When Kirsten Hall ’15 arrived on Hillsdale’s campus as a freshman, she knew she wanted to study English and go for a Ph.D.
Hall said she was attracted to Hillsdale’s robust English program but knew she also wanted a well-rounded education.
“I wanted my education to be a liberal-arts education,” Hall said. “I didn’t want to narrow myself too much. A big university was not appealing to me.”
Now, six years later, Hall will graduate from the University of Texas at Austin with a Ph.D. in English. She has been hired by Ave Maria University — a small, Catholic liberal arts school in Ave Maria, Florida — as an assistant professor of English.
Hall credits Hillsdale’s English department with preparing her for graduate school.
“I came out of Hillsdale a strong writer and researcher,” Hall said. “The adjustment into the Ph.D. program was not that big of a push academically. A 400-level seminar in the English department at Hillsdale is like a grad student Ph.D. class.”
Hall also appreciated the mentors she had as an undergraduate.
“I had a very good experience with all of the English professors,” Hall said. “All of the teaching was highly individualized and everyone actually cared about what you were working on. At a big university, you might go to a professor and they wouldn’t care about your goals.”
Associate Professor of English Dwight Lindley taught Hall as a student and still keeps in touch with her.
“In her first class with me she wrote such a great paper that I recommended she revise it, and she got it published in an academic journal,” Lindley said. “We had a working relationship that went beyond the class with that project.”
Lindley and Hall maintain a professional relationship to this day. Lindley recently wrote for the Genealogies of Modernity, an academic journal for which Hall is an editor.
Now that Hall’s time at University of Texas at Austin is coming to a close, she is thankful that she can return to a small, liberal-arts college like Hillsdale.
“I have no interest in teaching at a R1 institution,” Hall said, referring to UT Austin. “It’s too much of a factory, pushing students through. People care too much about researching and writing.”
Hall noted that public universities are overly commercialized, which harms both the professor and student.
“Grad school forces you to sacrifice the intellectual life for professional utility,” Hall said. “I meet very few people who are actually interested in the topic they’re studying. Their real motive and interest seems to be oriented around scholarly ambitions — to get a tenure track job at a prestigious university.”
Hall sees another troubling trend in higher education: academics are too focused on research.
“The humanities are trying to become more like the sciences, which means you push out as much research as possible early in your career,” Hall said. “And a lot of good work in the humanities comes after people have spent years and years teaching and thinking on a topic. But the way the system works now is that you have to be publishing a lot early on in your career, before you have anything interesting to say.”
This research pressure in academia has created a glut of research that “no one reads,” because it’s more about whether you can add it to your CV line, Hall said.
Now after her experience at a big state school, Hall is ready to return to her liberal arts roots. As a professor at Ave Maria University, she hopes to use the same approach as the Hillsdale English department.
“The English department is quite small right now. And I want to build Ave Maria’s English department into the kind of department I had at Hillsdale,” Hall said. “English is one of the most popular majors at Hillsdale, and there are tons of people who take literature classes who are not literature majors.”
Hall wants to instill the same love for English that Hillsdale cultivates among non-English majors.
“The word dilettante and amateur get a bad reputation, but they actually come from the Latin words meaning to love and to delight,” Hall said. “I want accounting majors in my classes who will cultivate a lifelong love of reading, and when they are tired at the end of a long day of work, to know that that is something they can turn to.”
This desire to delight in education is a reason why Ave Maria found Hall such an attractive candidate, Lindley said.
“She’s a more attractive candidate because she knows more than just her area of specialty. And I know that the people where she got a job were impressed by her ability to do more than her specialty. And that was partially because they were drawn to her love of it,” Lindley said. “If you don’t love it, it’s actually hard to move your students. It’s hard to make other people love it.”
Lindley said he is convinced Hall will go far in her professional career pursuing English, and he is thankful Hall has stayed in touch with him.
“I’ve really enjoyed maintaining a relationship with Kirsten after her graduation. And it’s the kind of thing I often hope will be the case with students, but it’s not often the case. A lot of people leave and then I never see them again,” Lindley said. “So I’ve really enjoyed having a continuing professional friendship with Kirsten.”
