It’s 6:59 on a dark morning, midway through the semester. Groggy students hover in front of their laptops in dorm rooms, the Grewcock Student Union, and coffee shops across campus, fingers poised, ready to press the single button that will decide their future for the next three months. The countdown begins, and in an instant, a quiet, unanimous click resounds all over campus. Surroundings grow silent in the wait, and minutes which feel like millennia drag by. Students rub their eyes as WebAdvisor buffers endlessly. Countless clicks of the refresh button later, classes for next semester show up full, even if they had 20 or 30 spots open beforehand. Class registration has begun.
According to Registrar Douglas McArthur, three of the quickest classes to fill up on registration morning are Classic Children’s Literature, Theology of the Body, and Readings in Power, Leadership, and Responsibility. Though they are all 400-level classes in their departments, these “bucket-list” classes appeal to students regardless of their majors.
Part of the classical education minor, Classic Children’s Literature is a discussion-based class with a strict 15-student limit to ensure close classroom dynamics.
“I don’t know about the couple of years before I started teaching it, but I think since 2012 it’s been full every single time, and in fact, every time we’ve opened up for another section, those have been full as well,” Associate Professor of English Daniel Coupland said.
The class requires students to read children’s stories from authors such as the Grimm brothers, Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, and A. A. Milne. While the stories may be simple, Coupland said that the students still encounter the same kinds of themes found in adult literature: friendship, human nature, redemption, and the nature of good and evil.
“What makes this class unique is that it’s one of the few classes where students are actually coming back to a text another time,” Coupland said. He explained that as readers get older, they bring more experience to the fairy tales they grew up reading and “get more” out of rereading them.
Coupland has been teaching the class at Hillsdale since 2002. He said his favorite work to teach is “The Wind in the Willows,” by Kenneth Grahame.
“I would suggest it may be one of the most powerful books on human friendship ever written in the English language,” Coupland said, “And yet, Grahame uses these four animal characters to show us humanity. It’s a really, really powerful book.”
The study of human relationships seems to be a common theme throughout these popular classes. Students spend weeks trying to secure spots in Professor of Philosophy Nathan Schlueter’s Theology of the Body class, a 400-level religion and philosophy elective which requires students to read and discuss the teachings of Pope John Paul II about morality, love, sexuality, and marriage.
“Here, students can see how their whole liberal education — philosophy, theology, ethics, politics, history and literature — bears upon concrete human experience and upon real, practical choices,” Schlueter said.
A natural development out of a Roman Catholic theology class, Schlueter agreed to teach the Theology of the Body class for the first time in 2014, as long as at least 15 people signed up. Then, almost 60 people wanted to enroll. Now, three years later, both of the two sections offered filled up the day they opened.
It’s not just the students who enjoy the class, though. As an end-of-semester project, Schlueter requires his students to present on a “cultural artifact” through the lens of what they’ve learned. He said this is definitely his favorite part of the class.
“I have seen excellent presentations on topics ranging from Plato’s ‘Republic’ to Taylor Swift’s video for ‘Blank Space,’” he said, adding that the students bring some “much-needed cultural criticism” to his classroom.
Another class which explores relationships and the human state is Professor of Law Robert Blackstock’s Readings in Power, Leadership, and Responsibility. As the class reads famous literature and history texts, students must confront humanity in its best and worst states, and from that, learn how to make choices with a better understanding of what it means to be human.
“We’re looking for two things: what is the world we live in? For all its good and its ill, let’s get as clear a view as we can get,” Blackstock said, “And then how good can it be? And those people who live the good life, who make a good thing of their lives, what are they doing? How are they doing it? How do we make ourselves as fully human as we can be? You know, that is a high, good goal.”
