There is no better example of the “American self-made man” than Vice President J.D. Vance. Hillsdale’s bright and diverse studentry deserves an inspiring commencement speaker in 2025, and Vance would more than excel.
He grew up in Middleton, Ohio, a rust-belt town less than four hours south of Hillsdale. His grandparents were his primary caregivers because his mother was addicted to opioids and his father was absent. After leaving home, Vance enlisted with the Marines, the branch Hillsdale alumni most frequently join. He went on to study political science and philosophy at Ohio State University before attending Yale Law School. He then married the love of his life, worked for a Silicon Valley tech company, wrote a best-selling memoir, won a U.S. Senate election, sold his memoir to Netflix for a film adaptation, fathered three children, and was elected vice president of the United States — all in the span of 10 years. He overcame unbelievable odds to become the second-most powerful elected official at 40 years old.
Many people met Vance through his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which topped the New York Times Best Seller list twice. The book was acclaimed for its account of the hardships Vance overcame and the insights it provided into impoverished white communities in Appalachia. One line from his book encapsulates the message Vance would communicate to Hillsdale students: “What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives.”
His exhortation that people take personal responsibility never falters throughout “Hillbilly Elegy.” He places this idea in opposition to “‘learned helplessness’ when a person believes, as I did during my youth, that the choices I made had no effect on the outcomes in my life.” The young Vance had every reason to blame exterior circumstances for his struggles. At one point his mother threatened to crash a car he was in. He was almost placed in foster care because of it. Butler County, Ohio, the county he grew up in, has an annual median income below the poverty line and more annual deaths from opioid overdoses than natural causes.
Once Vance left home and entered new circles, he became aware that peoples’ environments do not determine their outcomes. Vance says the key to overcoming “learned helplessness” is asking ourselves “what we can do to make things better.” This mindset fueled his unlikely success. Hillsdale students should adopt a similar mentality.
Hillsdale’s commencement speech acts as a capstone to students’ time here. The Western theological tradition is integral to the education students receive, so the ability to speak about faith would enhance that speech. Vance experienced many forms of western religion. He grew up in a non-denominational Christian household. He writes in his memoir that his grandmother Mamaw “always had two gods: Jesus Christ and the United States of America. I was no different, and neither was anyone else I knew.”
Ohio State and Yale exposed Vance to the “New Atheism” movement that pervaded academia in the early 2000s. He spent years reading atheist philosophers like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and arguing against the fundamentalist Christian beliefs he grew up with. In a 2020 reflection written for The Lamp he admitted that he attacked such beliefs in effort to gain social acceptance among the elite. But Vance continued to wrestle with his faith. An article by the philosopher Basil Mitchell, St. Augustine’s “City of God,” and a chance meeting with the venture capitalist Peter Thiel influenced his eventual conversion to Roman Catholicism in 2019.
Vance’s struggles with religion and pursuit of truth mirrors a common Hillsdale experience. Every year, many students come to Hillsdale at their parents’ behest, practicing their childhood religion. While here, their faith must deepen or change as challenges from classmates, exposure to new ideas, and a lack of parental oversight force students to defend their beliefs. Every student at Hillsdale can relate to a stage of Vance’s faith journey, and he could speak directly to graduates as they reflect on the ways their faith lives have matured.
Vance’s amazing life story and faith journey make him the ideal candidate to deliver Hillsdale’s 173rd commencement speech on May 10.
John Schaefer is a senior studying philosophy.
