Next week the Grewcock Student Union will become a little bit of Britannia for a day.
April 9 marks 50 years since Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill was appointed an honorary U.S. citizen by President Kennedy. To celebrate the oft-unnoticed national Winston Churchill Day, the college will transform the union from 12:15 p.m. to 2 p.m. and professional Churchill impersonator Randy Otto will conduct a Q&A session as the prime minister from 4 to 5 p.m.
“He’s a great combination,” Soren Geiger, research assistant to College President Larry Arnn, said of Otto . “He doesn’t just match the style and the look, but he knows Churchill so he can actually speak and answer as Churchill would when asked a question about Churchill’s life. President Truman’s grandson says spending an evening with Randy Otto is as good as you can get right now to spending an evening with Churchill.”
It may be an opportunity for education, but Geiger said he hopes Churchill Day will be fun, too.
“We want to kind of give a more fun feel to it than the normal Hillsdale event you might think of,” Geiger said. “So it will still be educational on Winston Churchill, his life, the college’s work on maintaining and promoting his legacy. But we’re also just going to transform the union into something a little more British on April 9. I mean we’ll have patriotic British music playing through the speakers, have a huge 9-by-14 foot monitor playing Churchill documentaries. There may be some croquet set up on the Quad.”
The college recently appointed Churchill and automotive historian Richard Langworth senior fellow of the Churchill Project. Langworth explained in an email why Churchill day is worth celebrating:
“For the same reason we should still celebrate Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays —their indispensability to human freedom. Without Churchill in 1940, almost certainly the world would be a darker and more sinister place. Of course he did not win World War II. That required more than he and Britain could do alone. His achievement rather was not to lose it — to hold on until, as he wrote, ‘Those who had hitherto been half-blind were half-ready.’ And after it was won, he was the first to warn against the specter of communism.”
While 2015 is a huge year for Hillsdale and Churchill connections with the Churchill CCA, the Churchill online course, and Arnn’s Churchill book coming out, April 15 itself will be the occasion of a number of Churchill initiatives at the college.
“It’s not really celebrated much, but it’s an important day and there’s going to be a lot of big things happening in the Churchill world on that day this year. Rosetta Books, whom we’ve partnered with, is going to launch e-book versions of the official biography, so that’s a huge scholarly resource out there that’s going to be searchable and cheap and downloadable. We are going to launch a blog from hillsdalecollege.edu devoted entirely to Churchill scholarship and really milking the offical biography for all its worth now. So that’ll launch on April 9. We’ll also announce a Churchill scholarship that’ll be available to students, undergrad and grad, in the fall. And so we’ll have this celebratory event and it’ll be the place and time to do all this.”
Geiger said he hopes everyone will take advantage of the opportunity.
“Come and not just learn about the official biography, but see your friends who you may not have even known work on the official biography. They’re all going to be there and talk about that and also get your picture taken with Churchill,” Geiger said. “It’s a very rare opportunity considering he’s been dead since 1965.”
Senior Andrew Reuss, who works for the president’s office, looks forward to Churchill Day as an enjoyable extension of Hillsdale studies.
“I think it’s exciting,” he said. “I think it’ll be a fun event for people to celebrate this great man that most of us have studied, or at least know of. Plus it will be a nice opportunity for the community, as well as people on the outside, to see what Hillsdale is about, and why we study what we study.”
Hillsdale’s Churchill Day celebration is a reflection of its unique capacities and position within the world of Churchill scholarship.
“I believe Hillsdale unites and offers two crucial resources: Sir Martin Gilbert’s papers and Churchill’s official biography, with an established ability to conduct scholarly outreach and online courses reaching tens of thousands,” Langworth said. “These attributes make the college a natural home for the Churchill Project. The aim of the project is to do for Churchill what the college has done for the Constitution: foster understanding of and appreciation for timeless truths that are essential in maintaining civil liberties. No other institution in the world has these twin assets. None is so well-positioned to offer them to so many people.”
