Students, faculty, and college visitors will gather in Phillips Auditorium for four days starting Sunday for this year’s fourth Center for Constructive Alternatives.
But what does that mean? The title is clunky and bureaucratic. No one calls it that. Even the event posters shorten it to CCA.
The Center for Constructive Alternatives does not mean anything. Center? It’s not a building. Constructive? What is being developed? Alternatives? To what?
It’s just confusing, and Hillsdale College is missing an opportunity to capitalize on these seminars that feature some of the very best lectures on campus, full of valuable ideas and conversations in support of the college’s mission.
President George Roche developed the idea behind CCAs. The first occurred in 1972 on Recycling the City: Alternatives to Decay. In 1979, Hillsdale’s alumni magazine described the seminars as being “devoted to an examination of the major problems of our time and seeks to offer solutions drawn from the traditional values and liberties of American society.”
Perusal of recent CCA topics, however, shows that the seminars seem to have changed in function. The conferences focus on history (i.e. Winston Churchill, The American West, The Sixties), films, economic philosophy, and other themes such as The Art of Biography or Sports and Character.
While the lectures examine the conflicts past and present related to the CCA, they seem to seek to provide an outlook on these subjects through a lense of traditional values and liberties. Some speakers may offer solutions to present-day conflicts, but that fundamentally no longer appears to be the goal of the CCAs.
That is not necessarily a bad thing. Providing this type of perspective is inherent in the college’s mission, which is why thousands of people support the school.
Hillsdale should embrace that and change the name of the Center for Constructive Alternatives. A name such as Conserving the Classical Arts better captures what this program does (and also preserves the CCA nickname). We can do better than Center for Constructive Alternatives to express what this liberal arts institution is doing and enunciate a clear goal for this program.
