Assistant Professor of Education Erik Ellis has only taught at Hillsdale for two years, but he’s already made a big impact — one that will be missed next year. 

When Ellis leaves to teach at the University of Dallas next year, his students will miss sharing his Chilean cooking, listening to his stories, and speaking Latin with him over pipes. 

Ellis said the main reason for the move is that it will allow him to be near his family.

“By various accidents, including people fleeing California during COVID, all of my family now lives in Irving, Texas, and 100% of my wife’s immediate family lives relatively close,” Ellis said.

Ellis said he will be working with masters and doctoral students at the University of Dallas instead of undergraduates. 

“I will be working in a more definite way with the renewal of Greek and Latin, which for me is really kind of the core of the thing,” Ellis said. “That work will be more central to what I’m doing at the University of Dallas. 

Ellis said the move won’t be easy. 

“The thing I’ll miss most about Hillsdale is definitely my students and my colleagues. The people here have all been wonderful.” Ellis said. “There’s just a vibrancy of life here that I’ll miss.”

Senior Juliana Undseth said when Ellis handed back midterms in a J.R.R Tolkien and C.S. Lewis class, he used stickers his daughter had given him to give each student an award such as “best handwriting” or “best parody.” 

“He gave me two awards and then he said, ‘I also would like to give you these,’” Undseth said. “He turned around and picked up a stack of books. ‘I was clearing out my office and these are extras,’ he said. ‘ You can have them for having the best midterm.’’” 

Ellis spent a year and a half in Chile before coming to teach at the college in the fall of 2022. Graduate student Samuel Musser said he still has a South American sense of hospitality. 

Senior Michael Hoggatt experienced it firsthand. 

“When one of my friends who was close to him graduated, all three of us gathered for a Chilean asado. We grilled lamb in Dr. Ellis’s driveway over charcoal over three hours and had a grilled pepper and egg dish and just kind of lived in this cultural experience,” Hoggatt said.

Junior Nathaniel Privitt said his best conversations with Ellis happened while they smoked pipes — on the Quad, in the Arb, or at Ellis’s house. 

“Some of the best conversations happen when we’re halfway through a bowl of tobacco,” Privitt siad. “The conversation flows when that happens.

Privitt says they often switch to English at some point, but their conversations always begin in Latin. 

Musser said Ellis has a somewhat unconventional approach to teaching that is in fact profoundly classical. He said even classical schools today don’t have the emphasis on rhetoric and reading and speaking Latin that Ellis brings to his classes. 

“I think his creativity and his out-of-the-box thinking is actually more classical,” Musser said. “And with some of the things he’s doing, he’s actually getting back more to the roots of what it means to be  classical.”