but one-sided.

It’s true; I’ve heard students at the college make outlandish claims about political thinkers that illustrate their own ignorance, but that does not mean such students are indicative of the whole population.

If you’re going to make sweeping claims about the nature of the education here at Hillsdale, do your research. The results might surprise you.