This weekend, professors and faculty will reveal your grades and academic performance to the most immediately potent sovereign bodies you acknowledge: your parents.
The College invites our parents to participate in the project of higher education. It was with our parents that our lives began and it is in their steps we will follow, so it is fitting that they should be a part of this, the most crucial stage of our development.
By law, colleges and universities that accept federal funding cannot discuss their students’ academic information with parents unless the student gives their consent. Hillsdale rejects the funding and embraces the discussion.
Another characteristic privilege of our institution (and tribulation to its students) is the Center for Constructive Alternatives lecture series. The lectures wrench us out of the standard pace of our already-full weekdays, prevent us from attending office hours, and force us to shift work schedules around. We consume caffeine until we can see sound, hear color, and at long last produce the final page of that annotated bibliography due… now.
But at these lectures, students can listen to notable speakers from across the nation and world. Among the speakers for this week’s Winston Churchill CCA series are Robert Hardy (better known to some as Cornelius Fudge), a student of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein, well-acquainted with Churchill’s life and legacy; and Minnie Churchill, Winston’s former wife. We have the opportunity to learn from — and, in some cases, even meet — people who have lived and made history.
Deadlines press all ’round. But we came to Hillsdale because it offered us an education we could find nowhere else. The accountability of Parents Weekend, like the chaos of every CCA week, is a burden we can celebrate.
So gird your loins and set a coffee mug at your right hand. Just make sure to self-govern your way into a bed at the end of it all.
