Students should invest in their education by making themselves volunteers to the partnership of the college in study and service, President Larry Arnn told the incoming class at Freshman Convocation.

The class of 2027 and their families gathered on the East Lawn for Freshman Convocation on the afternoon of Sunday, Aug. 20. In addition to Arnn, Seniors Caitlin Dugan and Michael Hoggattand addressed the incoming class at the event, encouraging them to involve themselves in the college community. 

“Power through those awkward conversations in the lobby of your dorm or in the bathroom in the morning when you’re getting ready,” Dugan said. “Some of those people will end up being your closest friends here. Get to know and invest in the people in your dorm because when you do that, you will start the process of making your dorm your new home.” 

Dugan spoke about her own experiences at Hillsdale with residence life, intramural sports, and GOAL volunteering. She encouraged the freshmen to focus on those around them during their college journey.

“That’s my charge to you,” Dugan said. “Learn and grow from your fellow classmates by participating in your classes, your dorms, and your extracurriculars. Your Hillsdale journey begins today. Take full advantage of it, because remember, people are eternal and school is not.”

Hoggatt called the freshmen a “barbarian horde,” but promised a Hillsdale education can make them civilized.

Referencing John Henry Newman, Hoggatt said the end of liberal arts education is to make the student a gentlemen with a “cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, and a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life.”

The college accomplishes this task in part, Hoggatt said, through community and conversation among students, faculty, and the authors they study.

“Besides your peers, there are your superiors, those who have thought great thoughts before you and will teach you if you listen,” Hoggatt said. “Many of them sit in this audience beside you. Many of them still speak through printed texts housed in the library. I could not charge you with any higher command than to give these figures your respect.”

Arnn emphasized the importance of the bond between students and faculty. Without these bonds, he said, it would be impossible for the college to achieve its end.

“These pillars of faith, freedom, character, and learning, these are human goods that every human being knows,” Arnn said. “We’re going to agree, all of us, to seek those goods and help everybody else seek them and never obstruct the college in its pursuit of them, because it’s what it’s for.”

Asking the faculty to stand up, he told the freshmen these would be some of the most important people in their lives.

“What does the word ‘college’ mean?” Arnn said. “Partnership, something we all do toward a common end. We don’t compete with each other in seeking the end. We cooperate, we help each other. The one who doesn’t know learns from the one who does, and those places exchange all the time. It is a system of ruling and being ruled.”

Before turning the podium back over to Provost Christopher VanOrman for the freshman pledge, Arnn said the system of ruling and being ruled requires the students to become volunteers, to give themselves to the partnership of the college.

“This is how we form our community,” Arnn said. “We volunteer, we understand, and we give ourselves to it. We’re committed to love each other while we do it. You know C.S Lewis writes that you can love people if you don’t even like them, including yourself. So you see the spirit, it’s on you now. You have to keep it alive. It’s been alive for 180 years. Now it’s on you. So I say, get your boots on.”