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Greek, Latin, Plautus and Pericles were barely on the radar for Eric Hutchinson (’02) when he started at Hillsdale College as a freshman.
“I didn’t even know what classics was when I came to college,” said the assistant professor of classical studies. “That’s one of a long list of things I didn’t know. My original goal, when I was first thinking about going to college, was that I wanted to be on TV. I didn’t really have a plan for doing that, but I just thought that would be great as a life’s work.”
But he needed to fulfill the language requirement, and he had always heard from his family about how they’d taken Latin growing up. After one semester, he was hooked. His work in the classics department — and especially his relationship with one professor who would become a friend, mentor, and colleague — defined his time at Hillsdale College.
“He absolutely is selfless with his time, with the amount of time that he would spend with students, and I didn’t realize how many things you had to do, in his position, when I was a student,” Hutchinson said. “Cause you know how students are. We think we know everything and we don’t really know anything, and you just figure, ‘Well of course this is what this guy wants to do is talk to me for an hour about something that is only tangentially related to class. And I’m sure he doesn’t have anything better to do right now.’ But he would always do it, and never once did I get the impression that it was some kind of inconvenience or a bother to him to do that. And that’s pretty special.”
Hutchinson had plenty of moments less in character with his persona as an antiquities scholar. When he lived in Galloway as an underclassman, he and his friends made it a habit of sitting around the outside basement door and making up songs about passing girls.
“But really loud,” he said, “and perform them at a very high volume so it was impossible for them not to hear. There were a lot of people that ended up walking faster by Galloway.”
He met the girl who would become his wife his first day on campus, but he and Allison Long (’01) didn’t go on their first date untill a year and a half after he graduated. In the meantime, Hutchinson spent his entire junior year at Oxford University.
He also enjoyed the bachelor lifestyle of off-campus housing as a senior.
“I always sort of thought that the apartment that we lived in should be condemned, because it was in really bad shape,” he said. “And then lo and behold, after we moved back here, I was walking through downtown … and lo and behold, it was condemned. There was a sign posted in the doorway that said no one was allowed to set foot inside until all of these various regulations had been met.”
Hutchinson and his roommates only made matters worse. One of his buddies owned a small, portable refrigerator that he didn’t use, so they unplugged it and converted it to a desk. But he accidentally left a piece of chicken inside, and when the roommates were cleaning up at the end of the year, they opened the refrigerator. The inside was covered with maggots.
“It was one of the most disgusting things that you can imagine. It was just amazing,” Hutchinson said. “At the time I didn’t know any better. I thought, ‘This is how men live, isn’t it?’”
Hutchinson returned to Hillsdale after receiving his master’s and doctorate from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania to join Jones, Garnjobst, Holmes, and other old teachers of his on the faculty.
While new architecture has transformed campus aesthetically, people are much the same, with lots of colorful characters and an interesting mix of personalities.
“By and large what you find here among the students [and faculty] are just really decent people,” he said. “And I think that was true when I was a student. [It’s] still the most basic impression that I think you get once you get to know the people who are here.”
ptimmis@hillsdale.edu
