Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was the dream commencement speaker for Hillsdale’s politicos-to-be. This year, the book nerds deserve a turn.
Hillsdale should invite author and translator Anthony Esolen to be our 2017 commencement speaker.
Giving a good graduation speech is no easy task. In twenty-odd minutes, the speaker must establish personal credibility, demonstrate an understanding of the college’s community and goals, offer helpful advice for navigating post-graduate life, and tie a bow on an entire class’s educational experience—all while massaging some life back into an audience poleaxed by too much pomp and circumstance.
No one is better equipped for this task than Professor Esolen.
Esolen, who teaches English at Rhode Island’s Providence College, is an author and classical languages expert best known for his beloved translation of Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” He has written on literature and history, and he contributes regular reviews and essays to publications like the Claremont Review of Books and Crisis magazine.
But Anthony Esolen isn’t just your typical egghead. He’s an egghead with a Hillsdale disposition and a Hillsdale connection.
Esolen’s work is shot through with the same paradoxical mixture of joyful irreverence and serious respect that many students feel toward the Great Books of our curriculum. We marvel at the intellectual riches of our Western tradition, but have no problem snarking about Aristotle and Aquinas when the opportunity arises.
Esolen’s “Divine Comedy” is reverent and erudite—but his books, like “Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child” and “Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization,” often take a different tone. (The latter is studded with sidebars like “Nine Politically Incorrect Truths about Greek Homosexuality”: “At its most spiritual, as in Plato, it directed men toward lives of virtue, of struggle in the battlefield or in the assembly. Athens was not San Francisco.”)
To top it off, Hillsdale knows Anthony Esolen, and he knows us. By the time graduation rolls around, most students will have encountered Esolen’s “Inferno,” which is required reading in nearly every section of English 104. And Esolen visited Hillsdale in fall 2012, earning fans all over campus by lecturing on epic poetry and the moral imagination in one breath and railing against liberal educational practices in the next.
“The compulsory state education that we’ve accepted as normal has as one of its unstated principles that education … is all difficult and unnatural,” Esolen told the Collegian at the time. “But it’s not; it’s natural in human beings to learn. So a great lot of the battle is won not by figuring out ways to foster the imagination, but just removing all those influences that snuff it out.”
All this shows plainly Esolen’s ability to connect to Hillsdale’s students in a graduation speech. But does he stand a chance when stacked up against other potential candidates for the spot?
Of course Hillsdale could land a much flashier commencement speaker than a humanities professor from Rhode Island. Many Republican politicians would jump for the chance to flaunt their patriotism and charisma before an audience of prodigious young conservatives.
But pursuing political and pop-intellectual speakers on the basis of name recognition alone has produced some seriously mediocre results in recent years. Ted Cruz’s thinly veiled stump speech was widely panned by students in 2013, as were Eric Metaxas’s flimsy meditations on our Christian nation a year later. (Last year, Clarence Thomas proved a welcome exception.)
In fact, Hillsdale’s best commencement speech in years came in 2015 from another little-known writer: Michael Ward, a C.S. Lewis scholar whose “Of Hills and Dales” speech showed a profound understanding for and appreciation of our little college and the enormous task it has undertaken.
We landed a Supreme Court justice last year; we can safely ride that wave of prestige for another few semesters. In 2017, the choice is clear: we can hope for nothing better than a speech from Anthony Esolen.
