The newly established Gadfly Group hosted its first lecture last Monday evening, a night filled with political quandaries and questioning of traditional beliefs.
John Somerville, assistant professor in English, spoke on “The Hillsdale Bubble and Why it Should be Popped,” a statement reflecting the vision and goals of the new group, which focuses on challenging conventional political ideas.
Senior Jack Butler is the president and founder of the Gadfly Group. He said that even as a freshman, he worried that he would not know his own political beliefs well enough to testify to them in liberal environment. He wanted conservatives to actually ponder their own political beliefs, a challenge which would be a helpful rather than a hurtful thing.
“Ever since I got here as a freshman, and even before I got here, I was worried that in coming here I would deprive myself of the experience that conservatives at every other college campus get, which is the regular challenging of their beliefs by liberal environments,” Butler said.
Butler wanted to establish a group that would force students to question their beliefs and form a defense for them. He recalled the moment last spring when someone told him that the College Democrats might be dissolving.
“I thought that was horrible because I think that group is an important thing, or at least the idea of having a group like that is important,” he said.
Butler said that moment was the calumniation of the thought he had over the last few years of the importance of having such a group which would challenge traditional conservative thought. He explored other campus groups without success to see if any filled this function.
Butler spoke to Somerville, the faculty moderator of the preexisting Fairfield Society-a group which provokes philosophical and theological discussion. Somerville was willing to have the Fairfield Society be an overarching group under which the Gadfly group could exist. The group is a branch of the Fairfield Society and is operating alongside it.
At the lecture, Somerville affirmed Butler’s goals for the new group. After seeing Hillsdale students come and go without a testing of their beliefs, he believed that the Gadfly Group is just what is needed to stimulate and employ a trial of ideas.
“Whatever they believed they believed had not been tested, that’s what Jack referred to as one of the functions of the Gadfly Group,” Somerville said. “We don’t want anyone to be here at Hillsdale College and to assume that she knows but not to ever genuinely engage.”
Butler derived the group’s name from Socrates’ “Apology.”
“When Socrates is defending himself from his accusers, he’s saying basically that ‘Athens needs someone like me,” he said. “I’m like the Gadfly that sets itself upon a lazy horse and gets it moving.”
Likewise, Butler wants the Gadfly Group to provoke students to ask necessary and challenging questions, questions that they may not want to ask.
“That’s the ideal to which I want my group to aspire,” he said. “I want to stimulate people. If students leave this place without ever having truly considered their own beliefs or the beliefs of those with whom they disagree, I don’t think they are really positioned to make a big difference in the real world. Because it’s a real world mostly dominated by some form of liberalism.”
Butler hopes the group can be a sort of whetstone for conservative thought.
“To defeat something, if that is the ultimate interest the students here, you have to understand it first. Know your enemy, so to speak.”
The group is currently trying to establish relationships with other professors; Dr. West of the politics department, who has shown both interest and ability, Butler states, will likely be next. An organizational meeting for the group is also forthcoming.
Somerville concluded his lecture by stating that the Gadfly Group must serve as the pin which pops the idealist bubble.
“If we’re going to be properly and fully educated, it is something that will make us freer,” he said. “We’re trapped in our bubble; not engaged with the large questions is to fail.”
